By Dave Rodman, Turner Sports Interactive
November 16, 2002
4:34 PM EST (2134 GMT)
HOMESTEAD, Fla. -- A three-man board representing the National Stock Car Racing Commission Saturday morning denied Roush Racing's appeal of points and monetary penalties levied after the Pop Secret 400 at North Carolina Speedway in Rockingham.
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The board, consisting of NSCRC chairman George Silbermann, John Bishop and Johnny Capels met for about two hours with Roush Racing representatives.
Roush personnel present at Homestead-Miami Speedway were owner Jack Roush, driver Mark Martin, crew chief Ben Leslie and engineer Bob Osborne.
The panel's ruling maintained a 25-point driver point deduction for Martin, a 25-point owner point deduction for Roush and a $5,000 fine for Leslie.
The penalties were levied when the post-race inspection at Rockingham revealed the car's left front spring had fewer than the required minimum 4.5 coils, specifically 4 3/8 coils.
The commission's statement said, "The spring rule, as written, is clear. The spring from the No. 6 car did not meet the requirements of the rule. NASCAR acted fairly and consistently in issuing the penalties.
"It is therefore the unanimous decision of the National Stock Car Racing Commission to uphold the penalty assessed by NASCAR. The appellants have the right, under Section 15 of the NASCAR rulebook, to appeal this decision to the National Stock Car Racing commissioner."
 | REACTION |  | Jack Roush comments on the commission's ruling.
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Roush Racing president Geoff Smith, who coordinated the appeal for Roush but did not make a presentation to the commission, said Roush would not appeal the decision to commissioner Charles D. Strang.
"No, we're all done -- you can only play Don Quixote and Sancho Panza for so long before you have to wrap it up," Smith said. "I think the clear point of what has occurred here is that the score of the contest can be altered even though there has been no performance gained on the playing field."
The decision means Martin goes into Sunday's Winston Cup season finale Ford 400 trailing point leader Tony Stewart by 89 points. Roush has an equal deficit in the owner standings to Stewart's owner, Joe Gibbs.
Martin said the choice to appeal was not one the Roush organization could pass up.
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"If something was to happen tomorrow," Martin said, "and we were to wind up within 24 points of Tony and we hadn't appealed, we could never forgive ourselves when we had such a great case."
NSCRC member John Cooper, former president of Daytona International Speedway and Indianapolis Motor Speedway, said Silbermann determines the appeal board makeup, and that in his long tenure on the commission Cooper had been called, "about once a year."
Cooper was at the track, as was commission member Les Richter, a former NASCAR vice president and president of the former Riverside International Raceway.
"I think in this case they wanted to get a couple members that had experience with sanctioning bodies," Cooper said Saturday at the track. "And they got a couple good ones."
Bishop was a former high-level administrator with the Sports Car Club of America (SCCA) and was the founder and president of IMSA, another road-race sanctioning body. Capels was formerly president of USAC and held a role with the CART Fed-Ex Championship Series.
"You have to have a certain degree of expectation in order to have a certain degree of disappointment," Smith said. "We didn't have a high degree of expectation, so we have a low degree of disappointment that any result was gonna be any different.
"When I woke up this morning I was pretty sure that the oceans wouldn't boil and pigs wouldn't fly and that NASCAR wouldn't change its mind and that all got corroborated today."
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