'Scandal' puts NASCAR exactly where it wants

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. -- In this oceanfront city dominated by condo towers and Harley-Davidson dealerships, the indignation is flowing faster than the Gulf Stream. Drivers, series officials and even some reporters seem so personally offended by the infractions that have plagued these Speedweeks, you'd think David Hyder had greased the manifold of every car in the media lot.

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Oh lordy lordy, hide the women and children, there's cheating going on in NASCAR again.

Oh, the horror. Oh, the scandal. How dare these crewmen continue to work the gray margins of legality in a sport that draws so much of its colorful history from ... crewmen working the gray margins of legality.

Yes, everyone will sit back and laugh while remembering the days when a Smokey Yunick car would have its fuel drained during inspection, and then drive away on extra gas hidden in the framework. But some tape flies off a hole drilled into a rear deck lid, or somebody misaligns bolts on a rear shock mounting, and suddenly you have Watergate at 185 mph.

Time for some perspective. Restrictor-plate cars are the most specialized in NASCAR, with a tighter inspection process and certain parts used only on the big tracks at Daytona and Talladega. Every year, crew chiefs are busted for flirting with the outside of that heavily policed box. Plenty of them. Prior to the 2001 Daytona 500, NASCAR penalized 18 crew chiefs -- current VP of competition Robin Pemberton among them -- in one day.

But now there's a "scandal," or so it's been tagged by one of the largest media contingents ever to cover a Daytona 500. No matter that similar infractions are unearthed almost every year. No matter that the only difference between this Speedweeks and that of 2001 is a more heavy-handed NASCAR response. The news isn't that teams skirt the rules -- it's that NASCAR is finally hammering them for doing it.

Granted, the illegal fuel additive allegedly found in Michael Waltrip's car is a different animal, the kind of blatant tampering that NASCAR has never had any patience for. But keep in mind that an infraction of that magnitude hasn't been exposed since 2000, when somebody juiced the fuel in Jeremy Mayfield's Penske-Kranefuss car. The penalty then was 151 points, $50,000 and a one-month suspension of crew chief Peter Sospenzo.

Two fuel-additive violations in seven years. Compare that to, say, Major League Baseball, where 12 players were suspended for steroid use in the 2005 season alone. Or the NFL, which is plagued by gun-related incidents. Where's the scandal again?

Besides, there's an unintended benefit to all this hubbub during the biggest race weekend of the year. Tuesday during his state of the sport address, NASCAR chairman Brian France said the sport remains "under-covered" in some areas. For some reason, NASCAR has a tough time getting through to casual sports fans and getting on sports-talk radio.

Gordon's car fails
post-race inspection

Jeff Gordon won the second Gatorade Duel but will not start the Daytona 500 from the fourth position after a height violation was found on his No. 24 Chevrolet.

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Well, this week, he got both. NASCAR was all over the place -- on CNN, ABC News, National Public Radio and other entities that normally wouldn't be able to locate Martinsville on a map. Waltrip's plight was a major topic of conversation earlier this week on ESPN Radio, whose television arm is dumping all kinds of resources into a series it virtually ignored the last six years.

Even the accused can see the upside.

"I hate it for the sport to see the focus get turned to that, but I will say drama always outweighs pure excitement. It just seems to get more attention," said Jeff Gordon, who lost his fourth-place starting spot after his car was found to be an inch too low following Thursday's 150-mile qualifying races.

"So for that part, I mean, it's drawing attention to the sport. Now, I hope that we can get this attention and get people watching it and go out Sunday and put on an awesome, exciting, three-wide battle to the finish. It's going to balance itself out."

Not everyone agrees.

"We've given the perception that we're just a bunch of malicious guys out there trying to screw everybody out of a win," Jeff Burton said. "That's not good for our sport."

But the attention is. NASCAR, even today, still needs help getting into living rooms in certain segments of American society. Yes, six teams got busted for some sort of technical violation. But of the 61 cars that came to Daytona, 55 played within the rules. Now, ignoring that would be scandalous.

The opinions are solely those of the writer.