2012 champ says real deterrent would be continuous checking
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SPARTA, Ky. – After conducting tire audits following three consecutive NASCAR Sprint Cup Series events, officials did not take any tires from teams following last weekend’s race at Texas Motor Speedway.
With an appeal scheduled Thursday for Richard Childress Racing, the only team penalized thus far for illegally manipulating air pressures, has NASCAR’s message been sent and received?
RELATED: RCR, No. 31 team await penalty hearing
“It’s not fair for me to speak on NASCAR and how they feel,” 2012 Sprint Cup champion Brad Keselowski said Thursday during a break in testing at Kentucky Speedway.
“I do know that they’ve sent a very strong message, not just with the penalties they’ve levied to the 31 team but with some of the threats they gave competitors at the end of last year and the start of this year to make sure they didn’t go down this road.”
The real deterrent, he said, would be the continuous checking of an item, no different than the scheduled technical inspections that take place during the course of each race weekend.
“I think it really takes a three-pronged attack … and taking tires is part of that,” he said. “I don’t think it would hurt anyone’s feelings to see NASCAR just make it a regular habit to check them all the time and we could be assured that there was a level playing field which is so important for our sport.”
Officials took tires from the teams of Kevin Harvick (Stewart-Haas Racing) and Joey Logano (Team Penske) following this year’s Phoenix race; a week later at Auto Club Speedway, tires were taken back to the NASCAR Research and Development Center in Concord, North Carolina, from the teams of Harvick, teammate Kurt Busch, RCR’s Newman and teammate Paul Menard.
At Martinsville, tires were taken from the teams of Logano, AJ Allmendinger (JTG Daugherty Racing), Matt Kenseth (Joe Gibbs Racing) and Martin Truex Jr. (Furniture Row Racing).
Only those taken at Auto Club were sent to an outside party for further evaluation. NASCAR has not said which tires or how many were included.
Such tire audits are not commonplace in the sport, but continued concerns that some teams were illegally tampering with air pressures eventually pushed officials to take action.
In spite of NASCAR’s rigorous inspection process, and the threat of fines and penalties, Keselowski said there is always a concern among competitors that something is getting by officials.
“Oh yeah, it’s natural,” he said.
“The way the inspection process works is very similar to how the police work, you try to be a deterrent because you know you can’t catch everything. If you’re speeding down the highway, probably nine times out of 10 you’re going to get away with it. … But it’s that 10th time and the penalty for it that is so severe that it makes you not want to get too crazy the other nine times.
“It’s important to have that constant threat to keep everyone in line. In this case, there’s a lot of ‘excessive speeding’ going down this highway and I don’t think it would hurt at all to continue the process in showing the face that this is something that’s going to be taken very seriously.”
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