Did You Notice? … All four cars run by Hendrick Motorsports were penalized 100 points by NASCAR Wednesday (Mar. 15) for allegedly tampering with their hood louvers, confiscated during pre-race inspection at Phoenix Raceway.
The Nos. 5, 9, 24 and 48 teams lose 100 owner points while Alex Bowman, William Byron and Kyle Larson lose 100 driver points (Chase Elliott was not affected as he wasn’t entered at Phoenix due to his snowboarding injury). Each team also receives a $100,000 fine while their crew chiefs were hit with four-race suspensions. (Kaulig Racing’s No. 31 team was also hit with these parts modification-type penalties).
If your first reaction is anything like mine when this penalty came out, it’s “what the heck is a louver?” It’s not something I would think of right off the bat, even as a journalist and TV production person covering this sport since I was a kid. I always thought of louvers as being more decorative, right? I remember them on the back of Pontiacs growing up as a kid as a cool little extra design flare.
The Merriam-Webster definition of a louver is simple: it’s a series of slats provided with one or more slanted, fixed or movable fins, to allow for the flow of air. Think the slats on your air vent at home, allowing heat or air conditioning to come through. I’ve provided an example below of how they look on the hood of a Next Gen car.
That’s where NASCAR has focused its attention, feeling Hendrick has tampered with the part originally supplied in an attempt to gain some sort of competitive advantage. All you need to read is the word “air” in that definition and you can see why the sport believes there could have been a competitive advantage here, an accusation they’ve levied while applying the equivalent of a Class A felony charge to one of the sport’s legacy organizations.
“It was obvious to us,” NASCAR Senior Vice President of Competition Elton Sawyer said. “That these parts had been modified in an area that wasn’t approved. This was a consistent penalty that we went through last year with other competitors.”
HMS vehemently disagrees, coalescing their inevitable appeal around three specific arguments. For starters, they believed the louvers given to them don’t match the design given by the manufacturer or approved by NASCAR. Secondly, there was inconsistent and unclear communication given by NASCAR surrounding this part. Finally, recent comparable penalties given by the sanctioning body were based on post-race inspection. For reference, NASCAR confiscated these louvers before qualifying even started during the weekend at Phoenix.
It’s hard to see those arguments holding weight in kangaroo court (also known as the NASCAR Appeals Board). If the louvers didn’t match the design, why aren’t they incorrect on all other 32 cars in the field? Seems to me that if there’s a part that doesn’t look right on your car, isn’t it your moral and competitive obligation to inform not only the single-source supplier but NASCAR itself?
It’s hard to find the teeth behind any post-race inspection comparison either. Whether confiscated before, during or after the weekend, NASCAR’s stance on these single-source supplied is perfectly clear: DON’T TOUCH. That’s like saying hey, you caught us about to cheat but since you did really good detective work, we didn’t actually get to do it so there’s no need for any consequences here!
Yeah, that’s silly. If there’s any adjustment to this penalty going forward, it may stem from the second point surrounding unclear communication from the sanctioning body. It’ll be a while, if ever, before we get specifics on that, and you wonder how confident HMS really is on overturning these if they’re allowing one portion of the consequences (a four-race crew chief suspension for each team) to start this weekend at Atlanta Motor Speedway.
Assuming it stands, where does HMS go from here? How much does it cripple an organization that’s been, hands down, the fastest over the first four races of 2022? They still went out and won Phoenix, Byron’s second straight victory as he combined with Larson to lead 83.5% of all laps run.
The two major penalties assessed during the regular season, 100-point hits to Brad Keselowski and Michael McDowell proved irrelevant: neither team was within striking distance to make the playoffs on points. But were there really enough competitive consequences there? All either driver needed was a win, at any track, and they would have found themselves competing for a championship come September.
The HMS cars, of course, have a far better chance to qualify on points. But if they’re as competitive as they seem during the rest of 2023? 100 points wouldn’t have been enough to keep Elliott from winning the 2022 regular season title. He still would have coasted into the garage by 30 over Joey Logano.
As for Elliott’s trio of teammates? They’d have needed to win to make it, 100 points making their climb that much harder. But is that really going to be a problem for an organization that posted four cars inside the top 10 at Phoenix? A team that’s led 54.2% of all laps run thus far in 2023 (the next closest, Trackhouse Racing, is at 10.1%).
All four cars from HMS were in the postseason stable comfortably by Dover Motor Speedway last May — less than halfway through the 2022 regular season. Based on that, it still feels like Elliott has the hardest hill to climb after his fractured tibia heals … and he’s the only one on the team who didn’t get penalized.
It makes you wonder if NASCAR’s deterrent is actually enough. With the playoffs becoming that important to NASCAR’s overall competition model, you may want to add in a disclaimer during the regular season (or postseason) you’ll need to win twice in order for victories to count toward playoff eligibility. It’s a way for them to raise the bar without invalidating previous wins (if they didn’t catch HMS cheating before Phoenix, they can’t just assume the answer was yes at Las Vegas Motor Speedway the week before without hard evidence).
If HMS does prove to be guilty, deducting at least 10 playoff points makes advancing through a little more difficult. Assuming this incident happened last fall, it would have allowed Ross Chastain to keep that Mario Kart move in his back pocket at Martinsville Speedway; Elliott would have fallen six points behind Denny Hamlin and failed to advance into the Championship 4.
If these penalties turn out to be warranted (and again, it’s always hard to tell … NASCAR needs to continue to do a better job of explaining why and what is causing the penalty to be assessed, like how easy it is to see a holding call on NFL replay), I give them credit. It’s not easy to tattoo a scarlet letter on the equivalent of the sport’s New York Yankees the rest of the year. No matter what, HMS will be fighting the court of public perception in regards to whether they cheated on the way to winning another potential championship, adding to their own NASCAR record.
The bigger issue is taking a larger view of where the sport stands one month into 2023. So far, we’ve had … two straight fairly uncompetitive races saved by late caution flags and NASCAR overtime, an overall decline in lead changes as the Next Gen car appears to have hit some sort of aerodynamic snag in year two, the sport’s Most Popular Driver break a bone and get himself sidelined for six weeks and concern about declining TV ratings and how the races themselves are being covered.
Even some of the better on-track drama, between Hamlin and Chastain, revolved around weird contact late in the race at Phoenix where neither driver was truly in contention for the win. And once Hamlin admitted the contact was intentional, that resulted in this weird black cloud fine too.
Bottom line, these aren’t the storylines you want coming off a stake-in-the-ground, NASCAR-is-back 2022 season that landed far above expectations with the Next Gen car. No matter what happens here, I’m sure officials are hoping for a super competitive race at Atlanta Motor Speedway this weekend that turns eyes back toward the racetrack and away from the potential black eye everyone involved just incurred here.
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The author of Did You Notice? (Wednesdays) Tom spends his time overseeing Frontstretch’s 40+ staff members as its majority owner and Editor-in-Chief. Based outside Philadelphia, Bowles is a two-time Emmy winner in NASCAR television and has worked in racing production with FOX, TNT, and ESPN while appearing on-air for SIRIUS XM Radio and FOX Sports 1's former show, the Crowd Goes Wild. He most recently consulted with SRX Racing, helping manage cutting-edge technology and graphics that appeared on their CBS broadcasts during 2021 and 2022.
You can find Tom’s writing here, at CBSSports.com and Athlonsports.com, where he’s been an editorial consultant for the annual racing magazine for 15 years.