On Wednesday (March 29), the National Motorsports Appeals Panel announced its decision regarding the penalty handed to Hendrick Motorsports after NASCAR confiscated louvers during the Phoenix Raceway race weekend.
The governing body took the louvers believing that HMS had doctored what is a sourced part and not to be altered.
The original penalty came down like a sledgehammer for each car: $100,000 fine; loss of all four crew chiefs for four races; docked of 100 championship/owner points and the loss of 10 playoff points each.
The penalty was meant to send an overwhelming message that tinkering with parts coming from a supplier was the ultimate no-no. The race teams did not get a slap on the wrist but a severe schoolyard thrashing.
As is the natural order of events, HMS appealed. And today, the NMAP neutered NASCAR.
In what is an unlikely outcome, the NMAP found that HMS had altered the parts, finding them guilty, but rescinded the points penalties while keeping the monetary and crew chief elements intact. Aside from having all aspects of the punitive measures dropped, this outcome is about as good as it gets for HMS – which may be bad for everyone else.
To start, NASCAR looks weakened in its ability to levy penalties.
Dropping monetary fines has been a common part of the usual process whenever NASCAR wants to tell a driver, team member, or team to take a time out. The points, however, have been the vital ingredient all along. Points place a driver in or out of the playoffs.
Points matter in the end-of-the-year standings, which is tied to how season-ending monies are distributed.
Alex Bowman jumped to first in the points standings by getting back his lost points. The season may be only six races old, but sitting in first goes a long way to claiming the regular-season championship, itself coming with a monetary bonus.
With the NMAP indicating that NASCAR was correct in going after HMS but wrong in how it penalized the juggernaut organization, it opened up a different set of issues. One of the first concerns would be that other teams might feel emboldened to work on single-source parts if they feel that the major retribution comes in the form of monetary fines.
They could even look at it in a pay-to-play way and think of it as remuneration.
But given that most teams are not cash-rich, this idea may be left to the bigger teams.
The bigger teams is part of the bigger issue here, and that is that the treatment HMS was given could be envisioned as favoritism. Just last year, Hendrick driver William Byron encountered a $25,000 fine and 25-point reduction for intentionally spinning Denny Hamlin. Through the same appeals process, Byron regained his points but saw the fine increase to $100,000.
Whatever HMS is doing in its appeals must be magical because the team is adept at keeping its points while handing out checks from its healthy bank account.
Favoritism in motorsports is nothing new, and maybe Hendrick is benefitting from being a stalwart.
For example, after the 2019 Formula 1 season, Ferrari faced intense scrutiny over its engine and how it had been able to make horsepower. Over the winter of that year, the FIA and Ferrari reached an agreement that changed the team’s performance. While the Prancing Horse suffered through a miserable 2020 campaign, the big issue with the whole situation was that FIA basically tried to sweep the infraction under the proverbial rug.
The two sides agreed to keep the deal sealed and thus avoided further scrutiny from the other teams – even though Red Bull team principal Christian Horner rightly noted that the ordeal left a “sour taste” with him and that “there are races that we should have won last year, arguably, if they had run with an engine that seems to be quite different to what performance that they had last year.”
Staunch rival Toto Wolff agreed with Horner’s assessment but also remarked that “Ferrari is an iconic brand,” clearly insinuating that the Italian team might have benefitted from its legacy position.
What was later discovered was that the FIA mandated that Ferrari use less fuel in 2020 to compensate for the unapproved engineering associated with the 2019 iteration of the ICU. Should another team have monkeyed around in this part of the car there is every reason to believe that the information would have been made public and that the offending team would have been penalized into the next millennium.
For NASCAR, the appearance of Hendrick enjoying preferential treatment might not be as problematic is the fact that the louvers themselves are the center of the matter. Chad Knaus, Hendrick’s vice president of competition, pointed to this problem right after NASCAR took the louvers in question.
On March 17, he said, “We in the garage — every one of these teams here are being held accountable to put their car out there to go through inspection and perform at the level they need to. The teams are being held accountable for doing that. Nobody is holding the single-source providers accountable at the level that they need to be to give us the parts that we need.”
The NMAP does not publish how it reaches its conclusions, merely the outcomes. In this scenario, the NMAP may have found that Hendrick did alter the louvers – but only so that they would actually work with the car. The guilty verdict can be correct and the punishment wrong. If NASCAR is not properly policing the parts being supplied, then teams have little recourse but do what they can to make them work.
Of course, maybe the reason that the points were given back but the fines stood and the crew chiefs ejected is because the offense came during, and cue Allen Iverson, “practice.” Yes, we’re talking about practice.
Had the offending parts made their way to the track during the race, this story might be a different one, and NASCAR might look the solid, strong organization that it wants itself to be.
As a writer and editor, Ava anchors the Formula 1 coverage for the site, while working through many of its biggest columns. Ava earned a Masters in Sports Studies at UGA and a PhD in American Studies from UH-Mānoa. Her dissertation Chased Women, NASCAR Dads, and Southern Inhospitality: How NASCAR Exports The South is in the process of becoming a book.