Chase Briscoe and Joe Gibbs Racing’s No. 19 team were handed a L2 penalty on Wednesday (Feb. 19) after Briscoe’s fourth-place Daytona 500 car was found to have modified the spoiler base, a single source part of the Next Gen car.
Violating sections 14.1 and 14.5.8 of the NASCAR Rule Book, the No. 19 team was docked 100 owner points and 10 playoff points while Briscoe was docked 100 driver points and 10 playoff points. JGR was fined $100,000, and crew chief James Small was handed a four-race suspension.
The penalty drops Briscoe from 10th to 39th in the standings, and he will enter Sunday’s (Feb. 23) NASCAR Cup Series race at Atlanta Motor Speedway with -67 points.
Front Row Motorsports’ No. 34 team and Rick Ware Racing’s No. 51 team were also penalized following Daytona for safety violations pertaining to ballast found outside the ballast containers.
Each team lost 10 owner points, while drivers Todd Gilliland and Cody Ware lost 10 driver points each.
Stephen Stumpf is the NASCAR Content Director for Frontstretch and is a three-year veteran of the site. His weekly column is “Stat Sheet,” and he formerly wrote "4 Burning Questions" for three years. He also writes commentaries, contributes to podcasts, edits articles and is frequently at the track for on-site coverage.
Find Stephen on Twitter @stephen_stumpf
When did NA$CAR discover the modification? Did the car go on the track with the modification? How many “inspections” before the discovery? Did the team have time to make the car “legal” before it went on the track?
These type of penalties really bother me, the car may have been illegal, but the driver didn’t do it the team did. I could see giving the driver last place points but the hundred points should come off the owner not the driver. This is on Gibbs for not managing one of his teams
I get the sentiment, but I think the driver’s are in on it to some extent. Dale Jr made comments about cheating the car up that he “didn’t know about it”, but then also said “I hope I never drove a ‘legal’ car. I wanted my guys to find every edge they could give me.”
Dude, it can’t possibly work that way. If the driver didn’t get a penalty it would be worth it to the team to cheat just for the benefit of making it into the playoffs. The team makes a lot of money by making it into the playoffs. And if you think about the money they win if they win the championship, all four teams would have their cars cheated up on that final race.
That’s why they call it a TEAM. They win together, lose together, and get penalized together. Their fates are intertwined.
That’s a good point but as I said if they give the driver last place points he’s in a points hole to have enough points to make the top 16. But if he wins a race I guess he would still get in anyway. I guess it ends up being luck at the draw to see if your car gets picked to go back to NASCAR to be stripped down.