Are NASCAR's stock car teams now playing somewhere in the Twilight Zone?

   By Mike Mulhern
   mikemulhern.net

   DOVER, Del.

   When it takes until Wednesday afternoon to decide if the car that 'won' Sunday's race is legal or not, there is something badly amiss.
   Welcome to the Theater of the Absurd.
   Whether or not Clint Bowyer's Loudon-winning car was legal or illegal is not really the point here – but rather NASCAR's overly complex inspection procedures and requirements, and the exorbitant expense Sprint Cup team owners have to bear to meet them.
   Three days?
   If NASCAR inspectors need three days post-race, working in that Concord, N.C., R&D center, after hauling Bowyer's car nearly 1,000 miles from New Hampshire Motor Speedway, to dissect and measure the car to find a variance of just some 60-thousandths of an inch, something is badly wrong.
   But is anyone here paying attention to that?
   If the rules today are too complicated, too difficult to handle at the track itself each race weekend, then NASCAR needs simpler rules.
   Period.
   By the time the 43 cars get to the starting line Sunday afternoon, they should all be legal enough for the 100,000 or so in the stands to feel confident they're about to watch a legitimate sports event.
   If NASCAR can't ensure that, there is a big problem.
   But does anyone here see that?
   One problem is that everyone in this sport, all 3,000 or so in this huge traveling circus, is so busy running up and down the highway from one track to the next, with a brief stop at the house for fresh clothes, who is really looking at the bigger picture?
   Well, maybe some of these corporate sponsors, for one. And to judge by the cutbacks many team sponsors have been making, well, looks like they're voting with their billfolds. By closing them.
  
  

   Clint Bowyer gets a victory lobster from Loudon track boss Jerry Gappens. (Photo: Getty Images for NASCAR)
  


   These last few days of controversy have not cast this sport in a very good light. And all this comes after – AFTER -- that stunningly low 2.3 TV rating for Sunday's Loudon 300....while teams, even some of the biggest names in the sport, are still scrambling for sponsorships, and while the National Football League is setting records.
   But at the moment, after talking with some key sports figures in the garage here, it's not clear that those inside this sport really get it yet: This is just another bus stop on the treadmill circuit, Kansas City is next week, New Hampshire was last week....and poor Clint Bowyer, well, maybe he was just cheatin' and got caught. Who cares? Just a little less cannon-fodder now for rivals in this championship chase....
   Hey! This should be a key moment for the powers-that-be in this sport, wherever they are, to pause and reflect on just what is going on here -- big picture.
  
  

   Supercomputers? Maybe NASCAR should impose an electrical blackout at the race track (Photo: Getty Images for NASCAR)
  

   Yes, this car-of-tomorrow was a laudable venture, at first. Billed as a safer car, a cheaper car to deal with....a car in part designed to help open the sport to new team owners by lowering the bar of admission....
   Well, it is much safer, yes!
   But cheaper? Nope. In fact it has dramatically changed this sport in many ways that are simply not good.
   The COT, and all that goes with it now, has raised the price of racing considerably. (And it should be noted that those already in this sport have a vested interest in keeping newcomers out.)
   Certainly, those 'Twisted Sister' cars of the past (circa 2003-2007) were a step, a long, long step over the line of reasonable, by team owners and crew chiefs.
  
But the overly strict measurements NASCAR now requires teams to fit with their COTs – as anyone still paying attention to the sport now can see – is clearly a long, long step over the line of reasonable by NASCAR in the other direction.
   Three days?
   Anyone who watches NASCAR's highly detailed at-track inspections, lengthy and complex, (and performed by the best army of inspectors this sport has ever had, it should be noted) has to scratch his head and wonder why it took NASCAR three days after the race to find an 'egregious' variance of less than the thickness of a quarter. And why it has decided to make such a big stink about it. Who is really behind this controversy?
   Never mind whether such a variance might or might not be 'performance enhancing.' That's not the issue here.
   Three days to determine whether the winner was cheating?
  
  
  

  Clint Bowyer: did he really win Loudon? Why was his car legal on Sunday, but illegal on Wednesday? Does NASCAR need to rethink its inspection procedures? (Photo: Getty Images for NASCAR)
  

   This whole Clint Bowyer controversy is a good launching point to consider other related questions:
   The initial goal of the COT with its 'zero tolerance' measurements was perhaps reasonable: to make cars more equal.
  
That, the initial theory went, would make it cheaper for teams, because they wouldn't need an 18-car fleet for each driver, with some cars specifically built and chassis/body-tuned for specific tracks.
   Bang the gong.
   Cheaper? LOL.
   Fewer cars? LOL.
   Maybe teams could get along with fewer cars if the Sprint Cup schedule, crew chiefs point out, weren't so demanding.
  
   A couple of current examples:
  

   Last week: Concord, N.C., to Loudon, N.H. – 889 miles. Back to Concord, N.C., 889 miles.
  

   This week: Concord, N.C., to Dover, Del. – 500 miles. Back to Concord, 500 miles.
  

   Next week: Concord, N.C., to Kansas City – 995 miles. Back to Concord, 995 miles.
  

   The following week: Concord, N.C. to Fontana, Calif., -- 2400 miles. Back to Concord, 2400 miles.
  

   The tour without a break until Thanksgiving. Throw in a couple of crashed cars and repairs, and the workload increases.
   We see all the pictures of drivers and their new kids....wonder what the divorce rate is among crewmen.
   And, the initial theory went, 'more equal' COT cars would make it easier for the sport to attract new team owners.
   Bang the gong.
   The COT, quite the opposite, has all but killed off independent teams, except as start-and-parks, or field-fillers, or satellite operations for bigger teams.
  
   And – this may be the heart of the economic dilemma -- the COT has forced the big team owners to buy outrageously expensive measuring equipment to meet NASCAR's strict tolerances.
   Temperature-sensitive laser and GPS measuring devices?
  
   Give me a break.
   Is this getting too absurd yet?
   You haven't even heard the all of it.
   NASCAR's no-testing policy, now two years going, was ostensibly to save teams money.
   That policy has been, to put it bluntly, a dismal failure.
   Let's make that clear: a dismal failure.
   Team owner Jack Roush says if it cost $500,000 to do all the testing a team wanted to do over the season, before the testing ban, "It's costing us three times that right now," to do the computer simulation programs that have become necessary because NASCAR won't let teams put a real race car on a real Sprint Cup tour track with real Goodyears to test.
   Saving money?
  
  

  Darian Grubb, Tony Stewart's crew chief. And to which supercomputer is this laptop connected, the one in Switzerland or the one in Austria? (Photo: Getty Images for NASCAR)
  

   Remember when legendary crew chief Jake Elder won races and championships with just a ball of yarn and a ruler?
   Well, brace yourself – the top teams on the Sprint Cup tour today are using 'supercomputers' to prepare their cars for Sunday's NASCAR races.
   Supercomputers.
   Supercomputers?
   Supercomputers.
   How much is the hourly cost for those things?
   Is this getting too absurd yet?
   We're not putting men on the moon here; we're running two-tons of over-horsepowered steel-and-carbon fiber (oh, don't get me started on the excessive carbon fiber expenses in this sport) in circles.
   Remember those wind-tunnel wars? With teams flying race cars to special high-tech wind tunnels in Canada and Europe to get some special aerodynamic engineering....and men even building lavish high-tech rolling-road wind tunnels right in Charlotte?
   NASCAR racing has now devolved in a battle of the 'supercomputers,' with Cup teams using those for complex and expensive race-modeling simulations, in conjunction with those multi-million-dollar seven-post-shaker rigs that every team has to have.
   'My supercomputer is bigger than your supercomputer.' Is that what this sport is devolving into?
   And Roush says he's now planning to hire more engineers to help run his team's supercomputer program – another two computer specialists on the road, at-track, and another two computer specialists back at the shop to choreograph everything.
   And Roush says he and Childress are probably late to this part of the technical game.
   Cheaper?
   This is all way, way over-the-top.
   Is anybody in Daytona listening?
   Hey, remember when a good oak tree in the yard was a key part of a stock car operation....
  

   On top of all this, you can take NASCAR's rather murky explanations of this Clint Bowyer affair at face value...or you can suspect – as some in the garage here do – that there may be something deeper involved.
   Consider this: what really was the problem with Bowyer's car at Richmond, in the final race of the regular season? Bowyer was the last man to make the 12-man cut, by 142 points over Ryan Newman.
   How would NASCAR have dealt with this Loudon situation if it had occurred a week earlier in the playoff finale at Richmond?
   A 150-point penalty, as NASCAR just handed Bowyer and Childress, would have knocked that team out of the championship race, if it had been levied for a similar Richmond violation. (The 150-point penalty has considerable precedent: In 2008 NASCAR, in four separate incidents, sacked the Brian Vickers Red Bull team with a 150-point penalty, the Martin Truex-DEI team with a 150-point penalty, Johnny Sauter with a 150-point penalty, and Scott Riggs with a 150-point penalty.)
   But imagine the PR consternation if it had taken NASCAR until the following Tuesday or Wednesday – just as the 12 playoff drivers were heading to New York City for that championship media blitz – to figure out that, whoops, one of those 12 really didn't make the chase after all.
   And throw in an expected appeal of such a ruling, and a two or three week PR headache of convening a NASCAR appeals board, right as the chase is opening....
   Maybe NASCAR itself came close to an even worse PR disaster...
   Wonder what Newman really thinks about all this? Oh, yeah, BTW, NASCAR still has that 'secret penalty' stuff hanging over Newman and all these drivers, remember. Speak your mind at your own peril.
   And watch out for NASCAR's Twitter police....
  
  

   But the bottom line here is this: if NASCAR can't determine at the track itself on the day of the race, after several days of close at-track inspections, whether a car is legal or not, NASCAR has some big, big problems. Credibility, for one.
   If NASCAR can't adequately police the rules it has right now, at the track each week, then simplify the rules....or start hauling all those laser-GPS measuring machines to each track. Either throw some of those weird body templates and measuring devices in the trashcan, or start doing better inspections at the track each weekend.
   This sport is at a point in time where it hasn't been hitting on all eight cylinders anyway in the eyes of the general public, so it has a major PR problem here too.
   The way NASCAR has handled the whole Clint Bowyer thing this past week is a slap in the face to this sport's fans, the 100,000 or so who spent good, hard-earned money to make it to Loudon, N.H., to watch last Sunday's 300, and the three million or so who watched it on TV.
   This sport's fans deserve better.