NASCAR's Mike Helton rules no major penalties for Carl Edwards, just probation: Wild West Rules now?

   Mike Helton rules: no harm, no foul (Photo: Getty Images for NASCAR)
  

By Mike Mulhern
mikemulhern.net

   No suspension or heavy penalties for Carl Edwards for Sunday's incident with Brad Keselowski at Atlanta, NASCAR president Mike Helton ruled Tuesday.
   Edwards will be on 'probation' for three Sprint Cup races – Bristol, Martinsville and Phoenix.
   No points deductions, no monetary penalties, and no suspension, even though Edwards conceded after the late-race crash that it had been deliberate on part, "to settle it now," after a series of incidents with newcomer Keselowski.
   So NASCAR's pre-season 'Have at it, boys, and have fun' declaration, in announcing the sanctioning body would take a general hands-off approach to policing drivers and let drivers police themselves is alive and well.
   That might be surprising to some, considering Keselowski landed on his roof after getting the boot by Edwards at 180 mph and could easily have been killed….and considering that Keselowski's car could easily have gone into the catch-fencing and injured fans.
    "The clear message we sent in January was that we were willing to put more responsibility in the hands of the driver," Helton said.
    "But there is a line you can cross, and we'll step in to maintain law and order when we think that line's crossed."
    Clearly Helton and NASCAR did not feel that Edwards and Keselowski had crossed that line at Atlanta.
   But will the general public buy that argument, or the sport's hard-core fans? And what about NASCAR's other drivers? NASCAR's call here was made, really, after Edwards put the sanctioning body between a rock and a hard place, because this sport has a long tradition of only very, very rarely suspending its stars.
   Helton said in his post-race talk with Edwards over the incident "we made it very clear to him that these actions were not acceptable and did go beyond what we said back in January about putting the driving back in the hands of the drivers. We believe the driver understands our position at this point."
   However just what message the no-call on Edwards might send to the rest of the drivers in the field could be chilling.
   Drivers – Robby Gordon, Kevin Harvick and Jimmy Spencer come quickly to mind – have been suspended for relatively minor infractions, and journeyman Carl Long was suspended for 12 weeks for a minor engine issue at Charlotte during the All-Star weekend last May.
   So Gordon and Harvick both expressed surprise at NASCAR's no-call.

   Harvick: "Huh! Surprised by the penalty, or lack thereof."
  Kyle Petty, whose son Adam was killed at Loudon in 2000, had called on national tv for Edwards' suspension: "I am deeply saddened by the decision NASCAR made...I love this business, will always support it, but not this."
  Robby Gordon, who was suspended one race at Pocono by NASCAR for an incident the day before in a Nationwide race in Montreal, questioned the ruling: "I wonder what would have happened to me in that situation? Hmmmm. Someone playing favorites?"
  Helton, noting he had talked with both car owners involved, Roger Penske (Keselowski) and Jack Roush (Edwards) and planned to talk with both drivers in the coming days, said the more important issue was why Keselowski's car became airborne at Atlanta. That's the same thing that happened to Edwards' car at Talladega a year ago in another frightening incident.
   "We have not seen a car get airborne much on the mile-and-a-half racetrack (like Atlanta)…and that's something that is very important to us, and we want to study very closely to figure out things that we can do to help prevent this very quickly in the future," Helton said.
    "This is a very important element of all of this -- the car getting airborne was a very serious issue…and that's something we'll take a look at very quickly and try to figure out how to help prevent."
    
    

     Roger Penske's newest driver Brad Keselowski: He's a real live-wire on the track, another Dale Earnhardt/Kyle Busch perhaps. Did Carl Edwards teach him a lesson....or did NASCAR botch this call, in hopes of selling more tickets.....(Photo: Getty Images for NASCAR)
    

     And Helton noted he did order Edwards parked after the crash. Of course that was with only a few miles left in the race. Edwards was some 230 miles behind the leaders when the crash occurred; Keselowski was running sixth.
     Helton said, after talking with Penske and Roush, the driver situation was now to "clean the slate, if you will, so that they can both go back to some hard, competitive, side-by-side racing."
   However Helton conceded that it's now up to the drivers in the sport to try to figure out just what NASCAR is thinking about all this: "The balance of it, I think, will still have to be sorted out among the drivers…as to what their opinion or their interpretation of all of this is."
    Helton insisted NASCAR is "wanting to do the right thing by the competitors…allow them to race…but to maintain law and order within a reasonable step.
    "So a lot of that I'd have to yield to the drivers on what their opinions are and how they interpret all of this."
   
   

   Did Carl Edwards (L) dodge a bullet, in NASCAR's decision? Did he send a message to Brad Keselowski? And what will the sport's fans -- and NASCAR's outside observers -- think about all this? (Photo: Getty Images for NASCAR)
   

   But just where is that line that NASCAR is still waiting to see drivers cross?
    The late David Poole, reporter for the Charlotte Observer, wrote some caustic words about the Talladega incident between Edwards and Keselowski last spring. Poole was talking about Talladega in particular, but his words certainly resonate loudly after Sunday's Atlanta crash too:
   "All I want is for someone to tell me what's acceptable. We apparently established Sunday (at Talladega last spring) that seven fans being injured – one spent the night in a hospital with a broken jaw – is OK.
    "It seems we've decided we can live with that much damage being done to the sport's customers for 'good racing.'
     "How many people have to be listed in 'guarded' or 'critical' condition before we say that's too much? Is it lead changes? If we have fewer than five fans hurt for every lead change, is that acceptable?
    "Does somebody have to die before we've decided we don't have control?"
 
    So just where is that line that NASCAR won't allow drivers to cross, the line where the sanctioning body steps in and deals out heavy penalties?
      "I think we see it when we see it," Helton says.
      And Helton pointed out that NASCAR doesn't always met out all its punishments in public: "There are a lot of things that we do behind the scenes with owners and drivers to balance these type of things out, we think."
      Helton said Penske simply wanted to be sure "that this was all said and done and it was over with."
     And Helton mentioned, without specifics, "some of the things that we can do to maintain law and order beyond just issuing penalty notices."
     It is unclear just what Helton was talking about on that point.

     Perhaps an aggravating issue here is that nationally NASCAR's reputation is on the line in this deal: ABC's Diane Sawyer featured the Edward-Keselowski story as one of her Monday night leads on the network's national news, pointing to what she apparently found incredulous that a NASCAR driver would intentionally crash another at 190 mph and then all-but boast about it.
    Is this situation good news for NASCAR – as in 'any news is good news' – or bad news?
    "You'd have to ask 25 different people, and you'd probably get 25 different opinions of what's good and what's not," Helton said.
    And Helton tried to refocus the debate on the issue of Keselowski's car getting airborne, rather than on Edwards' intentional hit.
    "We can look at the impact the car took, and the reaction of the roll cage, and the hoop and different elements that we saw that did their job," Helton said.
    However drivers like Ryan Newman --- himself twice an innocent victim of flying flipping cars at Talladega last year – called a year ago for NASCAR to study the issue of flying cars and find a way to keep these cars on the ground.
    And as the world saw Sunday NASCAR stockers are still flipping and flying….
    All this comes as NASCAR executives have publically pushed for more contact in what they call 'a contact sport.'
    That could lead some skeptics to wonder if all the attention – particularly since no one really got hurt this time – might be seen somehow as a PR plus for the sport, which has been suffering from slumping TV ratings and less-than-sellout crowds.
     How this plays out now in the court of public opinion remains to be seen.
    "We told the drivers that we were going to back off on that grip we had….but there is a line you can cross…and when you cross that line in our opinion, we're going to get involved with you," Helton said.
    Was that line crossed Sunday at Atlanta, and NASCAR just didn't see it?

   A quick look at some media reaction around the country to NASCAR's decision:
   Sports Illustrated: "In the end, NASCAR got exactly what it wanted: The re-injection of danger -- and the specter of death -- into its sport."
   The Atlanta Journal-Constitution:  "NASCAR: You just dropped the monkey wrench. NASCAR clearly is desperate for sold out grandstands and fat TV ratings again. It believes fans want wrecks again, even at the possible risk of a fender landing on their cheeseburger, or possibly in their left ear. But this was weak, boys. Really weak."
   NYT: "In the midst of a ratings and attendance slump, NASCAR went back to its bad-ol’-boy roots this season in the hope that more aggressive driving would draw fans back to the sport."
   ABC: "NASCAR officials have encouraged aggressive driving as they attempt to once again increase interest in the sport."
   Well, on the good news front, Sunday's Atlanta 500 -- the first NASCAR event this season without serious TV competition from the Olympics, was up in overnight ratings over last year's 500. This race pulled a 4.7 rating, up two percent. That's about 3.7 million viewers.

       

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   Can car owner Roger Penske help make peace in this feud? (Photo: Getty Images for NASCAR)