Jimmie Johnson ran one of the most dominating races of the season on Sunday at Dover. As is standard procedure, NASCAR brought the winning 48 and another random vehicle -- which just happened to be Mark Martin's No. 5 -- back to its R&D center for inspection. Lo and behold, NASCAR found the two cars to be pushing tolerances -- not illegal, certainly, but close. And, given the 48's mastery of Sprint Cup and crew chief Chad Knaus's history of, shall we say, liberally interpreting NASCAR's rules, and you've got a situation where everybody's starting to wonder about the legitimacy of the 48's run. Is it fair? Probably not, but then it's not unfair either. Let's break it down.
On Friday, Knaus took on the media hordes and, after the usual we're-all-cool back-and-forth, took a "cheating?" question head-on: "First off, if we were cheating I wouldn't be standing here, I'd be back in Charlotte, so obviously that's not the case ... We've always taken it to what we thought were the tolerances but we never crossed that line and we don't cross that line. The cars were legal. That's the thing everybody has to understand. It's turned into a bigger issue than what it really should."
Knaus also tried the blame-the-tools approach, one which in this case makes a bit of sense: "You have to realize that it was only 10 short years ago when we used to tech the template on these cars was a piece of plywood cut in the silhouette of a race car," he said. "Now we're measuring with quarter measuring systems measured to the hundreds of thousandths of an inch and it's a learning process for everybody."
Thing is, he's completely right -- the 48 team did absolutely nothing wrong. It's the equivalent of thinking you probably ought to slow down when you're approaching the speed limit. But Knaus has a history of tiptoeing up to that line of legality -- and, on occasion, hopping over it. He got suspended for four races and fined $25,000 in 2006 for what NASCAR termed "blatant cheating" before the Daytona 500.
Knaus acknowledged that his history puts him in the awkward position of "presumed guilty," and on Friday tried to meet those accusations head-on. "The last thing I want to do is sit in a closed-door meeting with Mike Helton again over what has happened to me in my past," he said. "We've worked really hard to clean up the reputation of this No. 48 team and we're going to hold that to the highest regard and the highest integrity."
"It's not uncommon for cars to stick around the tech center to be measured," Johnson said. "The tech center has ways to measure the vehicle that the teams don't have. So they're doing their work and collecting their data and all that stuff, and the cars were there being inspected. Believe me, if they weren't legal, they wouldn't have been released."
Of course, this being NASCAR, Jimmie Johnson and Chad Knaus could swear on a stack of Bibles and their own mommas' names that they were innocent, and a segment of fandom wouldn't believe them. Heck, Knaus could testify that he was the crew chief of the 48 car and there's a segment who'd suspect him of lying.
Thing is, Knaus has nobody to blame but himself if the fans and the media cast a suspicious eye in his direction. So much of what the 48 team has done can't be achieved by cheating, but instances like this, fairly or not, won't do anything to help his reputation. For their sake, they'd better hope this is the last "near-tolerance" warning they receive.
NASCAR warns Hendrick teams about cars [AP via Yahoo! Sports]
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