Opinion: NASCAR Shouldn’t Use Drivers As Example With Penalties

Remember when I posted my opinion of the Matt Kenseth penalty on Tuesday? If you haven’t read it, click the link below because it goes good with what I have to say today.

PREVIOUSLY — Opinion: NASCAR Goes Too Far with Penalty Against Matt Kenseth

Today, the key that I am going to focus on is this – NASCAR penalized Matt Kenseth because they felt that they had to.

It’s obvious that over the course of the last couple of weeks that NASCAR had lost order of the sport and we had drivers wrecking each other to get what they wanted with the Chase system as constructed as it is.

At Kansas, Logano spun Kenseth to prevent Kenseth from getting a win to advance to the next round of the Chase. At Talladega Superspeedway, Kevin Harvick supposedly wrecked half of the field to save his Chase birth. Now at Martinsville, Kenseth’s incident prevents Logano from winning and getting an automatic advance.

If NASCAR doesn’t lay their foot down this week, then the circus could perhaps continue this weekend at Texas Motor Speedway. Therefore, they knew that they had to do something, and something that would send a message.

Don’t believe me? Read this quote from NASCAR Chairman Brian France when he was on SIRIUS XM Radio on Wednesday explaining the reason that Kenseth got the penalty.

“We issue penalties for two reasons: We’ve got to punish you for what we think you’ve done wrong, and we have to make sure that we deter somebody else from doing exactly what you did or worse. That’s why we can’t be consistent with every single penalty because sometimes we’ve got to up the ante with a penalty because we don’t believe the current remedy is a deterrent. That’s one of the reasons that we arrived at a two-race suspension in this particular case.”

Previously as Kenseth politely pointed out following the second appeal, no driver had been suspended for retaliation on the race track in NASCAR Sprint Cup Series competition. Allow me to offer some of the previous penalties.

1. At Phoenix International Raceway in 2011, Jeff Gordon wrecked Clint Bowyer after some incidents together. Gordon’s penalty – fined $100,000, docked 25 points and placed on probation for the remainder of the season.
2. Carl Edwards wrecked Brad Keselowski at Gateway in July 2010 fighting for the race lead. Edward’s penalty – docked 60 Xfinity Series points (under the old points system), fined $25,000 and placed on probation for the rest of the season.
3. Earlier that same year, Edwards got into Keselowski at Atlanta, only meaning to spin him but flipped instead; Edwards, laps down while Keselowski was lead lap for this particular incident, was only put on probation for three races.

Now Kenseth goes and does the same thing and he gets suspended for two races?

The idea of a rulebook is to create rules and get your drivers to follow them. If they don’t follow them, you penalize them according to how the penalties are structured in the rulebook. If they are not listed in the rulebook, you go by the boundaries that have been set in previous cases – just as you would do in the court of law.

Instead though, NASCAR made the decision to go a step up and beyond and suspend Kenseth to “deter somebody else from doing exactly what you did or worse”.

If a team makes a change to their racecar that is seen in the grey area of the rule book – legal, but not in NASCAR’s eyes – they are found legal for that weekend, but a rule change is issued in the short couple of weeks that follow to deter other teams from doing the same thing. Shouldn’t the same thing happen when it comes to behavior penalties?

If France wanted to send a message, he should’ve followed the right course of order with Kenseth, giving him a fine, points penalty and probation. Then he should’ve issued a rules bulletin saying that the “behavior section” of the rulebook – section 12, by the way, would be adjusted to possible suspensions in the future should a driver commit something along the same lines. That’s how you send a message, not by using “driver of the week” as an example.

“I’m obviously more than a little disappointed on the decision and the penalties to start with,” Kenseth said following the second appeal. “I’m the first driver in the 65-year history of NASCAR to get suspended for an incident that happened in a Sprint Cup Series race. I felt I was unfairly made the example instead of knowing where the line is and what the penalties are.

“I’m extremely disappointed, but we’ll get through this. I look forward to going to Homestead. I’m not going to change who I am. I am not going to change what I stand for. I’m not going to change how I race.”

So congratulations NASCAR. We have gone from Brian France applauding drivers like Ryan Newman, who pushed Kyle Larson out of the way to get the final spot in the Chase at Phoenix last year, to applauding Brad Keselowski and Jeff Gordon for their passion last year after their fight at Texas Motor Speedway, and then applauding Joey Logano a couple weeks ago for his move at Kansas in calling it “quintessential NASCAR” to what we have today.

As Ricky Craven put it on ESPN, the comments of Brian France and the Chase format have created this mess, and Kenseth’s unfair suspension.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4svEN25Bc-c

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