JGR Caught With Hand In Cookie Jar
Written by Rocky Kitts · August 17, 2008
Well, there are a lot of people upset with Joe Gibbs Racing right now, and it’s no surprise that most of those people are drivers and owners who have seen the rear end of Gibbs cars more than they would like to this season. JGR and Toyotas have been dominant in both series and that’s raised many eyebrows about how they got so good, so quick. Now, after JGR was busted for interfering with the the result of chassis dyno tests on the cars of Tony Stewart and Joey Logano; Richard Childress said what many people were no doubt thinking:
“Their [rear end] needs to be kicked out of there…They’re shiftless anyway. They [NASCAR] just need to do something.”
Ouch. Where I come from calling someone shiftless is about on par with kicking their dog or talking about their momma in an uncomplimentary manner. In the usual manner of such incidents, Toyota claimed ignorance of any impropriety and J.D. Gibbs blamed unnamed people inside the Nationwide team for not conforming to the high moral standards that Joe Gibbs Racing expects.
I’ll let you make up your own mind whether or not I’m being sarcastic with that last sentence and I’ll move along to the problem. From ESPN:
Robin Pemberton, NASCAR’s vice president of competition, said inspectors preparing to run the tests discovered spacers — in this case one-quarter inch thick magnets — were placed on the gas-pedal stop to keep the car from running wide open and presenting a true indication of how much horsepower was reaching the rear wheels of the team’s Toyotas.
While this was being talked about during the Michigan race (tune in later for my thoughts on Carl Edwards big win), I found myself thinking that after this little episode, that if Kyle Busch had won again on Sunday, that you could pretty much expect his car to be immediately impounded. After a second place finish, that may still happen, if nothing else, as an attempt to assure teams that are madder than a Republican at an Obama rally, that there are no Toyota shenanigans going on in the Cup series.
Going to be interesting what NASCAR does in this case. There are many who believe that NASCAR has given Toyota a wink and a nudge to do what they needed to do to get competitive, and now that they are dominant, they are trying to reign the Toyota teams in a bit. If that is the case, don’t be surprised if NASCAR hands out a really, really big penalty in this case.
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