Jimmie Johnson is the master of NASCAR Sprint Cup racing. He seems to be a pleasant, good-looking, well-meaning fellow who any organization would be proud to feature as a front man.
Conversely, his crew chief, Chad Knaus, has been in the NASCAR penalty box with the relative frequency of a NHL goon. The infractions, designed to make his car lighter or more aerodynamic, have piled up through the years and allowed the Johnson haters a platform from which to rail against the driver and his five series titles.
Traditionally, in the wink-wink culture of racing, no one really employs the word “cheating” to describe the tinkering done in the name of speed. It has been that way forever.
Years ago, answering a Tennessee writer’s question about some possible mechanical shenanigans, Sterling Marlin merely credited his success to a “superior reading of the rule book.”
The roguish nature of a sport born of bootlegging is to a certain extent unchangeable. It is soaked into the lore of racing like an oil stain.
But the stuff that Knaus and his contemporaries get busted for these days seems to be so microscopic, so picayune, so trivial as to be laughable.
Earlier this racing season, Matt Kenseth’s team was brought up on charges and summarily punished for employing a part that was less than three grams too light. For shaving the equivalent of a couple of cotton balls worth of weight, the full, yet inconsistently applied might of NASCAR came down on Joe Gibbs Racing.
That certainly is not in the proud heritage of a Tim Flock, who in 1952 was disqualified from a race for having replaced the fairly important metal roll bars with wooden facsimiles.
One might argue that if you’re going to do it, if you are going to try to engineer an edge and are going to get hammered anyway if caught, then you might as well go big. Be bold and audacious. Think rocket fuel and tanks the size of a studio apartment to hold it.
Wouldn’t you love to see what these guys could do if the innovative restrictor plates were removed?
Here’s a proposal: One race a year in which any rule not directly related to driver safety is suspended. One race in which the crews could apply the great expanse of their ingenuity to anything beneath the basic frame of a Sprint Cup car. Just get it out of their systems.
And then everyone can go back to “cheating” by microns and milligrams.
