NASCAR announced Wednesday that it has taken away Peyton Sellers' win in Saturday's NASCAR Camping World Series East race at Greenville-Pickens Speedway for a rules violation. This leaves the question of why won't series officials do this for its other series, including Cup.
NASCAR officials often have followed the belief for years that the driver taking the checkered flag first remains the winner regardless of penalties uncovered in post-race inspections. It's happened a few times in the Cup series in recent years where the winner was penalized but kept his win:
# Carl Edwards won at Las Vegas this year but was fined 100 points, crew chief Bob Osborne suspended six events and fined $100,000. for the oil tank caper. While Edwards also lost the 10 bonus points with the win, he still kept the win. Granted this penalty was as severe as NASCAR had made in recent years but he still is listed as the winner.
# Edwards won at Dover last fall but his car was found to be too low in the right rear. He was docked 25 points and Osborne fined $25,000 but the win remained with Edwards.
# Jimmie Johnson was penalized in 2005 after his win at Vegas when his car was found to be too low. An appeal reduced the penalty to crew chief Chad Knaus but the other penalties remained, yet Johnson kept the win.
In a perfect world, those drivers and others who have won races but failed post-race inspections would have had their victories stripped and either given no points or given something like 43rd-place points. Problem is in this big money sport one of the more valuable items to sponsors aren't the trophies but the pictures of their driver in Victory Lane with the driver and team wearing a sponsor's hat -- thus the term hat dance.
Such Victory Lane photos can take 30 minutes or more to do because of all the race sponsors, team sponsors, NASCAR sponsors and track sponsors. To have a driver and team go through all of that and then later take away the victory makes those pictures worthless. Suddenly sponsors have a bad taste in their mouth after spending hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars to be a part of that moment and be able to use those pictures in advertisements and such. That's not what a series wants when those same companies are asked to pony up more money the next year.
Plus, the whole experience robs the fans of the driver later declared the winner the opportunity to celebrate. Imagine what it would be like to find out a day later that Dale Jr. won (or lost) a race because of a violation found after the race. While, it would have people talking about the sport all week (is that really a bad thing?), some would not be happy about leaving an event and finding out what they saw didn't matter. Just recall the debacle of the 2002 Indianapolis 500 when Paul Tracy appealed the decision by race officials that Helio Castroneves was ahead of him before the final yellow flag came out. The winner was not made official until five weeks later (Castroneves won). That won't work in NASCAR.
Penalizing Sellers (for a shock absorber violation) is easier for NASCAR because there are fewer fans, fewer sponsors and fewer people who will be upset or even care about the decision. So, while NASCAR took away Sellers' victory -- and gave it to runner-up Austin Dillon, grandson of Richard Childress -- it seems unlikely that series officials will do the bold (right?) thing in the Cup or Nationwide or Truck series any time soon.