If this seems too long just read the last line in Part II.
Last Tuesday, NASCAR fined Jeff Gordon's crew chief (the head coach of
Gordon's team)
$25,000 for using an illegal intake manifold during a race. (Stick with
me/you won't need
to know what an intake manifold is.) Gordon himself got stripped of 100
Winston Cup points
(the points they add up to determine each year's champion).
Gordon won the race in question, but the interesting part is: Even after
it came out he'd
been cheating, the victory stood. Gordon kept all the prize money, too.
His Winston Cup
ranking didn't change a bit after losing the points. Indeed, the whole
thing's already been
forgotten.
Lesson: Cheating in NASCAR is sort of expected.
Last year, I spent some time with NASCAR driver Jeremy Mayfield's team.
One of the pit crew
guys, in a moment of candor, told me that in this sport cheaters are
actually admired.
Other teams respect your skills if you manage to slide something by.
With countless
templates and rules/defining body types and engine specs down to the
millimeter/stock car
racing is in large part a matter of beating NASCAR's careful
inspections. Each time the
sport issues a new bylaw, teams hit the wind tunnels and engine
simulators looking for
maximum performance at the very edge of legality. When the car gets to
the racetrack, the
edge is often blurred.
This spring, the Mayfield team got nailed for using an illegal fuel
additive to boost
horsepower. A crewmember poured STP in the tank at a pit stop. Blatant,
flat-out cheating
(and Mayfield didn't even win), yet the cheater still works for the
team, and nobody thinks
less of him or of Mayfield. It's a part of the sport: You hope you don't
get caught, but if
you do ... aw, shucks. A few weeks later, Mayfield finally did win; this
time NASCAR fined
the team for a too-low roof-line, which altered aerodynamics. But here,
too, the victory
stood. (Mayfield claimed the roof got bent when he jumped on it
celebrating his win.)
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