Nascar Blog

Nascar announced the penalty today for Kurt Busch’s little incident on pit road Monday in Dover, 100 driver points and $100,000 dollars and placed on NASCAR probation until Dec. 31, 2007, for violating Section 12-4-A (actions detrimental to stock car racing — reckless driving; endangering a crew member on pit road). Roger Penske was also penalized 100 owner points for the infraction.

Now, I don’t know about you all, but I think that is kind of weak for what happened. All Nascar did right there is tell the drivers you can have one major infraction before you are suspended for any races or anything more severe than just points and money. Sure, the points are big, it dropped him from 11th to tied for 18th with Bobby Labonte, 720 points behind Jeff Gordon, and the hit to the wallet is never good, but I’m sure he can handle it.

Remember in 2002 when Harvick got a little payback in a truck race? They parked him the next week in the cup series, so, how does that compare? I realize Harvick was on probation at the time, but he was put on probation because of something that happened in the Busch series, did a little payback in the truck series and was penalized for it in the cup series.

Jimmy Spencer was suspended for a weekend for punching Kurt Busch after the GFS Marketplace 400 at Michigan International Speedway, something that only could’ve damaged Nascar’s image, although it probably made more people interested. How does that compare? Jimmy Spencer punched Kurt, Kurt endangered a pit crew members life and possibly some others had he lost control of his car while doing it. If Kurt was really that unhappy, punching Stewart should’ve been his reaction, not sliding into his car on pit road.

Nascar continues to disappoint in how they handle the rules this year, and they are only hurting themselves right now, a similar incident on pit road could end up with people being seriously hurt or even killed. Just ask Ricky Rudd how he feels after loosing control of his car and running into a crewman on pit road in 1990, I think it was. That crewman died and is what led to Nascar implementing the pit road speed. I they don’t want a similar incident in the future, they need to make a harder statement than they did.