Filed under: Clint Bowyer, Chase for the Sprint Cup, Richard Childress Racing, NASCAR
How could they have been so stupid?That's the $64 million question as to why a NASCAR championship team would try to cheat or modify its car in the opening round of the Chase for the Sprint Cup playoffs after NASCAR had already warned it was perilously close to being illegal only a week earlier.
That team's owner and namesake, Richard Childress, has a simple answer: last week's winning No. 33 Cheerio's Chevrolet driven by Clint Bowyer was absolutely legal.
The legendary team owner says there was no cheating and he will appeal a slew of penalties and fines issued Wednesday, including a six-race suspension of the team's crew chief, Shane Wilson, and car chief, Chad Haney, and the equally painful 150-point penalty Bowyer has been issued in the championship standings.
The points penalty dropped Bowyer from second place in the standings to 12th among the 12-driver championship field with the second race in the 10-race Chase for the Sprint Cup playoffs set for Sunday in Dover, Del.
Childress insisted that Bowyer's car didn't fail the height requirements because of crafty work by the team trying to gain an edge on the competition. He has a far less sinister explanation.
"We feel certain that the cause of the car being out of tolerance by sixty-thousandths of an inch -- less than one-sixteenth of an inch -- happened as a result of the wrecker hitting the rear bumper when it pushed the car into winner's circle,'' Childress said in a statement released Wednesday.
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