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crazy Woman Driver of three paper clips. Nevertheless, NASCAR slapped Joe Gibbs Racing even harder than Penske. They docked 50 driver points from Kenseth and 50 owner points from Gibbs; fined crew chief Jason Ratcliff $200,000 and suspended him for six races; and even suspended Gibbs' car owner license. Gibbs Racing appealed on the grounds that Toyota built the part and included it in the engine before shipping the engine across country to the team. NASCAR acquiesced a little bit, reducing the points deduction from 50 down to 12, cutting Ratcliff's suspension from six races down to one, and restoring Gibbs' license. CHANGING LANES To me, there's only one way to interpret this: NASCAR's grand poobahs are doing their best to make sure the playing field is absolutely as level as possible. To accomplish this, they are crushing the creativity that the best crew chiefs long have used to use to explore – and, sometimes, exploit – the gray area in the rule book. But with every new iteration of the Sprint Cup car, the rules have gotten more precise and that gray area has gotten smaller. And with the debut of the brand-new Generation-6 car this season, it seems like that gray area is all but gone. So is this zero-tolerance policy 12 0713 crazy woman driver cl.indd 2 good or bad? I think it depends on your attitude toward Sprint Cup racing. Personally, I prefer a little more creativity in my car-building, because success on the track is then more of a total team effort. If the cars are all built to exactly the same specifications, then the only real variables are the drivers and luck. But I understand NASCAR's point here. Sprint Cup racing has never been about technological advances – heck, it took decades to switch from old-fashioned carburetors over to fuel injection – and that seems fine with the fans. Instead, NASCAR is all about the guys behind the wheel, and the best of them have become among the most well-paid and wellknown athletes in all of sports. My biggest problem with NASCAR's new approach is that the Sprint Cup bosses seem to be treating every offense the same way when, in fact, they are not the same at all. The Penske teams got whacked because the bolts in question allowed the rear suspensions to move when the rules clearly state that rear ends aren't supposed to move. If I'm the judge, I'd say that those crew chiefs purposely used the bolts in an attempt to gain an advantage and, in my opinion, figured they weren't likely to get caught. The chatter in the garages, in fact, is that another team tipped NASCAR off or that Penske likely would have gotten away with it. JUly 2013 // WWW.CHANGINGLANESDIGITAL.COM 6/4/13 3:30 PM