2 Officials - Early Precautionary Casualties of Lawsuit?

By Bruce Simmons

With NASCAR investigating the $225 million lawsuit brought on by Mauricia Grant, they've taken an early set of actions after chatting with everyone involved and sent 2 Nationwide officials on administrative leave until things can be sorted out in the long haul.

I'm not sure if that's a "Look we are taking action" statement by NASCAR or if they actually did find something.  I'd be shocked if that's the case (found something) just by image alone of the sport that I get from the drivers, crews and team owners.  But I need to keep in mind that we don't see or hear anything about the track officials on any sort of personal level during the sport, so we, as outsiders looking in, have no real clue.

We can only hope these allegations just aren't the case.  It would be very damaging if they have any substance what so ever.

Besides the officials put on leave, the investigators noted that they did not uncover a single instance of Grant having complained to any of her supervisors or other NASCAR employees during this distressful time in her employment, though she states she has both e-mails and text messages to support her claims.

What that means is now they need a computer forensic expert to investigate these windows of proof.  I say that because I could send myself an email or fake headers and what, in both email or text messages to make things look a certain way.  (My computer admin past)  A computer forensic investigator will need to verify the emails, and the routes it's taken, and possibly trace it back to it's source to prove it's source validity.  It's a bit of work, but it's doable if all parties have retained their server records of such transactions, which most ISP's do.  It's the same for text messages.  Your cell phones work off of computer systems that are the same in principal.

For now, we wait and see.  Time will tell all.

Meanwhile, Brian France took a pretty strong verbal stand over the weekend in hinting (Or just outright saying) their perspective.

France did say,

"Obviously we found some violations of our policy. I would not jump to conclusions" and further added "I would be very, very cautious in making a leap of faith, even if we take action on any official in this investigation."

One thing he noted was the method of communication of the lawsuit and the lack of real time complaints about the scenario while it was actually, allegedly occurring.

"The most disappointing thing to me is that we found out about these alleged claims after you did in the media via a national lawsuit that seeks a lot of money," France said. "That's very disappointing because if any of those claims turn out to be accurate and have substance, we would have liked to have known about that two years ago so that we could have reacted and done something about it -- because it's inconsistent with anything, from a policy standpoint, about how a work environment for our officials should be."

He further pointed out that it seemed that Grant chose to make it about money, and they will deal with that approach in their defense.


(Source:  Google AP News,  NASCAR News )