The failure came about from a template violation involving what’s known as the “C-Posts” of the car body. The C-Posts are part of the car that connects the roof of the car to the deck lid, or trunk region on a regular street car.
NASCAR Sprint Cup Series director John Darby noted that there was a body modification on the No. 48 Chevy that was outside the inspection tolerances after NASCAR officials noted some oddities to the car body.
The Hendrick Motorsports team has to fix the problem and resubmit the car for additional inspection before being allowed to participate in the first practice session for the Daytona 500, which is this upcoming Saturday.
No one will be evicted from the track for the discovered violations, but penalties could (will?) be forthcoming. And if NASCAR sticks to it’s previous patterns of how they’ve handled modifications to the body of the new car template, the penalties will be stiff and crew chief Chad Knaus will probably be sitting out for a few races after the D500. They’ve been very stern in handling the premise of teams trying to modify the body of the car.
And that could be bad news for the rest of the garage, because every time Jimmie Johnson has had to operate without his crew chief, he’s been rather dangerous on the track as far as performance goes.
Case in point: The No. 48 car failed inspection at the 2006 Daytona Speedweeks and Chad Knaus was evicted from the track. Jimmie Johnson won the Daytona 500 with Darian Grubb and then Johnson went on the win the Championship.
Yep, bad news for the garage indeed.
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In other developments, Tony Stewart and Kurt (I’m having fun) Busch started a small wreck in practice, taking out the two Penske and other cars in the practice session. You have to wonder if Kurt isn’t quietly smirking a bit. (There’s video of the incident on NASCAR.com). I can’t find an embed option.
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[NASCAR]
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