Cheat To Win!
I had to laugh outright and more than once about all the chest beating and media foaming at the mouth about the illegal fuel-doping of Michael Waltrip’s NAPA Toyota Camry at the Great American Race last month – NASCAR’s Daytona 500. When a mysterious horsepower-increasing “gel-like” substance was found in the intake manifold and fuel system of the lead-Toyota-team NAPA car (twice; probably propylene oxide), the redline spin being put on the escapade rivaled anything inside the Beltway in Washington, D.C. It was even bandied about that the fuel-tainting had been “sabotage” – to give Toyota a black eye at its first-ever Cup race. And monkeys are just about ready to fly out of my butt!
Waltrip even had a Nixonian “Checkers” speech before the TV cameras where he invoked his little girl inquiring about his cheating (sob, sob) – and like Nixon it was a masterful use of TV to appeal directly to the sympathy of the general crowd. I’ll give him this, the guy can work a TV camera. How was that for his manning-up – claiming he didn’t know how such a dastardly act could happen and how embarrassed he was for Toyota and all his sponsors.
Please. You’re killing me, Mikey -- you’re the team owner/driver, and you don’t know what’s going on with the car? A crazed crewmember just lost his mind and became possessed before Qualifying and dumped a fuel-doping oxidizer agent in the fuel tank – without any consideration for dyno-testing and re-jetting the carb for max power – to think nothing of the repercussions to your career and Toyota if you got caught? Even at my most hallucinogenic, I can’t make this stuff up.
If you ever had any doubt that NASCAR at its highest level is about “the show” and not the racing, then whatever tissue-thin shred of credibility the Cup series had as racing competition was blown into so many bits by this fiasco. The fact that they let the NAPA
Toyota team stay at the track and Waltrip race the car and make the main race is the prime evidence. Sure, they fined the team driver and owner more money and points than ever before, but they should have parked him at the very least for such an overt attack on the rules.
Although, I heard in the rumor swirl afterward that some of the top NASCAR mavens wanted to send anything with a hint of NAPA-liveried Toyota Racing on it home, but were over-ruled because it was Toyota’s first Cup event and NAPA has been such a decent sponsor. There was also loose talk that Toyota was going to pull its factory support from the NAPA team right then and there at the first race of the season. Didn’t happen, but might be tough to get them to re-up, don’t you think?
I hope NHRA officials were closely following NASCAR’s handling of the cheating – and planning to act 180-degrees the other way if (when) such an incident happens at a national event with the Big Eye In The Sky TV cameras bearing down. I think one has to be careful for what you wish for in the growing of your sport.
I just hope that as the NHRA tries to bring its racing farther and father away from its knuckle-dragging, street-racing outlaw past image, and into the TV and corporate-controlled shiny-happy-racers present, it doesn’t go so far as NASCAR has to take all the “juice” out of the marrow and makeup of the sport and the people in it.
