NASCAR threatens stiffer L1 penalties for non-stiff rear windows

NASCAR wants teams to knock it off with whatever they’re doing to the rear windows of their cars, threatening really big penalties if they don’t.

There have been a bunch of talking points through a third of the 2018 NASCAR season, including Kevin Harvick’s dominance, the struggles of Chevrolet teams, and the youth movement not quite arriving yet. Alas, there’s been one more continuing storyline, and it’s one NASCAR wants to nip in the bud right now.

That would be teams failing to follow the rules on the rear windows of cars, a trend that has led every fan to know exactly what an L1 penalty is. It’s becoming a near-weekly occurrence that a car has something amiss with its rear window area, with Kyle Larson becoming the latest victim of a penalty after his ride went to the NASCAR R&D facility for a teardown.

So far, the L1 penalties have led to car chief suspensions, fines and a loss of 20 driver points. But NASCAR can go even further, and it announced this week that it’s going to do just that. Any further rear window violations will lead to a loss of 40 driver points, which is almost like not participating in a race, plus the maximum fines and crew chief suspensions allowed by the rulebook.

It’s upsetting NASCAR that teams are so flagrantly thumbing their noses at the regulations, regardless of how much extra performance using less rigid materials in the rear window area actually provides. More than that, though, the organization’s execs are even more clearly irritated about the optics — that these are violations that can be easily seen on TV and are obvious to even the untrained eye.

NASCAR senior vice president of competition Scott Miller said as much.

"This issue with the rear windows is really bad for all of us. It’s bad for the sport, it’s bad for the broadcasters … it’s bad for the teams, and the reason why this one is so bad is the optics of it. It’s like everybody sees these things. They’re out in the open and it gets all of the negative wheels spinning in directions that we don’t need them spinning in."

That’s a refreshingly straightforward and honest admission. NASCAR is struggling at the gate and on TV. The very last thing it needs is any impression that things aren’t on the up and up. No one in NASCAR wants the fans that do show up or tune in to think that the winning cars and doing it because they played fast and loose with the rules, whether that’s what is actually happening or not.

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So the message being sent is clear, but once race teams are used to doing things one way, it’s sometimes hard for them to stop, at least cold turkey. The guess here is that the rear window hijinks will start fading away, but not before at least one driver feels the force of the bigger hammer NASCAR is about to start swinging.