NASCAR might finally be ready to strip race wins from cheaters

A recent comment by a NASCAR exec on the Kevin Harvick penalty suggests a longtime stance could be open for a change.

Kevin Harvick dominated last week’s race at Texas, sweeping every stage en route to his eighth win of the season and first of the NASCAR Playoffs. For the second time in 2018, though, Harvick was assessed an L1-level penalty that removed all of the benefits of the victory. Despite that, runner-up Ryan Blaney didn’t get the win.

Why not? Put simply, NASCAR simply doesn’t like saying anyone who didn’t cross the start-finish line first has “won” a race. To this point, it’s been willing to dock points, suspend team members and levy fines, which is basically everything possible short of giving a win to someone who didn’t take the checkered flag. But there are signs that position might finally be flexible.

NASCAR Senior Vice President of Competition Scott Miller opened the door just a crack with his recent comments on Harvick’s penalty, or so it would appear. Here’s what Miller said on the topic of the “deterrence model” used to try to keep teams from bending the rules:

"We’re actually looking at a lot of different things in the offseason in regards to the deterrence model/ All the way to … we’ve heard the fans call out for, ‘Why don’t you DQ the offending car?’ That’s actually a topic of discussion, among with many other things."

It’s not like there’s no precedent at all for saying a winning driver didn’t actually win. An example took place just this season in the XFINITY Series, when Justin Haley appeared to win the summer Daytona race only to have NASCAR decide that he violated that track’s special rule about going below the yellow line to make a pass. Kyle Larson was awarded the win, and NASCAR seemed just fine about doing that even though it was a judgment call that was not without controversy.

So in effect, what NASCAR really doesn’t like doing is changing the winner of a race after the fact. If there was a way to immediately perform post-race inspection, it probably would have had Blaney as the winner last weekend. Alas, that’s simply not possible, and the sanctioning body believes that the optics of changing the victor mid-week are bad enough it doesn’t want to go there.

Or at least it hasn’t yet. Miller’s remarks suggest NASCAR will at least consider doing it as soon as next season if it deems that its current punishments aren’t severe enough. One wonders if one more such violation in the season’s final two reasons would be enough to make that happen.