The NASCAR Cup Series champion will be crowned Sunday, even if there are penalties
By Nick Tylwalk
The nightmare scenario of having to find out three days after the race who is really the champ is thankfully not in play at Homestead.
Just a few weeks ago, the NASCAR Playoffs were shaken up when Kevin Harvick won at Texas, then had the benefits of that victory stripped away after a post-race inspection penalty the following Wednesday. There’s no guarantee that the winner of the NASCAR Cup Series championship race at Homestead won’t suffer a similar fate, but one thing is for sure: If he does, it will happen within hours, not days.
As explained on NASCAR.com, the Cup Series championship race in Miami will have its own post-race inspection procedure, one that inspects cars within a 150-minute window after the race is finished (the same will be true for the other two series). Despite the expedited time frame, the inspections will be “exactly what is done during teardown at the NASCAR Research & Development Center” during the rest of the season.
That’s crucial because it’s not like it’s not possible the winning driver could be hit with a violation. It happened multiple times in 2018, with L1-level penalties being assessed to Harvick (twice, in fact) after race wins and to Chase Elliott, Daniel Suarez, Clint Bowyer and Kyle Larson in non-winning situations. Just by simple math alone, there’s about a 20 percent chance of someone failing post-race inspection on Sunday.
But while NASCAR naming a champion and then having to say, “Oops, nope, they sort of cheated, it’s this driver instead” on Sunday night would be a bit of a black eye, it would be so much worse if the wait for that to happen lasted into the following week. The quicker post-race inspection is desperately needed when a title is on the line.
(And also raises the question about why it can’t be done that quickly all the time, but that’s a logistical query for another time.)
Next. Kurt Busch had a beer with Denny Hamlin after their Phoenix run-in. dark
So rest assured that by the time Sunday night is over, the NASCAR Cup Series champion won’t necessarily be the member of the Championship 4 who posts the best finish, but we will know who it is without having to sleep on it. And thank goodness for that.