6whine and cheater chief are at it again!
#48 team may face penalty for all-star race violation: NASCAR officials are investigating #48-Jimmie Johnson’s Hendrick Motorsports team for a possible rules violation during the Sprint All-Star Race on Saturday night. A NASCAR official said after the race that a Johnson crewman was being investigated for modifying the side skirt on Johnson’s car during the race. NASCAR implemented new rules prior to this season preventing teams from modifying the side skirts during a race. NASCAR also has new video cameras monitoring pit road, making such rules violations easier to detect. Any possible penalties would be announced next week.(Sporting News)(5-17-2015)
Track News and Announcements
AMS files request for new NASCAR race date: After losing its Labor Day race date and being moved to the second race of the season, Ed Clark, president of Atlanta Motor Speedway, confirmed he has filed a formal request as part of NASCAR’s schedule realignment process to move its race date to a different spot on the schedule. “Ideally, I’d like to be later and we’ve talked about that,” Clark told Kickin’ the Tires. “But I am not somebody who advocates somebody who has a good date giving up their date just to help me. It needs to be good for whatever you do. In an ideal world, I would love to see them go to the West Coast and come back to us. The way it works, they (NASCAR) send all the tracks a letter saying, ‘if you desire to change your date, we need to have a formal request back” so, I did that. I didn’t ask for a specific date. I just asked NASCAR to look at it. Marcus (Smith, general manager) and Bruton (Smith, CEO) pretty much handle all of that but they knew I was doing it.” Clark said from a selfish standpoint he wants his track’s race in a better place on the schedule. Once that happens, he said he hopes they can stick with that date to build momentum but there is no way he would want any track operator to lose a date they like. “I’ve always said that if I could handpick my dates, I would run the last week of April and the last week of September,” Clark said. “They are beautiful weather conditions there. But we are roughly 120 miles from Talladega and you can’t get those two events close together. If it was all done in a vacuum, I would never in a million years advocate taking somebody’s date that they are happy with just to help us. If there was a win-win situation then, yeah, it would make sense.” In the days following the Atlanta race weekend [March 1st], there was speculation and jokes the track was in a downward spiral. Speculation by some was it might lose its lone Sprint Cup Series date because of poor attendance - that caused Clark to bristle. He said Atlanta coming off the schedule has not been discussed. “Anything is a possibility but there has been no talk of it,” Clark said. “And I can’t see NASCAR pulling out of a traditional market, you know, that was one of the markets that built NASCAR and has so many sponsors headquartered there. There’s a bunch.”(Kickin’ the Tires)(5-17-2015)