The National Stock Car Racing Appeals Panel decided Wednesday to uphold a massive penalty issued to Richard Childress Racing (RCR), denying an appeal from the team and essentially ending the NASCAR Sprint Cup championship hopes for driver Clint Bowyer. The three-person appeals committee -- consisting of former United States Auto Club (USAC) President John Capels, three-time Daytona 500 winning crew chief Waddell Wilson and former driver Lyn St . James -- found the Childress team did not make a compelling case to overturn the six-race suspension handed down to Bowyer's crew chief Shane Wilson and car chief Chad Haney this week.
And it upheld the 150-point penalty given to Bowyer in the drivers standings and Childress in the owners' standings, the $150,000 fines issued to Wilson and Haney and also the probation term (until Dec. 31) handed to both team members and Bowyer.
• Bowyer Penalized 150 Points• RCR Puts Blame on Wrecker
• Bowyer on Penalty: 'I'm Angry' At the conclusion of a five-hour hearing at the NASCAR Research and Development Center in Concord, N.C., car owner Richard Childress emerged and said, "After so many hours of whatever you want to call this, the ruling stood. I gave them the check (to pay the fines) and an appeal notice to the commissioner. We're very disappointed," according to the Associated Press.
Childress's final appeal will go to the National Stock Car Racing Commission's chief appellate officer, John Middlebrook, a former General Motors executive.
After Bowyer won the Sept. 19 race at New Hampshire, the first race in the Chase to the Sprint Cup championship, NASCAR inspectors determined that the rear end of his No. 33 Cheerio's Chevrolet was too high by a fraction of an inch -- less than the width of a quarter -- and handed out penalties last Wednesday.
Childress brought an accident reconstruction specialist to the hearing, according to the AP, but Dr. Charles Manning of Accident Reconstruction Analysis in Raleigh said the three-member appeals panel was not interested in his presentation.
"After so many hours of whatever you want to call this, the ruling stood. I gave them the check (to pay the fines) and an appeal notice to the commissioner. We're very disappointed."
-- Richard Childress
"They paid no attention to anything I said, which says something about what's going on in there," Manning told the wire service.
The panel's report also pointed to "additional facts which came to light during the hearing." Most significantly, it noted, "both rear hard points, left and right were high and that the rear of the body was offset on the frame.'' The panel did not accept Childress' explanation that this off-measurement was caused when Bowyer's car was pushed into victory lane by a large tow truck, not the result of team members' intentionally skirting the rules.
Further, the panelists agreed the penalities were reasonable for infractions "of this magnitude.''
Bowyer's 150-point penalty dropped him from second to 12th in the Chase standings, but he was allowed to keep the win -- his first victory in two years. He remained in 12th after finishing 25th in the second Chase race at Dover on Sunday and now trails points leader Denny Hamlin by 235 points.
The issues with Bowyer's car first became publicly known last week when the sanctioning body revealed that NASCAR officials had given RCR a part "courtesy call" and part "wake-up call." Inspectors warned the team that Bowyer's No. 33 Chevrolet had been dangerously close to failing inspection following the Sept. 11 regular-season finale at Richmond, Va., where Bowyer had finished sixth.
The legendary team owner Childress immediately responded to NASCAR's findings and insisting there was no cheating and that he would appeal the penalties.
"We feel certain that the cause of the car being out of tolerance by sixty-thousandths of an inch -- less than one-sixteenth of an inch -- happened as a result of the wrecker hitting the rear bumper when it pushed the car into winner's circle,'' Childress said in his statement last week.
At Dover last Friday, Bowyer also angrily denied any wrongdoing by him or his team. But the drama escalated when points leader Hamlin said it was a "crock" that the RCR team didn't get an advantage from the lower rear end, and, he charged, the controversy had been well known in the garage for weeks.
Hamlin's comments led to payback from RCR driver Kevin Harvick, who rammed Hamlin's car several times as practice began last Saturday morning, slightly damaging both cars and leading to a heated exchange between the two drivers in the garage as their teams repaired the cars.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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