No room for selective enforcement

Saturday night, just before the LifeLock.com 400 at Chicagoland Speedway, a NASCAR official stood in the way of J.J. Yeley's No. 96 Toyota preventing him from joining the field for the start of the race.

As the field was taking its pace laps, Yeley was allowed to join the back of the pack. But just after the green, the team was ordered to bring the car in for a stop-and-go penalty. Then, on its first pit stop, the team got a speeding penalty.

The word from NASCAR, as the race was starting, was that Yeley's team had made a suspicious switch of the container holding Yeley's drinking water. One of the old stock-car tricks in the books is to put lead inside a water container to be used when the car is going through inspection. Once the car is weighed and cleared, the real water bottle is put in and the car is a little bit lighter.

NASCAR apparently thought Yeley's team was up to something like that. So NASCAR showed the Hall of Fame team who was boss. It applied the kind of "justice" that some people still think is colorful, if a bit heavy-handed.

The problem was, Yeley's team wasn't "up" to much of anything. Somebody changed the water container after inspection because they wanted the water Yeley would drink to actually be cold -- or at least cool -- during the race.

Now if the NASCAR procedure is for an official to be there for any such switch so he or she can be sure there's no hanky-panky, and if the team made the switch without an official present, the team was wrong. Procedures should be followed. But procedures also should have penalties associated with them, and those penalties should be such that it's not about NASCAR officials acting on some punitive whim.

At Infineon, another race team changed an engine after a practice and then told NASCAR it had done so. Part of the single-engine per event rule is that the team tells NASCAR first, then NASCAR looks to make sure the engine being changed actually has a problem and isn't just one the team doesn't like having in its car.

Again, if the team violated the procedure it deserves to be sanctioned for that. Maybe it loses practice time at the next race. Or maybe it's penalized a lap or two at the start of the race. Whatever, but the penalty should be set forth in simple terms.

What actually happened, though, was that NASCAR officials were angered by that team's temerity. So after the race at Infineon, that team was the "random" team selected for postrace inspection. (After each race, the top five plus one team chosen at "random" go through postrace teardown.)

After the next race at Loudon, oddly, the same team was the postrace "random" pick. And again, after the race at Daytona, the same team got picked again by "random."

NASCAR showed them, right?

Well yeah, but is that right and is that fair? Is that the way things should be officiated? I don't think so.

There's a scene in "Days of Thunder" where the man playing the Bill France character tells rival car owners about an inspection process on shipping docks where produce is allowed to rot before inspectors who would clear it ever even look at it. The stuff never failed inspection, it was just ruined before anybody ever touched it. The owners in the movie were being warned that's the kind of treatment they might get if they didn't toe the line.

It's common for a team that somehow feels it has somehow crossed NASCAR to fear that it's going to get a handful of speeding penalties in a subsequent race. That's not officiating, that intimidating. And it has no room in a truly professional sport.