NASCAR: Making Suspensions Easy To Monitor And Enforce

NASCAR officials claim that eliminating all contact between a suspended member and their race team would be difficult to enforce. Well, that’s not true, it’s actually very easy.

The recent suspension of crew chief Cole Pearn from the No. 78 Furniture Row Racing team for the Phoenix race has led to much discussion about how punitive a suspension really is these days, with endless forms of technology available to facilitate communication between the race team and anyone who is not physically on the premises during a race weekend. It is hard to imagine that the team didn’t consult with Pearn at all between Friday morning’s first practice session and the end of the race on Sunday. In fact, I’d be disappointed if they hadn’t.

But is this appropriate? Should it be allowed, or should it be regulated? Can it be regulated?

NASCAR’s Executive Vice President and Chief Racing Development Officer Steve O’Donnell said:

"The old policy of you’re suspended, and you can’t be there has probably served its time. As we go forward now, obviously we never want to have to suspend someone, we’re going to have look at the technology.It’s very difficult to police, but you could have almost a no-contact rule. That would be hard to police, but we could put that in place. It is something we’re looking at. We wanted to see how Phoenix went, and we’ll kind of evaluate what teams are doing with all the technologies that they have in place and see what we can and can’t monitor on a fair manner and go from there.A suspension should be that. It shouldn’t allow someone just to crew chief a car from a different location."

It is unrealistic to expect no contact between a team and a suspended member completely. What can and should be regulated is contact during any and all on-track time (practice, qualifying and the race) for any event from which the member has been suspended.

How To Make It Happen

The suspended member is to present themselves at the NASCAR research and development center in Concord, NC no later than 15 minutes before the start of every practice session, qualifying session and race. The member will then be chaperoned (by a NASCAR official) in a room with no means of communication (no mobile phones, no landline phones, no computers, etc.) until the conclusion of that session. The member would be allowed to leave the room and have all technologies available to him/her again at that time. Yes, this is akin to proctored tests (SAT, ACT, etc.) we all took when in school, but that’s okay. Remember, these are NASCAR members who have run afoul of the rules, so a little embarrassment might send a message.

I’m not saying this should resemble solitary confinement. There’s no reason there can’t be a comfortable chair, a television, etc. After all, drivers hate to see someone else driving their car and crew chiefs can’t bear someone else leading their team, so giving them a means to watch practice, qualifying or the race itself and see it happening might make them think twice before pushing the envelope again.

Surely, they would communicate with the team between practice and qualifying and between qualifying and the race. That’s fine… they would only be making suggestions based on any data given to them, and the critical elements of real-time communication and back-and-forth dialogue would be lost.

At no time would suspended members be permitted on the grounds of any race track while suspended. (e.g. They could not make the 10-minute drive from the R&D center and be on the grounds of Charlotte Motor Speedway between sessions if the race was there during a week they were suspended.) This is the same procedure that is in place now.

A little quirky perhaps, and maybe even a little childish. But then again, so is cheating.

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