NASCAR Missed The Mark With Matt Kenseth Punishment

Matt Kenseth won in New Hampshire and then failed post-race laser inspection. The result was a penalty from NASCAR that missed the mark completely.

What happens in NASCAR when a winning car on a given weekend fails a race? Well if Matt Kenseth and the No. 20 team is any indication, the result is merely a slap on the wrist.

Now to be fair, NASCAR has rules in place for what can happen when a driver fails post-race laser inspection. Moreover, NASCAR has precedent from earlier this season when Kasey Kahne and Kyle Larson had the same thing happen to them after races. The punishment for them (loss of 15 championship and owner points) was the same for Kenseth.

While consistency is great, in this case it simply wasn’t enough. The penalties levied against Kahne and Larson made sense. The loss of 15 championship points directly impacted their seasons and that loss is still impacting them today as neither of them have been able to win a race. Both drivers are trying to make the Chase based on points at the moment and neither are inside of the Chase bubble heading into Indy.

Coming into the weekend, Kahne is 27 points behind the last spot in the Chase and Larson is 30 points back. Without those penalties that gap would be cut in half for both of those drivers, thus making their lives a little bit easier as the Chase nears.

For Kenseth, his wins already have him in the Chase which means the penalty that he was hit with does nothing. The loss of championship and owner points do not matter. While I don’t necessarily support a different set of punishments for different sets of circumstances, I do believe that the punishment has to actually be a punishment. After all, the point of a punishment is to deter someone from doing something.

In the case of Kenseth and the other drivers who already have wins, there is zero deterrent right now when it comes to failing post-race laser inspection. Sure, the $25,000 fine for the crew chiefs might be considered a deterrent, but that has no impact on the driver.

NASCAR has said in the past that they don’t like to take wins away from drivers because they believe that the fans in attendance deserve to see the outcome of the race and that they race should be decided in front of them. I suppose NASCAR shouldn’t go taking wins away on a whim but I am willing to bet that losing wins might make drivers and teams think twice about crossing the line.

Even if NASCAR didn’t want to take away Kenseth’s win, they still could have done more to get the message across. NASCAR could have taken away the three bonus points that the win earned him in the Chase, that would have directly impacted the team and essentially taken away what the win provided them. NASCAR also could have put Kenseth or his crew chief on probation, thus making another failure a potential suspension. That sort of action also would go a long way in deterring future incidents like this.

The bottom line here is simple; a punishment needs to actually be a punishment.

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The other factor in play is that it simply isn’t a good look for NASCAR to have their race winners failing post-race inspection. What if this happens in Homestead this season and the race winner ends up also being the 2016 NASCAR champion. If a championship is won with a car that fails post-race inspection is NASCAR just going to hand down a 15-point penalty and call it a day?

There were a few different routes that NASCAR could have taken to make a stance this week and they chose to take none of them. If something like this happens again (or in the Chase) the mess that it will cause will 100 percent be the fault of NASCAR. Hopefully that situation doesn’t arise because NASCAR fans do not deserve to have to have to deal with it.