 by Julian Spivey
Clint Bowyer’s No. 15 Michael Waltrip Racing Toyota team was handed down a severe P4 penalty on Wednesday, Sept. 23 for having illegal trackbar components on his racecar. Bowyer’s team was found in violation of four different NASCAR rules and the team which qualified for the Chase for the Championship playoffs has been penalized 25 championship points, fined $75,000 and Bowyer’s crew chief Billy W. Scott has been suspended for the next three races. The 25 point penalty drops Bowyer from 15th to 16th (dead last) in the playoff hunt and means he will probably not make the second segment of the NASCAR playoffs in two weeks unless he is able to win one of the next two races at New Hampshire or Dover. Bowyer has not won a race in almost three full seasons. MWR has appealed the penalty, but it’s unlikely it’ll be overturned. This penalty for having been caught cheating virtually ending any shot Bowyer and Michael Waltrip Racing have at winning the 2015 title is the most fitting way for MWR to go out of business. Michael Waltrip announced a few weeks ago that his team would be closing after the 2015 season and with its closure will come to the end the least honorable team in the history of NASCAR. NASCAR teams having to shutter their doors is a bad sign for the sport of NASCAR. It means the sport is economically not at its best and sponsorship money is drying up. This is something that, as a fan, bothers me going into the future and I’d typically feel bad for a team having to close up shop. But, I can’t feel bad for Michael Waltrip and his underachieving, constantly cheating team. Sure, I feel horrible for the 200 or so people who will lose their jobs, that’s a horrible side effect of a team closing. But, I can’t bring myself to feel bad for Waltrip or Bowyer who’s cheating over the years has brought quite a bit of embarrassment to NASCAR. Waltrip came into this sport as a team owner cheating and hasn’t let up in the almost decade since, even after that very first instance almost ended his team before it even really got going. In 2006, Waltrip signed with Toyota to field a full-time, multi-car team for 2007 that included himself as an owner/driver. The team got off to a controversial start in its very first race, the 2007 Daytona 500 when they were found to use illegal additives in their fuel to make the cars go faster and their qualifying spots were disallowed. The team barely survived this start and failed to qualify for multiple races during the season and lost multiple sponsors along the way. By the end of the team’s inaugural season they were embroiled in controversy once again when fellow owner Jack Roush accused the team of stealing sway bars from his team. The team’s biggest cheating controversy came in 2013 in the Richmond race, the final race before the cutoff for the sport’s playoffs. The team had manufactured a way to get the second car of Martin Truex Jr. into the playoffs by having Bowyer spin his car out intentionally to bring out a caution toward the end of the race. The result of Bowyer’s intentional spin essentially kept both Ryan Newman and Jeff Gordon out of the playoffs and allowed Truex to make it. NASCAR incensed by what was essentially fixing the race on the part of MWR, Bowyer and MWR’s then general manager Ty Norris punished the team by disallowing Truex’s playoff spot and inserting both Newman and Gordon into the playoffs in a move that many found controversial, but I thought was only fair. As a result of this race fixing NASCAR suspended Norris indefinitely for his role in the controversy and fined MWR a record $300,000. Even worse for MWR, longtime sponsor NAPA Auto Parts no longer wanted to be associated with a team of the sport’s biggest cheaters and pulled its backing after the season. This race fixing was the most embarrassing moment in the history of NASCAR and frankly NASCAR was actually a little too easy on the team. They should’ve banished the entire team for the remainder of the 2013 season or at the very least removed Bowyer’s cheating team from the playoffs. This is why it’s hard to get upset about Michael Waltrip Racing closing its doors upon the season’s end. MWR and Bowyer, who hopefully will have trouble finding a competitive ride, have been much more of an embarrassment and detriment to NASCAR than they have done any good. MWR has, in fact, only managed to win a measly seven races in their decade as a Sprint Cup Series team, and hasn’t seen a driver in victory lane in over two years. The team will always been known as cheaters and an embarrassment to the sport, and as Bowyer’s penalty this week shows they have never learned their lesson. Michael Waltrip Racing is coming to an end after the checkered flag flies at Homestead-Miami Speedway in November and I say, good riddance.
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