Magnets and Marble Musings

Some more Random Thoughts just keep popping up. This week's Magnet-Gate is still seething and roiling on the NASCAR airwaves! Talk about a storm!

Just because Jack seems to whine a lot, it does not mean that he is wrong!

As the engine dyno was revving in the background at Michigan, Nationwide race-winning owner Jack Roush gave a detailed account of the initial advantages Toyota was given to help the Camrys get up to speed when the manufacturer entered the sport in 2007.

"(NASCAR) gave them a bunch of considerations from a parameter point of view, a dimension point of view that was outside the box in terms of what the Ford engine was," Roush said. "The pushrods are straighter. The camshaft is higher. The pushrods are shorter. The valve train is stiffer. The cooling system works better. All of those things were things that NASCAR uses discretion to approve that obsoleted the Ford engine and we can't make as much power as they do with the parts we have and right now we can't afford to obsolete all the parts that we have.

"So NASCAR, in the interest of fairness and balance in the competition from a potential point of view, after they went to great lengths to be able to check the engines to find out what they were doing, decided that they needed to rein Toyota in and that's what they did. There's crying and complaining about it, but the problem was when they submitted the engine, Toyota had approved things that obsoleted, really, everybody else, and now we've all got the necessity to come back and re-design and obsolete our current engines in order to get competitive.

"The error wasn't ours for getting behind. The error was in what Toyota offered and what NASCAR approved."

Joe Gibbs claims he is taking the hard line:

Team owner Joe Gibbs issued a statement saying the orgnanization would impose its own penalties with "the minimum being suspension for the remainder of the season for those involved, including our two Nationwide Series crew chiefs."

One would think from Joe's statement, that the "Magnet Seven" are all gone from the shop. Someone might want to give Kyle Busch the news!

“They’re still going to be at the shop putting together some race cars and doing all the work that they need to do to keep the stuff up to par. We’re just going to have different guys here at the race track to crew-chief during the race.

This situation has certainly shattered trust in NASCAR and in the workings of the Gibbs organization. The last time news of this magnitude rocked our NASCAR world is when Michael Waltrip was accused in the "Sterno-Gate" disaster last year in Daytona. One has to wonder how this impacts all of the sponsors at JGR. It certainly taints our sport.