Front Row Motorsports owner Bob Jenkins says his team did break the rules but did not intentionally cheat by using valve stem caps that had microscopic holes in them on the No. 38 Travis Kvapil car Sunday at Pocono Raceway.
Travis Kvapil will address the $100000 penalty tonight on NASCAR Race Hub
Kvapil was docked 150 points and the team lost 150 points in the owner standings in addition to a $100,000 fine and 12-week suspensions to crew chief Steve Lane, car chief Richard Bourgeois and tire specialist Michael Harrold.
While bleeding air out of the tires during a run could help at a track such as Martinsville, it wouldn’t help on the rear of a car at Pocono, Jenkins said.
“If we really do want to maintain the integrity of the sport, NASCAR is going to have to police these type of things,” Jenkins said Wednesday afternoon. “I feel like in our case, it’s a series of unfortunate events.
“I hate that it happened. … I stand by the innocence of our people involved. I don’t think anybody on my team intended to cheat. If they did, it was Keystone Cops because all they really [would do] was hurt the performance of our race car.”
NASCAR confiscated Kvapil’s tires after his rear tires were flat following the 100-minute rain delay that preceded the race. NASCAR found the caps on the rear tires had microscopic holes in them. NASCAR then inspected all the other tires in the FRM stable and found one other bleeder cap on a right front tire and one on the inner liner of one of the rear tires.
“You certainly wouldn’t do it on your two rear tires and nobody would do it on the inner liner,” Jenkins said. “I can’t speak for NASCAR but I think they were relatively convinced there was no malice in this, there really was no intent to cheat.
“However the point that is not lost in all this is at the end of the day is there were illegal valve caps on our cars.”
FRM General Manager Jerry Freeze said they don’t know where the caps came from.
“We’d be the most inept crooks to do this with rain coming down and the car sitting under a car cover for an hour-and-a-half,” Freeze said. “Certainly there was no intent to do it. Somehow, these valve caps got in our system.”
The team will appeal all the penalties and has asked NASCAR to defer the penalties until after the appeal is decided. That would, at least for one week, keep the No. 38 team inside the top 35 in points. NASCAR likely will defer the suspensions and the fine but not the points, according to a NASCAR spokesman, meaning Kvapil will have to make the Michigan race on speed.
Jenkins said he won’t ask for there to be no penalties in his appeal but believes the penalties are too harsh.
“I can’t go to an appeal process and say a fairy came down and put these things on my car because every owner and every crew chief knows they’re responsible for every part on their car when they’re at the track,” Jenkins said.
“Even though it is something that happened outside of our control, we’re still responsible for it. … I hate it for my checkbook, I hate it for our team, but it happened and there has to be some level of responsibility for it. I just don’t know that 150 points and $100,000 is the appropriate level.”
That is a big fine for a team such as Front Row Motorsports, which expanded from one full-time and one part-time car to three full-time cars in 2010. While driver Kevin Conway has sponsorship from Extenze, the other two cars have sponsorship from Long John Silver’s and Taco Bell. Jenkins owns more than a hundred restaurants that are part of those chains.
Jenkins said the team will not start-and-park and he is committed to running three full-time teams.
“We’re all part of a small racing organization here,” Freeze said. “The fine as it exists is still going to hurt us quite a bit. … Everybody just wants to rally. I’ve had more volunteers that want to be car chiefs and crew chiefs in the shop than I’ve ever had.”
The big question in the shop is how the caps got on the car. Jenkins has bought much of his equipment from organizations that had recently closed. He said they also get caps from Goodyear, Champion Tire and other teams.
“A valve cap is something that you find laying on the ground, you keep them in a jug,” Jenkins said. “Shame on us that we didn’t have the quality control in place to even be able to trace this lot of product.”
The team has tried to figure out where the caps came from but has had no luck. Jenkins stressed that it was not the valve stems but the caps that violated NASCAR rules.
“I don’t think there’s a conspiracy theory out there that someone else did it,” Jenkins said. “Somehow we came in possession of these unknowingly, we used them unknowingly but they were illegal parts, they were on the car and there’s a price to pay for that.”
The biggest price might not be in the penalties, Jenkins said.
“The biggest concern I have – more than the money, more than the points, more than anything else – is the integrity of our race team,” Jenkins said. “For the entire period of time we’ve been in this sport, we’ve operated in relative obscurity and the reason that is is because we don’t cheat and we don’t do things to make waves.
“We try to put the best product out there each week that we can.”
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