(Photo by John Harrelson/Getty Images for NASCAR)
The end of the week brings me back to one fact: Mothers always know best.
You know, when they say, “If you can’t take the heat, get out of the kitchen?” Or, “If you’re not going to do something right, then don’t do it at all.”
So maybe those aren’t the exact words, but that’s the message NASCAR delivered to Carl Long when it fined him $200,000 for an engine 0.17 cubic inches too large and suspended him for 12 Sprint Cup Series races following the Sprint All-Star Race’s open qualifier.
The argument from Long and many fans is the same: He didn’t mean any wrongdoing and doesn’t have the funding to pay a fine of this magnitude for a third-party error.
If that’s the case, I wonder why Long is going Cup racing in the first place. It’s common knowledge that the top teams spend upwards of a half-million dollars on their race cars, and if Long can’t scrap together $200,000 as a driver-owner in NASCAR’s top division, he doesn’t belong.
There’s a racing series for every budget, and the NASCAR Cup Series isn’t the place for a team that’s scraping together funding, forced to run a third-party engine that’s underpowered yet oversized, and lacking the proper public relations to handle this type of a situation.
Rather than releasing statements through hired PR personnel, Long has been communicating through his website, Carl-Long.com. The latest posting, submitted after Long’s penalties were upheld in an appeal, said, “I am trying to overcome my emotions versus the facts. After today's hearing, I have lost all faith in the way the appeal system works.”
After seeing Long’s statements, the only thing I’m sure of is that he would be better off racing in the ARCA Series, USAR Pro Cup or one of NASCAR’s smaller touring divisions.
Not only would long be closer to the competition in a smaller series, but he’d be in the same ballpark as far as resources. It’s doubtful that anyone in any of those alternate series has ever seen a penalty equal to what Long is serving now in the Cup Series, being that everything but the racing itself happens on a smaller scale.
That isn’t to say that other small teams belong on this same path. I’m a huge fan of the way Tommy Baldwin and Jeremy Mayfield put together startup teams in this economy. They knew there were cheaper ways to do things while making an honest effort.
Although Tommy Baldwin Racing and Mayfield’s team haven’t been shining lately, it worked out of the box to get them going in Daytona. That’s more than Long, who missed the Daytona 500 after finishing seventh in the first of two Gatorade Duels held the Thursday before the race.
So, for Long to say that NASCAR put him out of business with record fines and a points penalty in a race that didn‘t pay points to begin with, he may be right. Whether or not his team had any business in Cup to begin with is highly debatable.
Long missed the Daytona 500, failed to qualify Dennis Setzer at Martinsville, then got burned by a third-party engine maker and fluke inspection at the All-Star Race. It’s been a rough season for a poor owner-driver who now owes NASCAR a large pile of money and an extended stay on the Sprint Cup Series sideline.
How Long handles the impending penalties will be the true test of his staying power at NASCAR’s highest level when the heat gets turned up in the kitchen.
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