Gibbs penalties don't quite send message teams need to hear

Team owner Joe Gibbs extended the penalties NASCAR handed his team's crew members through the rest of the 2008 season. Nick Laham/Getty Images

No question about it, NASCAR's penalties against Joe Gibbs Racing Wednesday were swift and sudden, some of the harshest ever handed down by the sport.

And to think, they still got off easy.

Five days after Gibbs' two Nationwide cars (No. 18 and No. 20) were caught with magnets under the accelerator pedals -- a move that cut the amount of horsepower produced during post-race inspection -- seven crew members from both cars were given indefinite suspensions by the sport. Among those barred from the track were star crew chiefs Dave Rogers (No. 20) and Jason Ratcliff (No. 18), car chiefs from both teams and two of the organization's top engine tuners. Drivers Tony Stewart and Joey Logano were penalized 150 driver points -- a record high for the series this season -- and the organization lost 150 owner points for both its cars. To top it all off, Gibbs was fined $200,000.

JGR owner Joe Gibbs immediately stepped up to the plate and went one step further, announcing all crew members named would be suspended from the track the rest of the season -- regardless of NASCAR's ruling. In a public apology, he stated, "We take full responsibility and accept the penalties NASCAR has levied against us today. In 17 years we have never had any representative of Joe Gibbs Racing knowingly act outside of NASCAR's rules, and that is something we consider essential to how we operate on a daily basis. What we have determined is that these individuals involved used extremely poor judgment in attempting to alter the results of NASCAR's dyno test."

It's rare when a team gets penalized you see an overt admission of guilt, which goes to show you the evidence officials had against the Gibbs organization. This was no small matter; if gone undetected, changing the results during a NASCAR test among manufacturers could have permanently altered the rules for the remainder of the season. Remember, just one month ago rules were put in place to handicap Toyota's horsepower after tests showed their engines were far superior to everyone else's. With their ingenuity handicapped by NASCAR's rule book, these team members chose to focus on altering test results so the sport wouldn't level the playing field a second time.

It shows you what a dangerous game NASCAR's playing in the name of parity. Innovations by teams and manufacturers to squeeze as little as an extra tenth of a second out of their times cost millions of dollars, and people aren't afraid to put their careers on the line to protect the smallest of advantages. That puts the sport in a tough spot. If it steps off and deregulates things like engine power, these cars are so technology-based Toyota could come in and dominate based on pure financial investment. But if the sport continues to regulate in the name of parity ... organizations will do whatever it takes to protect what they've developed, even if it means crossing the line. To solve that problem, you need to come up with penalties that inject such fear in potential criminals they feel the risk isn't worth the reward.

With that in mind, were the consequences rendered -- even with the involvement of the accused -- enough to stop this from happening again? It's far from a guarantee. While the fines and point penalties are enormous, they do little to hurt Gibbs in the big picture of the Nationwide Series. Both Stewart and Logano aren't running for the title in that division, and even with the penalty the team's No. 20 car sits 168 points ahead of everyone else in the race for the owner's championship. And while the suspensions of key crew members are important, they're not necessarily performance-altering. Remember, you can keep a guy from the race track, but you can't keep him from the race shop -- and that's where true success or failure is created these days. Multiple examples exist of teams losing their top players at the track and actually staying level or improving -- right now, Martin Truex Jr. has shown little to no ill effects in the Cup Series despite missing his car chief and crew chief for over four weeks.

So, if all that wasn't enough, what could NASCAR have done? Simple: bar the cars from competition for a set period of time. By keeping the cars from competing in the race, the sport could have sent a clear message this type of behavior will not be tolerated and hit the organization where it hurts the most: sponsorship. It's easy enough for an multi-million dollar organization like Gibbs to dish out $200,000, but it's a whole lot harder for those people to sit down with CEOs and explain to them why their car won't be racing for five or six weeks at a time -- along with the poor reputation that comes with it.

Let's face it: the more money that gets poured into the sport and the more regulations get put into place, the more cheating is going to become a fact of life. Over in the Sprint Cup Series, Roush Fenway Racing and Dale Earnhardt, Inc. are among those who have already been hit with massive rule violations this season. Gibbs' problems were tied to the Nationwide Series, but it's not hard to imagine this happening over in the Cup garage. Just last week, there was a chassis dynamometer test after Michigan, and it makes you wonder whether the top organizations were involved in a little trickery of their own.

The way things have gone this year, it wouldn't be hard to imagine. And after this latest round of penalties didn't go far enough, we're likely to see something like this happen again.