Thursday, June 20, 2019

NASCAR Overreacted by Suspending Sauter

Johnny Sauter was suspended from Saturday's race at Gateway (Google Images)
The sport of NASCAR was built on hard racing. Fierce competition, forged from the melding of man and machine in the crucible of an asphalt oval.

Drivers wheeling their high-octane chariots, battling inches apart for hundreds of miles has come to define what fans expect to see each week. They have also come to expect that, along the way, tempers will be tested and feelings will get hurt.

Take last weekend's M&M's 200 at Iowa Speedway, for example.

Hattori Racing's Austin Hill and ThorSport Racing's Johnny Sauter had a run-in at Texas Motor Speedway the week before Iowa. Hill got loose under Sauter, sending the 2016 series champ's No 13 into the wall. This all seemed harmless enough at the time.

During Saturday's race at Iowa, Sauter gave Hill a (possibly retaliatory) tap going into turn one, moving Hill's No. 16 up the track a bit. Again, this seemed to be a harmless racing incident. But, as the field circled around to turn three, Hill found his way back to Sauter's bumper and sent him tailgate-first into the outside wall. None too pleased, Sauter sped up as the field slowed for the yellow flag, caught up to Hill, and wrecked him back.

Austin Hill (16) puts Johnny Sauter (13) in the wall
(NASCAR.com)
NASCAR parked Sauter for the remainder of the event, which led fans and media alike to speculate what other penalties might await the Wisconsin native, and just how severe would they be?

Should the sanctioning body suspend him? Would he be fined and given a warning? Could this incident end his championship hopes?

Well, we got our answer on Tuesday afternoon when NASCAR announced it would suspend Sauter for this Saturday's Gateway 200 at World Wide Technology Raceway at Gateway. However, he will still be eligible to compete for the 2019 championship.

Something had to be done to send a message to Sauter, and the rest of the field, to deter this from happening again, but suspending him for a week is a major overreaction. NASCAR has been promoting their "boys, have at it" style of officiating for about a decade now and there's no evidence here that what Sauter did on Saturday was anything other than boys having at it, policing themselves.

As mentioned above, when drivers spend months on end racing at close quarters, fighting for stage points and the playoff berth that comes with each checkered flag, tempers will boil over now and again. And that's ok. That's what has made NASCAR the most popular form of motorsport in America — the strong personalities of our drivers and the fireworks that ensue when those personalities clash.

NASCAR needs this type of excitement.

Many fans are drawing comparisons between the Sauter/Hill incident and the Kyle Busch/Ron Hornaday altercation from Texas in 2011 and the final chapter of the Matt Kenseth/Joey Logano feud from Martinsville in 2015. The former altercation resulted in Busch being benched from the rest of the weekend's activities at Texas (both the Xfinity and Cup races) and the latter resulted in Kenseth sitting our the final two races of the season. However, these incidents are vastly different from what took place at Iowa Speedway.

Johnny Sauter (13) gets payback against Austin Hill (16)
(Google Images)
At Texas, Busch (a part-time truck series driver) hooked Hornaday (a series regular in the middle of a championship battle) into the wall, head on, at a much higher rate of speed than Sauter did when he turned Hill around. Likewise, Logano was leading the race at Martinsville, as well as the point standings with three races left in the year. Kenseth's car was wrecked and multiple laps down when he payed Logano back.

The beauty of short tracks is that the competition is much tighter than larger speedways because the cars and trucks travel at a much slower speed. When Sauter turned Hill, their trucks weren't traveling nearly as fast as when Hill turned Sauter moments before. Many fans seemed to want Sauter hung from a cross, bu they'd also be the first ones to complain that the sport and it's drivers are too"vanilla." No one's life was in danger here and neither truck was near track safety workers. This was a simple case of short track tempers flaring up. It happens on a weekly basis at short tracks around the country — a driver who felt he was done wrong, looking for payback.

Both the Busch and Kenseth scenarios had major championship implications, and the Texas truck wreck also saw Hornaday turned at high speed and a very violent angle.

Similarly, in 2008, Michael Waltrip drove Casey Mears down the frontstrech at Richmond Raceway and into the turn one wall after Mears cut him off coming out of turn four. Waltrip was parked for the remainder of the race, but not suspended.

Oh, and let's not forget  Kurt Busch and Tony Stewart at Dover in 2007. After both drivers wrecked, Busch sped down pit road and pulled alongside Stewart's car as it sat in his pit stall, almost striking one of Stewart's crewmen. Busch was parked for the rest of the race, assessed a 100 point penalty, and a $100,000 fine, but despite almost hitting a pit crew member, he was also not suspended.

Part-time ThorSport driver Myatt Snyder will fill in for
Sauter at Gateway this weekend (Google Images)
If NASCAR wanted to send a message to Sauter for this much lesser offense, they could have done so in the same manner.

Yes, a points penalty would be almost meaningless, since the No. 13 team qualified for the playoffs with a win at Dover. But the regular season champion receives a handful of bonus points heading into the playoffs. Taking points from Sauter, coupled with the points his team lost after they were parked at Iowa, would have made that goal much harder to attain. A hefty monetary fine would have also done the trick, as the purses at the truck level aren't nearly as substantial as those in cup.

Truck teams can also have a much harder time attracting and keeping sponsors than their bigger budget cup colleagues. When Sauter was released by GMS Racing during the off-season, ThorSport picked him up just a few weeks before the 2019 season opener at Daytona with sponsorship from Tenda Equine and Pet Care Products. Whether the team and the sponsor support what Sauter did or not, Tenda probably isn't thrilled at the idea of having a replacement driver in their truck this week, instead of the one they've built a program around since February. There's a chance that this penalty could have more of a ripple effect than initially intended.

Not to mention, the fans will also pay a price. Let's say I pull for Johnny Sauter. I've saved my money to spend the day at Gateway with my family; paid for gas, tickets, concessions, and now I won't get to see my favorite driver race due to an incident that happened one week prior. Any Sauter fan in that scenario would be acrimonious.

It is completely unfair to penalize sponsors and fans for something they had nothing to do with.

Speaking of sponsors, Marcus Lemonis, Chairman and CEO of Camping World and Gander Outdoors, really overstepped his bounds by chiming in on Twitter about Sauter's actions:
Lemonis' Camping World and Gander Outdoors brands have sponsored the truck series since Craftsman left as title sponsor after the 2008 season. He should be allowed to offer his opinions on the direction that the series goes. However, for the CEO of a series title sponsor to offer such a terse statement with regard to a competitor in that series is incredibly inappropriate, and to tag media outlets like USA Today and Fox Sports makes it even worse. It also makes you wonder what, if anything, Lemonis said to NASCAR officials privately.

Based on CNBC's "The Profit", Lemonis is fairly opinionated. But when it comes to NASCAR, he should offer his opinions on competition behind closed doors to the sanctioning body, not broadcast them publicly on his personal social media channels.

Being an old school, hard nosed racer, obviously Sauter wants to be with his No. 13 team at Gateway this weekend. But since he can't, he came up with a pretty good alternative.

Once a racer, always a racer:
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