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In modern NASCAR, the title boils down to four pilots and a 400-mile shootout in Florida. There's only one race left before the shootout, and three days after Kevin Harvick secured a seat there, he lost his guarantee and could be eliminated from the playoffs, all thanks to a huge penalty. .
Harvick dominated most of the NASCAR Monster Energy Series race rounds at Texas Motor Speedway on Sunday, on the way to victory, and under NASCAR's new point system, objectively complicated, a place in the final round of the playoffs champion of the series.
During a post-race inspection at NASCAR's off-site research and development center, NASCAR felt that the winning Harvick car in Texas was not entirely legal, thus denying Harvick and his team all the benefits of victory, with the exception of the trophy and the mooring. 40 points of pilot and owner.
(It takes a combination of mathematician skills and a photographic memory to replenish all the rules of NASCAR around the title these days, but, in the most basic explanation possible, victory is the The victories allow the drivers to qualify for the playoffs, and that is why Harvick's Texas win makes him lose a guaranteed spot in the final round of a race, where the title returns to the highest championship contender, if you want a full explanation of the rules, here.)
NASCAR announced that the Texas penalty applied to the Harvick spoiler, and that's all the sanctioning body said about its problem:
The team violated section 20.4.12 of the NASCAR rules book, which is specific to spoilers. Spoilers must be used exactly as supplied by the manufacturer and not modified.
The Harvick Stewart-Haas Racing team said they were not appealing the sanction and the team issued a statement following the announcement of the new Wednesday. Here, via ESPN, we focus on us for the sole reason that it's a great way to describe non-compliance with a major rule:
"We work relentlessly on every inch of our race cars to create speed and, unfortunately, NASCAR has determined we ventured into an area that was not covered by his rulebookGreg Zipadelli, vice president of the SHR competition, said Wednesday in a statement. "We will not appeal the sentence. Instead, we will immediately focus on this weekend's event in Phoenix and control our fate on the race track. "
The penalties lead Harvick, who dominated the entire season, moving from a guaranteed spot to the last round of four drivers entered for the title in fourth place out of the remaining eight drivers in the playoffs. Four of the eight riders are eliminated after Sunday's race in Phoenix and Harvick is just three points above the line. NASCAR said in a statement that Harvick could not use Texas' win as a tiebreaker.
Harvick will also have to play the last two races of the season without his team leader, Rodney Childers, and his car manager, Robert Smith, suspended for the next two races. Former team leader Tony Gibson will take over Childers' place, according to ESPN.
Harvick's claim to the championship has been evident throughout the year, but doing so without the person running the stand for him all year (if he had to qualify for the final round at this stage) would be more difficult.
But Harvick was one of the three dominant drivers of the season in the playoffs, with eight absurd victories over the 34 races in the series. The other two players on this list, Kyle Busch and Martin Truex Jr., have seven and four wins, respectively.
According to NASCAR's new rules system, his eighth victory in a dominating race at Sunday's Texas Motor Speedway was the one that allowed him to lose the pressure and place him directly in the title race at Homestead-Miami Speedway. a few weeks. Instead, the punishment inflicted does exactly the opposite. He is now trailing behind Busch, Truex and Joey Logano, who won in the finals two weeks ago at Martinsville Speedway.
But the last and last track before the title race in Miami is Phoenix, where Harvick is disproportionately better than most other players. This means that he is much better off than he could, but when a race decides everything for a person, many unexpected things can happen.
It looks a little like the title of champion, when you think about it.
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