Chad Knaus was adamant Friday at Atlanta Motor Speedway that teams are not being given single-sourced supplied parts with correct specifications and Hendrick Motorsports only made the modifications to the hood louvers that resulted in penalties for the team in order to make them fit.
“We made sure our parts fit the hood, and the hood closed and did all the stuff that it needed to do,” said Knaus, Hendrick Motorsports’ vice president of competition (pictured at left, above, with team owner Rick Hendrick).
NASCAR confiscated the hood louvers from all four cars the Friday of Phoenix weekend. Although issues were found beforehand, all four teams were allowed to participate in practice before the louvers were taken.
The teams were penalized earlier this week. In addition to $100,000 fines to all four crew chiefs and suspensions, the Nos. 5, 24, and 48 teams were docked 100 driver points, and all four teams were docked 100 owner points. There was also the loss of 10 playoff points.
“When we started to get parts at the beginning of the 2023 season, we didn’t have the parts we thought we were going to have,” Knaus said. “Through a tremendous amount of back and forth with NASCAR and the OEM and the teams, there’s been conversations about whether we can clean up the parts, not clean up the parts and it’s changed, quite honestly, every couple of weeks. So, it’s been challenging for us to navigate, and we’re going to have to see what happens when we get through the appeal.”
Hendrick Motorsports did not request a deferral of the suspensions, and all four crew chiefs are not at the track this weekend. Without an appeal date, no decision has been made on whether the organization will continue to have Cliff Daniels, Alan Gustafson, Rudy Fugle, and Blake Harris serve those suspensions going forward.
In a statement issued after the penalty, Hendrick Motorsports said the louvers were taken four hours after the inspection without prior communication.
“It’s really confusing,” said Knaus. “We knew that there was some attention to the area when we first went through technical inspection, and that’s what’s really disappointing to me, quite honestly. We had plenty of time to get those parts off the part if we felt like there was something wrong. I can assure you if we knew there was going to be a four-hour lag and we thought there was something wrong, they would have been in a trash can being burned with fuel somewhere where nobody would ever see them. We had no idea we’d been sitting in this position. So, once again, really disappointing we are in the position we’re in right now.”
NASCAR expects cars to be legal when they show up at the racetrack. However, Knaus said for a voluntary inspection, he doesn’t understand the severity of a penalty seen post-race, such as with RFK Racing and Front Row Motorsports last year.
“Again, from my perspective, I think it’s different,” Knaus said. “A voluntary inspection, I don’t understand why you’d be hung and quartered for a voluntary inspection that typically you’d be told, ‘Hey, you need to go work on that,’ or, ‘Hey, we need to discuss what’s going on here.’”