NASCAR: Post-race penalties updated for Chase

With the playoffs set to begin for all three NASCAR national divisions, series officials announced changes on Wednesday that will stiffen penalties for failing post-race technical inspection.

The most notable aspect of the announcement is that it will allow NASCAR to strip the benefits of a victory away from a team that fails the Laser Inspection Station or is missing lug nuts immediately after the finish of a race.

NASCAR is calling this result an encumbered finish.

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Should a winning car be declared as encumbered, NASCAR will reserve the right to negate the benefits of a victory – such as automatic advancement into the next round of the Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup. The finishing order would stand and no cars will be totally disqualified, but such an infraction would have major playoff implications.

For this to happen, a car must have three missing lug nuts, and not just one, which has been the grounds for penalty for much of the summer. That car would also have to fail the LIS station by a significant amount. NASCAR senior vice president of competition Scott Miller said the decision was born from the desire to maintain fairness, parity and competition.

"With these changes, we wanted to ensure that everything was in check with the LIS and the lug nuts, which are both new rules for this year," Miller said. "We wanted to make sure the door wasn't open for the teams to take advantage of the rules that we've had in place for the first 26 [races].

"We just want to get these things in place to ensure we have a level playing field and that nobody looks to try to take advantage of the current rules."

For NASCAR to take such action, Miller said the infraction would have to be egregious, deliberate and not an accident in the eyes of the sanctioning body. Further, NASCAR vice president and chief racing development officer Steve O'Donnell said the decision was made with the input of owners, drivers and crew chiefs.

"There’s been some comments out there about ‘LIS doesn’t matter, little tweaks to the car don’t matter,’ and in our opinion that couldn’t be any further from the truth," O'Donnell said. "We’re racing in 2016 now with technology and the most sophisticated engineers in the business which is terrific, and so in talking to all those engineers and race teams and the owners, they asked us to really clarify the rules in these two areas, which we feel like we’ve done and we feel we’re on the same page with everyone in the industry."

A single missing lug nut will no longer result in a crew chief suspension. Instead, it will warrant a fine between $10,000-$20,000. Two missing lug nits will warrant a crew chief suspension, a loss of 15 points and a $20,000 fine. Three missing lug nuts will be left up to NASCAR's discretion to see if it should result in an encumbered finish. It will also result in the crew chief getting suspended for three races while receiving a $65,000 fine. Miller said a similar sliding scale would be applied to the LIS station as well.

"[The LIS and lug nuts] were two areas where you were almost [incentivized] to potentially really violate the rules and the consequence didn’t match up with what the rule was. So we wanted to put that in place. We don’t expect to ever have to react in these areas, these are not violations we’ve seen in any of the first 26 races and we don’t expect to ever make this call, but we wanted to put it in place so hopefully we never have to."