NASCAR responds to 'sandbagging' talk

NASCAR never had any intention of taking cars back to the R&D Center to assess how each manufacturer stacks up.

"We actually found it kind of comical this weekend because we put a little bit of the rumor out there and candidly, it worked," said NASCAR executive vice president and chief racing development officer Steve O'Donnell on Monday morning during his SiriusXM NASCAR Radio appearance. "If anyone would have done some serious research, the wind tunnel that we would use for this is under construction this week, so it would have been impossible."

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"We had a strong suspicion that those guys would kind of tune it down this weekend, so not to post a pretty big number in inspection that maybe balanced back out the competition," Keselowski said. "And potentially that's right because our team hasn't done much differently and those guys are just not as fast as they've been the last few weeks."

Kyle Busch responded by calling Keselowski a (expletive) moron. The Joe Gibbs Racing driver also said they had brought a new engine package to the 2-mile facility. Busch's teammate Denny Hamlin called it fake news on Twitter while Martin Truex Jr. used the eye-rolling emoji. Joe Gibbs also used the word comical when asked about the claims.

Following the conclusion of the Pure Michigan 400, the only cars NASCAR announced to be bringing back to the R&D Center were for the routine in-depth inspection of the winner, second place, and random draw.

"The bottom line was we feel comfortable with how we review the cars," O'Donnell continued. "We have a process in place but we're not going to telegraph when we would do that at a certain racetrack. We always want to make sure that we have the best information possible – particularly on the aerodynamics of the cars. So, we'll continue to do that."