Well, it appears NASCAR inspectors make mistakes sometimes, and that seems to be the case regarding Ryan Blaney's No. 12 Menards Ford Mustang.
Sunday evening, Blaney's car was initially disqualified due to an issue with one of the shocks in the front of the car. That led to further evaluation in the days that followed. And, as it turns out, Blaney won't be heading to Homestead in a 53-point hole, as NASCAR has since rescinded the disqualification.
NASCAR Cup Series Managing Director Brad Moran spoke on SiriusXM NASCAR Radio about the reasoning behind removing the DQ, and how NASCAR inspectors seemed to have had an issue with a dampener plate that they use to inspect the race cars.
Cup Series Managing Director Brad Moran on #NASCAR?s decision to rescind Ryan @Blaney?s DQ from yesterday ??
?We realized that the dampener plate at some point was not consistent throughout the entire weekend, which is obviously on us. We had to make it right.? pic.twitter.com/e2i0Bg9fj4
— SiriusXM NASCAR Radio (Ch. 90) (@SiriusXMNASCAR) October 16, 2023
According to Moran, 12 hours or so after the announcement of Blaney's disqualification, they were able to dissect the issue further.
"Twelve hours later or a little more, we got a little bit of information," Moran said. "We brought all the shocks back. We brought the dampener template back. We started going through all of our weekend reports. As we were doing our due diligence and dug into all the details of every part of this penalty that we're talking about, we realized that the dampener plate at some point was not consistent throughout the entire weekend, which is obviously on us. We had to make it right. So, we're making it right, the 12's DQ was rescinded, he'll get all his finishing points and all his stage points, which he deserves for this weekend."
Sirius' Dave Moody then asked about how a dampener template could shift. Which Moran easily answered.
"Yeah, what happened Dave is obviously a lot of shocks go on ... throughout a weekend. They have like a set screw underneath it that keeps everything tight, and if they become even the slightest bit loose during a weekend, they actually can basically come loose, shift a little bit."
So, it seems that what happened in this case was the shocks on Blaney's car were misread following the race, because of a simple issue with the template.
Obviously, NASCAR will need to keep an eye on this because this could easily be a bigger problem in the future.
Blaney can breathe a little easier being only 17 points below the cut line, but he still needs to do a lot of work if he wants to reach the Championship Four at Phoenix.
