Chad Knaus Gets Push-Drafted Out Of The Garage

Daytona's first round of racing has wrapped up and two big stories promptly developed.

First, Ray Evernham's former car chief Chad Knaus lived up to his former boss' comment after being fined heavily for a cheating infraction around 1995: "I guess I'm this week's ass." Chad Knaus, though, got pushed clean out of the garage area, reminiscent of Talladega last October when Kevin Harvick's crew chief was likewise escorted out for cheating. The cause of this brouhaha was some illegal offset put into the right rear of Jimmie Johnson's #48 Chevrolet, offset that got noticed by smoke coming off Johnson's wheel wells during his 500 qualifying run.

In the same post-qualifying inspection, Terry Labonte, driving Roger Staubach and Troy Aikman's #96 Chevrolet, got his time disallowed for running a carburator with illegal modifications. Now we've seen things like this before - Staubach and Aikman's team is a Joe Gibbs Racing satellite effort with its engines from JGR's engine shop; years ago (I think it was 1997 at Talladega) Billy Standridge qualified at Talladega with a Tony Santanacola engine at a time when Santanacola was Cale Yarborough's head engine builder; the Santanacola engine run by Standridge was found to be less-than-legal.

The deal here in 2006 sounds like Hall Of Fame Racing (the Staubach-Aikman #96) became the fall guy for some experimentation by JGR's engine shop.

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The other story was the Daytona Shootout and JGR's double-header. First there was rookie Denny Hamlin winning the race, the first rookie to ever do so (the closest analogy was Jeff Gordon's 1994 win in the Busch Clash as a sophmore). The second part of the double-header was Tony Stewart's post-race commentary about how "dangerous" push-drafting is and how "NASCAR has to do something about it." Incredibily, Jim Hunter of NASCAR acknowledged Stewart's comments and talked vaguely about push-drafting being a problem.

Why does NASCAR have to do anything here? Push-drafting dates back to the 1960s and '70s - the old Car & Track television series filmed the 1974 Daytona 500 and that footage shows plenty of push-drafting; it also filmed circa-1972 NASCAR at Michigan and that footage shows Richard Petty punting Bobby Allison, Bobby Isaac, and others through the trioval area to pass other cars.

The wrecks that happened in the Shootout had nothing to do with push-drafting - even Kyle Busch's tag on Mark Martin wasn't about push-drafting, that was trying to knock Martin out of the way. For Stewart and anyone else - Jeff Gordon comes to mind immediately - to gripe about push-drafting is more hypocrisy from race drivers.

This was about the kind of terrific racing that has been in such short supply in NASCAR circles the last 20-plus years. There was the usual caveat that the 500 will be different, but we should hope it isn't different, as the sport can use a Daytona 500 as ferocious as last October at Talladega.