The #96 team with driver J.J. Yeley was penalized before the first lap of Saturday night’s Sprint Cup race at Chicagoland Speedway was completed. The team faces further penalties from NASCAR next week. Officials found two water bottles filled with lead weighing approximately 15 pounds each in the car as it was rolled onto pit road prior to the race. The move was done to make the car lighter when the bottles were replaced with water and skirt the mandatory weight minimum. The car was then put back through inspection and given a pass-through penalty on the first lap, putting Yeley a lap down.(ESPN.com)(7-12-2008) UPDATE: After the race, NASCAR met with Hall of Fame racing co-owner Tom Garfinkel and apparently cleared the team of any wrongdoing. “NASCAR had reason to believe we were doing something we shouldn’t have been doing – and we weren’t doing it,” Garfinkel said. “But they had sufficient reason to believe that because of some mistakes in procedure that we made.” Yeley said that each week, his team uses a drink system that requires crew members to put a cold water bag into the car before the race. If they put it in early, it gets too hot and isn’t drinkable. But NASCAR apparently felt something was amiss, and ran the car through inspection both with and without the water bag to address weight concerns. Officials apparently suspected that the #96 team had gone to the old trick of putting lead in the water bag to make extra weight. After the race, Pemberton said the team had “served our penalties. We’re done with them,” he said. “We’re comfortable with that team and we feel like they weren’t trying to pull the wool over our eyes.”(SceneDaily.com)(7-13-2008)
