Darian Gubbb, crew chief for #11-Denny Hamlin, returned to the track Friday at Chicagoland Speedway after serving a 6 week suspension handed down by NASCAR following the race at Indianapolis Motor Speedway. He met with the media at Chicago and discussed the penalty and plans for next year:
Do you know what happened in Indy that took you away from the race track for six races?
‘The same parts that have been in there, it was actually new parts that week on our car. It was a nut plate that is used as an aircraft fastener and it didn’t have enough torque on it and backed off and came loose. It’s something that we’ve taken out of the cars and have never seen again and never seen before. It’s a 27 cent part that came loose, wasn’t torqued correctly.’
Was it intentional or a gray area?
‘No, not a gray area, not anything intentional. There’s not any real performance gain there. Everybody in the garage uses those same covers and they came loose the week they shouldn’t have.’
Did anything become clearer over the last six weeks? [In regards to plans for next year]:
‘No, we’re still working on a lot of things and concentrating on winning a championship for Joe Gibbs Racing in the FedEx Toyota right now.’(Toyota PR)(9-13-2014)
