If you ain't cheatin', you ain't tryin'.
-- Someone in NASCAR, pretty much forever
Oh, those good old boys. They knew what was what, alright.
They knew the secret to Grease Monkey America's heart was some rough drivin' here and a shenanigan or two there, and the hero-vs.-villain morality play that arose from that. America loves morality plays, especially in its sports. We love to root against some cheatin', connivin' lowlife as much we love rooting for the humble, hardworking heart-o'-gold hero, truth be told. And NASCAR in its dirt-under-the-fingernails days gave us plenty of both.
It's partly why it became such a head-spinning phenomenon in the late '90s, a period of explosive growth it's struggled to match since.
It's also why IndyCar, which NASCAR left choking on its exhaust during that same period, should not be dismayed by the cheating scandal that's been the talk of the sport all weekend at Barber Motorsports Park in Alabama.
"Cheating" may be too harsh a word for what Team Penske pulled last month in St. Petersburg, but then again maybe it isn't. What happened was, the Penske forces either kinda-sorta forgot to disable the push-to-pass feature on their cars at St. Pete (their story), or they kinda-sorta left it enabled on purpose after a prior testing session (some other peoples' story).
In any case, IndyCar stripped Josef Newgarden of his win and Scott McLaughlin of his third-place finish at St. Pete, and the Penske folks accepted the penalty without protest, saying, yeah, the P2P was left on when it shouldn't have been but that it was an honest mistake. In other words, this wasn't old Smokey Yunick putting a perfect 7/8th scale stock car out there like he did once in NASCAR, or sneaking an extra, hidden fuel tank into a car the way he and more than a few others tried to do on occasion.
"Yeah, that wasn't us!" exclaimed Penske team president Tim Cindric, or words to that effect. "This was just an oversight on our part! An honest mistake!"
"Yeah, surrre," some other people replied, and the debate was on.
Honest mistake, or out-and-out cheatin'? Inadvertent boo-boo, or sneaky underhanded attempt to gain an advantage?
And either way, why is that a bad thing, exactly?
The Blob's contention is it's not, because at least it's got people talking about IndyCar. Nothing is more sleep-inducing than the All-American image IndyCar strives to project, and that especially applies to Team Penske and Newgarden, who's so wholesome and Boy Scout-y milk-and-cookies seem bawdy by comparison. Now it's possible he's just a damn cheater, and Team Penske -- which has loomed over the sport like a colossus for half a century -- is his enabler?
So, yeah, let 'em face some uncomfortable questions this weekend, thank the heavens for it. IndyCar, after all, was never more interesting than when A.J. Foyt either was or wasn't monkeying with the popoff valves on those old turbocharged engines, or when Bobby Unser either did or didn't speed on pit road to steal the win from Mario Andretti in the '82 Indianapolis 500, or when Scott Goodyear either did or didn't pass the pace car in the '95 500.
Shoo. Some folks will go to their graves claiming Paul Tracy got robbed of the W in 2002, which either was or wasn't Helio Castroneves' second win.
The biggest name in IndyCar getting docked for cheating or something like it?
Now there's some good fortune. Whether it looks like it or not.
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