HAMPTON, Ga. — Carl Edwards and Jack Roush returned to the race track Friday after being nailed with one of the highest penalties in NASCAR history following Edwards’s win at Las Vegas Motor Speedway last Sunday.
And while other competitors have decided to “pile-on” the Roush Fenway Racing pair, the team owner and driver continue to say they are not “culpable” for what happened.
When the cover of the oil tank located behind the driver’s seat came loose during the Vegas race, it allowed air to get sucked into the tank which created rear downforce and that made the winning Ford Fusion easier to drive than the competition.
But photos of Edwards doing his celebratory back flip clearly show the lid of the oil box off by about eight to 10 inches.
NASCAR announced on Wednesday the team was being docked 100 driver points, 100 team owner points, $100,000 and the 10 bonus points that would have been applied if Edwards makes the end of the season Chase for the Championship will be stripped.
On top of that, crew chief Bob Osborne is suspended for the next six races.
According to team owner Roush, a bolt broke from the “harmonic vibration” of the engine, car, etc., in the actual race.
“The thing that has not been part of the process has been the definition or the determination, the rate of culpability,” Roush said. “I can prove that I was not culpable here and nobody on the team was culpable, and I think that should make a difference. It would make a difference anyplace else in the world. 
“There would be a difference between first-degree murder and manslaughter based on culpability.  NASCAR doesn’t provide for that difference.”
In the court of public opinion, especially in the Sprint Cup garage area, drivers are vocal in their beliefs that the incident was an intentional act on Roush Fenway’s part.
“I think that it insults my intelligence as a race-car driver when you try and tell me that you accidentally left the oil tank lid off,” said Gillett Evernham Motorsports driver Elliott Sadler. “If you go to any owner, any engineer, any driver, any crew chief and ask them is that an advantage, ‘heck yeah it’s an advantage.’
“I’ve been doing that half of my career. When driving the 21 and 38 car, we pulled the shifter boot off and the oil-tank lid off until NASCAR started to tech it. It’s 100 pounds of (additional) downforce.”
That can make all the difference between a car that wins a race and one that finishes second, according to drivers in the garage area.
“Let me try and put this in perspective for you,” Sadler continued. “We spend three to four million dollars a year going to the wind tunnel trying to change body shapes, trying to do underneath the car, changing crush panels and doing stuff like that all the time — trying to get a gain and trying to get an advantage — when all you have to do is take the oil-tank lid off and you get 100 counts of downforce.”
“It’s fine by me if folks want to get worked up about it,” Edwards said. “Then we’ve got ’em right where we want ’em. We’re just racing hard, something came loose, we didn’t pass inspection and we got penalized. So, it’s really not that big of a deal to me personally, as far as what I’m going to do in the race car, so it’s almost comical to read some of the stuff. 
“That’s the way it is, that’s just human nature.”
Roush continues to plead that there is no culpability in the latest controversy involving his team. He recalled an incident involving driver Greg Biffle when he was in the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series, involving a manifold they later deemed was unapproved.
“So I lined everybody up and we did polygraphs and we verified it was a manifold that they had seen and that we had won races with it and it wasn’t something new and it passed inspection one or more times during that race for things they had looked at,” Roush recalled. “So they had seen it a dozen times. The fact that we could prove that we weren’t culpable, that we hadn’t lied was of no consequence at that time.
“I think really where the rubber meets the road here, is that if NASCAR has decided, and I believe they have and I’m OK with it, that if your car is out of variance to the inspection after a race and regardless of whether you’re culpable or regardless if you did it with intent, it gave you an advantage that they recognize, then there is a penalty.”
Five Nationwide Series teams were penalized at the season-opening race for having loose oil-tank covers, but in Roush’s case, it was actually off the box.