Full Throttle

Bob Margolis come on down, you’re featured on Full Throttle’s NASCAR Stupid Post of the Day! (Said with my best Johnny Olson, The Price is Right voice - ed)

Yahoo Sports head yahoo started Monday’s Daily Dose column thusly:

Well, another Toyota team got caught.

And this time it was the top Toyota team. It was only a matter of time before another Toyota team was found to be cheating.

Toyota teams have had a history of “bending the rules” since the manufacturer entered Sprint Cup competition.

Gee Bob, is your anti-Toyota bias a struggle to keep under wraps this week? Or am I wrong and it’s an anti-Gibbs bias showing through.

Both are possible but I consider the first more plausible considering Bob conflates Toyota’s 1 and 2/3rds seasons in Sprint Cup as some sort of statistical Holy Grail and cite three, count’em three instances of Toyota being caught doing something outside the bounds of NASCAR’s mythical rulebook.

Moreover, Margolis goes on to declare Toyota boss Lee White has to have known about the Gibbs magnets and also, apparently, Michael Waltrip’s jet fuel at last years 500 and the theft of a Roush sway bar this year.

Margolis “wonder[s] if this incident [Gibbs magnets] was just a brainstorm by a few guys at in the JGR engine shop or if it goes a bit higher. Given Toyota’s past record in NASCAR, you have to believe it’s a bit of both.”

Here we go with that record again. That 1 and 2/3rds of a season record. A record, during which time I’m obliged to point out, when no less than 8 Dodge teams, 8 Chevy teams and 4 Ford teams have been penalized for similar infractions from the start of the 2007 season that could be construed as “cheating” .

Hell even if Margolis had Toyota’s history correct - he missed Mayfield’s #36 Toy that was slapped for having an illegally weighted water bottle at Fontana in 2007 - they rank at the bottom on a list of marquees caught cheating, both Toyota and Ford trail with four penalties on the books.

Dodge and Chevy are tied, infamously, with 8 penalties handed out by NASCAR since the beginning of 2007. And the disparity is even greater when totaling up the NNS penalties from last year and this.

Added to the absurdity, Margolis implys both Joe Gibbs, and or J.D. Gibbs, and Toyota’s Lee White are also under suspicion as being complacent in the cheating but he offers nothing as proof. Well, he offers hot air, but little else. (Oh, what a shock! An ink-stained wretch full of hot air!)

Frankly I don’t know what Margolis’ problem is, whether it’s Toyota bias, something he has against Gibbs, or he’s just playing to the crowd - if “crowd” means the nutjobs his post attracted to the comment thread - it’s beyond the pale to assert the entire Toyota organization is “dirty” from top to bottom without offering some verifiable proof.

But he offered nothing, and for that he’s been singled out for FT’s Stupid Post of the Day, denied the chance to spin the Big Wheel and gets to collect nice parting gifts as he exits the door. (If “parting gifts” means getting a written, vice actual, swift kick in the ass.)