NASCAR announced a rules change in the Xfinity Series inspection process on Wednesday, which will go into effect starting with the first Playoff race at Bristol on September 15th. A crew member will now be ejected after two pre-race inspection failures, which is different from the three failures it previously took.
But, how did we get here? The NASCAR Xfinity Series has been rife with pre-race inspection failures in recent weeks at both Daytona and Darlington
The beginning of the Wawa 250 at Daytona was very strange as five Xfinity Series cars were forced to serve pass-through penalties right after the green flag was displayed. All three Jordan Anderson Racing cars of Jeb Burton, Parker Retzlaff, and Anderson himself were penalized, along with Justin Allgaier of JR Motorsports and Ryan Seig of Ryan Seig Racing. All five drivers lost their pit stall selections for Darlington, and the drivers of Anderson and Seig were not allowed to set a qualifying time either.
With all of these cars locked into the field, the qualifying penalties were irrelevant. The pass-throughs proved to be pretty irrelevant as well with Allgaier winning the race and all other four drivers finishing in the top-15. Well, at Darlington, some drivers went on to do it again.
While no one had to make a trip down pit road at Darlington, seven Xfinity Series teams failed inspection twice including Sam Mayer, Chad Finchum, Corey Heim, Kaz Grala, Jeb Burton, Kyle Seig, and Parker Retzlaff. All three race teams of JRM, Jordan Anderson, and Ryan Seig Racing were represented amongst this group.
So many cars failed pre-race inspection, that when the #26 car of Grala failed to pass for a third time, NASCAR had to reinspect him the next day because they ran out of time in the day. Now, NASCAR has made the penalties a bit stricter from now on.
It makes sense as well to do it for the Playoffs since those races are going to be tightly inspected as it is, and, it is important to catch teams trying to gain an unfair advantage. It also will probably save some time, which could prevent the issue that Grala had.
Skewcar is curious to see how many failures happen now as a result.
That really is the question Chris.
It will be interesting to see how many more or how many fewer inspection failures there are in the Xfinity Series as a result of this.
