NASCAR indicates it was behind a rumor that resulted in a now infamous "sandbagging" charge


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You have got to be kidding me.

Over the weekend, before Michigan, Brad Keselowski caused an uproar when he accused Toyota cars of sandbagging because of fear of NASCAR inspections. Several Toyota drivers mocked him on social media, and Kyle Busch called Kes a "moron."

RELATED: A angry Toyota driver has some choice words for Kes.

Now, NASCAR, in some very odd comments, seems to acknowledge that it planted the rumor to see if anyone would pick it up.

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On Sirus XM radio, Steve O'Donnell, NASCAR's executive vice president and chief racing development officer said this:

"We put a little bit of the rumor out there and, candidly, it worked. If anyone would have done some serious research, the wind tunnel we would have used for this is under construction this week so it would have been impossible. I think most of the rumors in the garage was that NASCAR was going to take the cars and so you saw some articles out there about who may be sandbagging, who may not be. I think it's crazy. But the bottom line was, we feel  comfortable in how we review each of the cars and we've got a process in place, but we're not gonna telegraph when we would do that.

In other words, NASCAR may have punked Kes.

Here are the comments that started the whole kerfuffle.

About this time every year NASCAR takes all the cars to kind of check to make sure that the competitive balance is where they want it to be, and I think we've seen the last two or three weeks that the Toyota cars are pretty dominant. We had a strong suspicion that those guys would kind of tune it down this weekend, so not to post a pretty big number in inspection that maybe balanced back out the competition, and potentially that's right because our team hasn't done much differently and those guys are just not as fast as they've been the last few weeks.

 

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