Why Is Jack Roush Complaining Now?

March 30, 2008

By Kim Roberson

Kim Roberson

Jack Roush has a beef. Someone stole one of his parts. That someone worked for a Toyota team. That really pissed Jack off. The part was returned. All seemed to fade into the darkness of anonymity.

Until this week.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I don’t condone theft in any form. When I took a polygraph a decade ago, I was asked if I had stolen anything. I said no. the questioner asked if I had ever taken a pencil or something from a co-workers desk and not returned it. I said I had. He said that was theft. I had a hard time dealing with the fact I was thus considered a thief.

This isn’t a pencil or a piece of paper from a co-workers desk. This was a sway bar. And it didn’t come from a co-workers desk; it came from another team's supply box.

Do I believe the person who pilfered said sway bar should be punished? You bet. As a matter of fact, if he is still working for Michael Waltrip Racing, then more than that person needs to be fired. The absolute last thing that MWR needed was to have another dark cloud cast across their doorway, and regardless of who took the part, and who knew about it, this has done just that. Now, instead of focusing on the fact all three of his cars are in the top 35, Michael has spent the weekend answering more questions about the integrity of his organization, and the people who work for it.

All of that said, I am still left thinking: Why now?

If there is a race fan out there that is not aware of Jack Roush’s deep seated hatred (and I do mean hatred) of Toyota, then they have been locked in a closet for the last few years. Everyone knows the story of how Jack found that an employee of his was driving a Japanese-made car to work, and that next pay period, paid him in Yen instead of dollars. Jack has been more than vocal about how Toyota is going to ruin NASCAR.

And then there is the whole battle between Jack and his former employee, who is also head of Toyota Racing Development, Lee White.

Two weeks ago, I wrote a column called “Just how dumb does Jack Roush think we are?” At that time, I mentioned that Mr. White and Mr. Roush had exchanged a few accusations back and forth about each other's integrity. At the time, I thought the whole thing had died away and everyone was back on track.

Until Monday.

On Monday, word leaked out that Roush had accused an “unnamed Toyota team” of stealing a “proprietary part” from one of his Roush-Fenway Fords during an interview in Atlanta three weeks ago.

All the sudden, people were comparing the possible theft to that of the McLaren-Ferrari debacle in the Formula One Series last year.

As the week went on, questions arose about just what the part was. Requests for interviews about the incident were turned down by Roush-Fenway Racing. Some people began to wonder just what could have vanished un-noticed from the RFR teams.

Toyota Racing President and CEO Jim Aust claimed on Thursday that it was a “spring” that was missing from RFR, and said spring had appeared along with one of the Toyota team’s things during a post-race inspection process. “The only thing I know is it wound up with parts we had and returned to Roush. It’s unfortunate it happened the way it did. It wasn’t anything intentional. There’s no reason to be done intentional. I have no idea how it happened to begin with.”

Even with the admission, there was no mention of which team was involved.

RFR denied it was a spring, and the wondering continued.

Until Friday.

During a meeting with NASCAR media at Martinsville Friday afternoon, Roush announced “the Toyota team went behind my toolbox, took my (sway) bar out of my inventory, put it in their inventory and took it home with them. That is a fact. It has not been refuted, and it has been discussed with the team involved.”

Turns out, the missing sway bar was removed by the un-named Toyota team when their tool box and one of Roush’s were placed against each other during the fall Dover race last year. No one at RFR realized the bar had been “stolen” until January…four months later. When a former employee of the Toyota team told someone at RFR he had seen the missing bar in a storage bin at his former employers’ shop, a manager at RFR called the team in question. The manager at the other team went to the locker, located the bar, and returned it. In January.

So why is it that the whole incident is just coming to light now….at the end of March? And why point the finger at Toyota…and not at the team involved?

Roush never did say who the team was. When asked point-blank if it was Michael Waltrip Racing, Roush replied "I don't substantiate."

It was Waltrip himself who came forward and said it was his team at fault. “It was a mistake,” he said Friday afternoon. “Look at the back of these toolboxes. There are sway bars, there’s jack handles, and it wound up in our possession. We called them and said, ‘We want to give this back.’ ”

So why is it that Roush was so willing to point a finger accusingly at Toyota, calling for an investigation and talking about lawsuits; however, when it came time to call out the specific team, he declined to name it, and said he didn’t want to embarrass either the sponsor or the team, many members of which he believes did not know this had happened…and than included management? Why is it that it took three months for this whole thing to come to light in the first place? If Roush had really wanted to embarrass Toyota, he could easily have called Waltrip’s team out before Daytona, thus doing what would likely have been major damage to a team which could scarcely handle another blow.

Roush himself admitted that the whole incident was not meant to come out into the open.

“I gave an interview (in Atlanta three weeks ago) to a number of you regarding things around my angst (over Carl Edwards penalty and Lee White’s ensuing remarks) and what I thought was appropriate or inappropriate that was being said and done. One of the people that I gave an interview with was a writer for the ESPN Magazine and I gave that Friday or Saturday and I guess the magazine was published maybe Tuesday or Wednesday of this week. Of course there was all this brouhaha about what I had said about the theft that had occurred last year…I’m not perished for having given it, although except for being aggravated, I probably wouldn’t have given it given other considerations.”

Roush said on Friday he would accept an apology, and a promise not to use information gleaned from having the bar. Waltrip apologized Friday afternoon, and even Roush says other than the paint job being removed, the bar didn’t look like it had been manipulated in any way. “It’s still got the serial number on it and it’s got all the proprietary considerations that it had. It hasn’t been re-machined. It hasn’t been changed in shape. It hasn’t been welded on. They didn’t grind the numbers off.”

So, essentially, this has been much ado about nothing.

Several people in the garage have admitted this week that “industrial espionage” happens a lot in the NASCAR garages. As was pointed out to Ray Evernham in an interview on Sirius this week, Dodge didn’t hire him because he was good looking when they decided to get back into NASCAR in 2001…they hired him because of what he had done with the 24 team, and the knowledge he had attained during his time as crew chief for Hendrick Motorsports. Evernham’s former driver, Jeff Gordon, laughed when he discussed the whole espionage issue on Friday.

"What's he doing with stuff just lying around the garage area?" the four-time Sprint Cup Series champion wondered to the media. "If that was a proprietary piece, I'd think that you'd have some tighter grips on it. I think the whole thing is hilarious." He went on to add ''I wonder what’s going on with that sway bar. Maybe there’s something that we’re missing that really truly is contributing to how fast their cars are going.”

As for NASCAR’s take on the whole thing, Sprint Cup director John Darby said "It's not the first time that somebody's gone home with a mistaken part." He added "It's not a PIN number to somebody's bank account. It's a sway bar, a very simple, very non-smart kind of a part, and I don't know why it's amplified to where it has…Our garage is open. Somebody can walk up to anybody's pit stall and look and see and photograph and measure and smell and touch any part they want to in the garage, and we've always been that way."

So words spoken in anger over an issue that had already been resolved turned into yet another black mark on a team that didn’t need it...and had already made amends to the person making the accusation. We are now aware of another one of NASCAR’s dirty little secrets, industrial espionage, and the fact that it happens more frequently than we might have thought.

Maybe now we can get back to focusing on the racing, and enjoy the next few weeks as we hit NASCAR’s smallest…and largest…tracks.

At least until the next scandal hits.

Discuss this and other racing matters in the Prodigys@Speed Forum

You can contact Kim at.. Insider Racing News

    Read other articles by Kim Roberson

The thoughts and ideas expressed by this writer or any other writer on Insider Racing News, are not necessarily the views of the staff and/or management of IRN.

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