Mayfield and NASCAR the bully

A reader writes, Dear AR1.com, Since its inception, Bill France, and now his heirs, run NASCAR like bullies. From how they handled the driver boycott for the 1969 Talladega race, to reprisals on drivers like Kyle Petty (1994) who revealed how NASCAR had implemented ‘the call’ to manipulate results good for TV ratings and the sucker fans who buy their product as real racing, or Tony Stewart’s many apologies after revealing things like how NASCAR’s rule book is on some erasable ink board, there’s a long history of non-transparency in NASCAR. Just try and get a NASCAR rules book, the fact you can’t should be cause to ridicule the use of ‘NASCAR’ and ‘sport’ in the same sentence and really undermines any integrity of the sanctioning body and series itself.

I suspect Mayfield has been wronged, because you can have all the policies in place for drug testing, but unless the integrity of both the testing service and NASCAR the sanctioning body can be proven, its hard to take this testing program serious. While Aegis Sciences Corporation has over 20 years experience in professional athletic drug and blood doping testing, they’ve never really been scrutinized. Sued, yes, but there is no federal oversight of their practices, which is sorely needed when you consider the fiasco with Lance Armstrong and the French national drug testing laboratory that reported he had tested positive for a banned substance. After Lance challenged the report, for the first time in that lab’s history folks took a very close look at their operational procedures and found a host of improper practices, mainly in the handling of the samples themselves. Perhaps the same thing finally needs to happen with Aegis, but more importantly, the press should also take a look at the history of how NASCAR has managed its entertainment product with bully tactics. There have been plenty of shady events that should be cause to seriously question their integrity and hence the validity of such a testing program to begin with, but unfortunately the press has allowed NASCAR to bully them as well. Few reporters out there seem willing to put it all out on the line for the sake of finding out the truth because they could quickly find themselves unemployed, and at the minimum, never be able to get near a NASCAR event or ISC track again. Andy Fogiel, Lansing, MI