Roush upset over theft and NASCAR’s response

A swaybar was taken from his garage and it’s almost become a joke on the circuit.

MARTINSVILLE, Va. (AP) — Jack Roush’s feud with Toyota is escalating over a car part he claims was stolen from one of his teams. The multicar owner calls it a case of “intellectual espionage,” but many others think it’s much ado about nothing.

“What’s he doing with stuff just laying around the garage area?” four-time Sprint Cup Series champion Jeff Gordon joked Friday. “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.”

But Roush isn’t laughing, saying a Toyota team that he declined to name stole a swaybar created specifically for Roush Fenway Racing from one of RFR’s teams at last fall’s race at Dover, Del. He said the team sandblasted the custom paint off of it and tried to have the vendor that created it for RFR duplicate the ends that make it fit.

Roush said after his team found out about it, it learned from a former employee of the Toyota team since hired by Roush that he’d seen the part in the Toyota team’s shop.

“I found out about it and I wanted to go supersonic,” Roush said, calling the team’s “theft” of the swaybar “intellectual espionage.” He said it initially left him wanting to get a search warrant to go claim the part and a restraining order to prevent the team from using any information gleaned from having it in competition.

Instead, he brought the matter to NASCAR, and that hasn’t been satisfying, either.

“It’s not the first time that somebody’s gone home with a mistaken part,” John Darby, NASCAR’s Sprint Cup director, said during practice at Martinsville Speedway.

“It’s not a PIN number to somebody’s bank account. It’s a swaybar, a very simple, very non-smart kind of a part, and I don’t know why it’s amplified to where it has.”

The problem, according to Roush, is that the team acquired the part last fall and didn’t admit to having it or agree to return it until confronted by RFR in January.

The return took place during a “clandestine meeting” at 6 a.m., Roush said, but in the interim, he fears the team may have learned things it can apply to its car.

“We’ve been harmed by this theft,” he said.

Former Roush employee Lee White, now a senior vice president and general manager for Toyota Racing Development, has been sparring with Roush in the media since Roush raised the issue of the theft a few weeks ago. White said Friday it’s not an issue for the manufacturer, but rather one between Roush’s team and the unidentified Toyota team.

The feud dusted up when Roush went public with his theft claims while responding to White’s claim that RFR’s No. 99 team with Carl Edwards as the driver intentionally took the cover off its oil tank at Las Vegas and gained an aerodynamic advantage.

Edwards was docked 100 driver points plus 10 bonus points. His crew chief, Bob Osbourne, was fined $100,000 and suspended, and Roush was docked 100 owner points.

Roush, who denied that the team did anything to make the oil tank lid come off, said he’s never stolen anything from another team in 22 years of racing, and that he’s disappointed that NASCAR hasn’t chosen to take any action in the swaybar matter.

“It’s basically lawyer time and as far as what NASCAR might do, they could obviously do a lot,” he said, including mediating a meeting between the teams, securing an apology and ensuring they won’t use information gained “by their ill-gotten means.”

He also wasn’t pleased to read that Robin Pemberton, vice president of competition, said things like the swaybar incident are common and the teams should work it out.

“It’s real easy for NASCAR to bring the rule book out and deal with what happens if a part is the wrong dimension or if it doesn’t fit a template,” he said. “But they don’t have a rule as it relates to theft, and maybe they should have. I’m not sure.”

Darby said with all the traveling teams do, and all the equipment they bring everywhere they go, and the ease with which things get mixed up, it’s no big deal.

“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,” he said. “These are just stock cars and stock car parts.”