IRLblog.com

Given what Brendon wrote about in this post and that Chris commented that:

Seems kind of weird that he will get no penalties for that transponder not being in the right place? If that had happened to another team in a different race I feel the league would have penalized the driver. Just my 2 cents.

I have to say that while I don’t want to play tin-foil hat conspiracy theorist I can’t help but think that something is most definitely afoot.  This article states that “A post-race inspection of Dixon’s car found that the transponder had been mounted upside down, and the radio signals were aimed skyward instead of at the racing surface.”  I’ve always figured that the transponders are to have uniform placement specifically for situations like this super close finish.  Now, given that it was simply upside down instead of moved forward in the car, I personally don’t suspect foul play on the part of Dixon’s team since I doubt that they gained a competitive advantage unless the transponders are unevenly heavy and this resulted in improved vertical weight distribution.  What I am curious to see is if this constitutes a violation of the series’ rules and would therefore be subject to a penalty.   We went through a copy of the 2007 rule book since we didn’t have an 08 copy on hand and found nothing specifying the orientation of the transponder, just its location.  Why does this matter?  Given Helio’s nigh-heroic effort and domination of the field, a significant enough penalty to Dixon might just have handed the championship to Castroneves.  Naturally, the IRL would want to avoid any sort of controversy so it’s easy to say that it was a simple mistake and will be forgiven since there was no malicious intent.  However, I’m sure we can all think of previous situations where an accidental rule violation still resulted in a penalty to the team and driver.