Happy Hour: All your laser inspection talk in one place

Welcome to Happy Hour. Feel free to tweet or email us your NASCAR thoughts and questions throughout the week.

Unsurprisingly, this week’s mailbag focuses around the laser inspection failures that happened after Sunday’s race at Chicago and NASCAR’s decision to not penalize Martin Truex Jr. and Jimmie Johnson after their cars failed inspection.

There’s no need for a long intro this week. We’re getting right to it.

If you were living under a NASCAR rock on Wednesday, you missed that NASCAR will no longer penalize teams for a minor laser inspection fraction after the conundrum it found itself in after Sunday’s race. Both race-winner Truex and 12th-place finisher Johnson had their cars fail inspection by a minor amount.

By the NASCAR rule book, the punishment for either was a points penalty; the infraction was too insignificant for Truex’s win to be stripped away. So recognizing that Johnson would be hit with a penalty and Truex’s points penalty would mean nothing, NASCAR moved the tolerance for laser inspection penalties.

There are now no more minor penalties. You either lose 35 points and/or the win or you pass inspection.

NASCAR did the fair thing — we have no problem with the sanctioning body making this rules change because the contradictions are too big to ignore. But we stand by what we said Wednesday: NASCAR should have seen this coming.

Keselowski sat down with Yahoo Sports on Thursday and you can watch his extrapolation on his tweets in the video above.

Transformer cars are cars that are engineered to change shape at speed and under load on the race track. When standing still they pass inspection, but the incredibly smart people who build the cars have designed them to skirt the inspection process — and gain speed — on the track. Engineers want to make the rear of the car pitch to the right for aerodynamic reasons; NASCAR’s lasers check to make sure the cars don’t have that much rear skew.

Is it legal? Of course. NASCAR doesn’t and can’t inspect cars as they are going around the track. And ingenuity is at the heart of the sport. You can’t get mad at teams using everything they can for speed.

The swerving, by our basic understanding, is designed to take that transformation out of the car and get it back legal again. NASCAR executive vice president Steve O’Donnell said the sport would like to eliminate the swerving that happens post race. How? We’ll see.

P4 is the major penalty that now is the sole penalty for a laser inspection failure. Our guess is that no one will cross the line in the Chase, though wouldn’t it be worth it for a team that has cars in the Chase to send out a “guinea pig” car for a driver who isn’t in title contention? The real-world experience on track and in the penalty process could be useful.

There’s another way a team could approach it too. Take Truex’s team for example. It’s advancing to the second round of the Chase no matter what happens over the next two races. Why not push the issue and see what happens? If you win again and NASCAR takes it away, no big deal. If you get a 35-point penalty; again, no big deal.

There are still loopholes here. Will anyone exploit them?

In NASCAR’s dreams. Do you have confidence that the racing will take sole priority the rest of the Chase? We aren’t.

This is our favorite new NASCAR parody account.

Just want to thank the guys back at the laptop, desktop and phone shop. They give us great equipment every week to make sure we can provide the best content and tweets in the series.

As drivers lose water weight throughout a race, media members gain weight with all the food that’s eaten in the media center. As far as the bathroom goes … well, when covering NASCAR, do as the drivers do.

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Nick Bromberg is the editor of From The Marbles on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at nickbromberg@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter!

Follow @NickBromberg