NASCAR's Mike Helton announced Tuesday, March 9 that Carl Edwards will be placed on probation for the next three races after his on-track incident at Atlanta Motor Speedway with Brad Keselowski.
Edwards' probation will run until April 14 of this year after he was found to have violated Section 12-1 (actions detrimental to stock car racing – aggressive driving) of the 2010 NASCAR rule book.
"Following that incident we asked the driver of the 99 (Edwards) to visit us in the hauler, and we made it very clear to him that these actions were not acceptable and did go beyond what we said back in January about putting the driving back in the hands of the drivers," Helton said.
"Sunday evening, all day Monday, and this morning we had several conversations internally as well as with the stakeholders in this situation including car owners, Roger Penske and Jack Roush. As a result of these discussions, we have reached the conclusion that Carl will also be put on probation for the next three NASCAR Sprint Cup races, and Carl's aware of what that means."
During a teleconference announcing the probation, Helton focused more on the fact that Keselowski's car went airborne during the incident. Edwards pushed Keselowski's car during the Kobalt Tools 500 causing the No. 12 Penske Dodge to lift from the track and flip onto its roof.
"We've not seen a car get airborne much on the mile-and-a-half racetrack, and that's something that is very important to us and we want to study very closely to figure out things that we can do to help prevent this very quickly in the future," he said.
"What we're doing right now with the 12 car is studying it. We've got a lot of technology with data recorders, just like we do with the 39 car in Talladega. Now we've got the second element of the 12 car from Atlanta that we can look at the dimensions of the car. We can look at the impact that the car took and the reaction of the roll cage and the hoop and different elements that we saw that did their job, but how much better can we make those components work so that doesn't happen again?"
