Or so it seems…

Gordon had announced his switch from Ford to Dodge, along with a new partnership with Gillett Evernham Motorsports, five days earlier and inadvertently had used a Dodge Charger nose that had been submitted to NASCAR but had not yet been approved. Before qualifying for the Daytona 500 on Feb. 10, Gordon replaced the part with an approved Dodge Avenger nose.

“This was an innocent mistake made by someone not even on my team,” Gordon said in the statement. “They accidentally supplied us the new Dodge noses that NASCAR hasn’t yet approved because of what amounted to a clerical error. It was discovered during technical inspection and corrected before the race. It was not even close to being an intent to create some competitive advantage, and the mistake was not even made by my team.”

One of the enjoyable things about Sunday’s race was seeing Gordon finish in the Top Ten. It makes no sense to me that NASCAR would sock him and his team with this level of penalty, for what is essentially a paint job change, that never even made it onto the track and had zero effect on the outcome of either qualifying or the actual race itself. I don’t do conspiracy theories, but it really makes you wonder about NASCAR’s intentions here.