Kin can be trouble in pits

Tom Logano tasked his powerful force of will into making his son, Joey, a Sprint Cup driver. He moved his family from Connecticut to Georgia, invested money from his waste management business and used a compliment from Mark Martin to create a brand out of a 15-year-old boy and start a bidding war between two NASCAR teams for his services.

"He was a person who clearly was used to having every single thing his own way and in accordance with his vision," said Roush Fenway Racing president Geoff Smith, whose team ceded that bidding war to Joe Gibbs Racing in 2005. "That type of personality is not unfamiliar to us."

A parent with that sort of personality or commitment would be shuffled to a suite or a box seat in other professional sports. So would a wife, a girlfriend or entourage.

In motorsports, they're given a lanyard and an all-access credential, the right to linger on pit road, slap the back of the crew chief with the tacit understanding of good behavior in return.

The arrangement works nearly every day with hundreds of people.

Kevin Harvick's wife, DeLana, sits uniformed atop her husband's pit box. Many other wives watch from pit road also. Carl Edwards' mother frequents the track. Joe Nemechek's mother was ubiquitous in her fatigues when her son, Joe, drove an Army-sponsored car. Some drivers employ relatives as motor coach drivers - as Jimmie Johnson once did with his father - or other ancillary jobs, giving them a role at the track but also creating a situation where and proximity can create a spectacle like the one after last weekend's Sprint Cup race at Pocono Raceway.

Logano crossed the implied boundary when he followed his son into a pit road confrontation with Kevin Harvick, eventually pushing TNT reporter Ralph Shaheen. Tom Logano appeared to pick his son away from a JGR crewman attempting to calm him before the situation escalated, then pointed, either in the general direction of Harvick or the exit to the garage behind him. And it wasn't the first time he'd found the boundary.

Logano, who has other confrontations as his son progressed from phenom-in-training to Sprint Cup driver and briefly losing his credential last year, was reprimanded on Sunday by NASCAR but will not be further punished.

"You can't deny the fact of a passionate parent," NASCAR Sprint Cup series director John Darby said. "You have to appreciate that, but there also has to be a line in the sand to how far that passion can go. All of our competitors are licensed to compete, given permission of sort to not only compete as athletes but to display the emotion of that competition. That's all fine. Sometimes, parents who are not licensed and don't have permission get involved in those things."

Team president J.D. Gibbs said Logano now knows "what his role is as a dad in NASCAR."

Smith said overall, he believes NASCAR's credentialing system works. The series reviews all applicants and can cancel any credential.

Entourage incidents are infrequent, but not uncommon.

The 65-year-old father of Sam Hornish Jr. was shoved to the ground by a credentialed friend of team owner Michael Andretti named Anthony Fedele in a fracas after an IndyCar race at Watkins Glen in 2007. Hornish Sr. had exchanged shoves with driver Tony Kanaan after stepping between Kanaan and his son and namesake after the drivers exchanged barbs and gestures.

In April 2006, Greg Biffle's future wife, Nicole Lunders, slammed a water bottle and approached the pit box of driver Kurt Busch after he wrecked her fiancé. Lunders was confronted on the ladder of the pit box by Busch's fiancée, Eva Bryan, inciting a nationally broadcast fiancée fiasco. Neither was penalized.

"Mom and Dad are used to having a better understanding that sometimes the kid has to take a hard knock in order to grow up," said Smith, whose team still employs Biffle "Girlfriends and wives - to their credit - they have a tough time with their husband or boyfriend being wronged, and they see right and wrong differently than a lot of people. We've seen some personality eruptions, and it's more them lashing out against something that happened at the track that put their loved one in perceived danger or being abused. There are a couple of places where the driver and spouse tag-team you in the business relationship even though the dealing is supposed to be with the driver."

DeLana Harvick was knocked down on pit road at Texas Motor Speedway in the fall of 2006 when an agitated Scott Riggs crew member tried to reach her husband. DeLana Harvick, the business-savvy co-owner of Kevin Harvick Inc., characterized her role as a uniformed member of the team at the time by saying, "It's not just me sitting up there to sit up there. I still feel like I can be his eyes and ears when he has other things to worry about."