How to Be Right and Wrong Simultaneously

You have a couple of hours left to vote on the People's Pitstop lineup for Saturday's NASCAR Sprint Cup race at Texas Motor Speedway. While you contemplate your votes, let's consider something that may have gotten lost in the shuffle last week at Martinsville.
Some of you might have noticed that Jimmie Johnson has not won yet this season. (By comparison, by this point last season, the five-time defending Sprint Cup champion had won three times.) At Martinsville, Johnson was essentially taken out of contention when he incurred a speeding penalty on Pit Row. And he did not react well. At all. He climbed out of his car and essentially accused NASCAR of lying.
Yes, he later apologized and said his misunderstood where on Pit Row he was caught speeding. But he still raises two interesting points.
First, he showed one way NASCAR is just like any other sport in North America. There are plenty of examples in plenty of sports where someone criticizing officials or the sport's sanctioning body was punished for it. Johnson probably will not be suspended for what he said, but he should remember that NASCAR would be well within its rights to punish him for what he did.
Second, he showed one way in which NASCAR is unique among sporting bodies. And not in a good way.
You see, the main difference between Jimmie Johnson being busted for speeding at Martinsville and you being busted for speeding on your local interstate is the defense Johnson can give but you can't.
"I didn't know I was speeding."
Unlike the car sitting in your garage/driveway, the NASCAR machines do not have speedometers. The teams generally record the tachometer's reading during the pre-race laps and tell the driver to keep the RPMs under that level on Pit Row. But there's a reason your car has both a tachometer and a speedometer. A traffic cop who pulls you over is never going to ask you "Do you know how many revolutions your engine was turning?"
Johnson is hardly the first person to suggest that NASCAR give the drivers a more accurate tool to measure something so crucial to their chances of winning. And it would make sense for the sport's governing body to give its drivers as much information as possible about when they're going to break the rules. When the NFL fines a player for hitting another player out of bounds, it doesn't have to worry about the fined player saying, "I had no idea where the boundary was."
Again, you have a couple of hours to make your choices for this week's race. We'll be back with the results.