Kingsport, TN(May 21, 2012) — On Friday night at Kingsport Speedway, Nate Monteith looked to have wrapped up his second straight win and fourth on the season, but after a protest by one of his competitors, his night and championship hopes were left in jeopardy.

Following the win, in which Monteith dominated the 3/8 mile concrete track, second place finisher and two-time winner this season, Daniel Pope II filed a protest of Monteith’s engine. The protest was a top to bottom examination that saw the NASCAR officials take a look at everything including intake, heads, valves, crank, cam, lifters, carburetor, bore & stroke and pistons.

When the protest was filed, the NASCAR officials knew they were in for a long night and because they didn’t have all the tools needed to conduct the inspection, they called in the Director of Weekly Racing for NASCAR, Lynn Carroll. Carroll loaded up his tools for inspection in Concord, NC according to Monteith and drove there following the protest arriving at Kingsport Speedway at 1:00am. After a long night of inspections and after reviewing every piece of Monteith’s engine, questions surrounded only one item, the piston ring package.

The piston rings were found to be 0.003 thinner than the rule book calls for, which is 0.043 and Monteith’s piston rings were 0.040 according to Monteith. For Monteith, it was a tough blow against his track title hopes as he had made some significant changes in his engine program over the last few weeks and was borrowing the engine that got him thrown out as evidence in a quote from his press release earlier today.

“This is a first for me in my racing career,” Monteith said from his race shop Monday afternoon. “Through all of my victories last year at Kingsport Speedway and to start the 2012 racing season, as well in 200-plus career Late Model Stock starts, I’ve never had an engine not pass post-race technical inspection. I recently changed engine builder just two weeks ago and, Upchurch Racing Engines wasn’t able to get my new motor completed in time for the next race at Kingsport Speedway. They had an engine sitting over to the side at their business and agreed to let me run it until they finished up my new engine.

“The borrowed loaner engine, up until 2010 everything inside of it was legal for NASCAR weekly racing competition. However, in the rush to allow me to get this borrowed motor back from North Carolina to Tennessee and get it put in the race car, there was just an honest oversight in the engine builder not even thinking about what (piston) ring package the motor had installed. The rings were only .003 out of spec, less than thickness of a sheet of notebook paper. This deal is what it is, and we’ll just move forward from here. You hate getting an apparent win taken from you. But I guess the true character of a champion is how you face adversity, and we’re going to face it head on. I know we’ve got a good race team assembled and we’ll just come back stronger than ever.”

We contacted Monteith’s new engine builder, Jeremy UpChurch to get his side of the story as well and he offered this statement about the problem with the engine.

“With not having his engine completed, we loaned him an engine for the race that hadn’t been changed since the rule change was implemented by NASCAR about the width of piston rings,” said UpChurch. “We had built this engine for Timothy Peters and Leigh Caruthers has run it occasionally since then, but there was no defined size for the piston rings before 2009.”

“We only had this engine that Nate Monteith, a new customer could run and the mistake I made was I never enlightened him that the piston rings weren’t up to spec on the current rules. I accept full responsibility for this mistake, but it wasn’t a performance advantage, I know for a fact based off of dyno sheets that we get about six more horsepower out of the pistons with the newer rules. We just built an engine for Tony Stewart at Richmond that was by the new rules and it was better than this engine.”

UpChurch and Monteith are still planning to work together going forward and both accept this as an oversight, but think that once the new engine is finished it will be stronger and faster than the one he’s been running.

“I think when we get the new pieces in the engine, Nate is going to be that much better, becuase we know the engine is stronger with the right pistons in it. I hate what happened for Nate and his team, but I’m glad we can put this behind us and move forward to putting together a great engine package for him.”

Monteith echoed UpChurch and is looking forward to going back to Kingsport Speedway on Friday night.

“The infraction was less than a sheet of paper,” said Monteith. “Yeah, that’s what we’re talking about, less than a sheet of paper got us thrown out. I am confident that this was a one time mistake and I’m looking forward to a long relationship with Jeremy and looking forward to running the new engine soon.”

Monteith is ready to put it all behind him, but is also ready to send his competitors and Pope in particular a message.

“I’ve been trying to help the track and put on a show over there for the fans, but there’s no holding back anymore,” commented Monteith. “I’m planning to win all the races over there and I think we’ve got our package together good enough to do just that.”

He also didn’t have anything good to say about the way that Pope and his team led by crew chief, Randy Weaver handled the whole deal.

“Obviously it’s a judge of character for them,” said Monteith. “They thought they’d screw up my whole deal, but they didn’t and they found out that we didn’t have anything that would make us that much better than them. (Randy)Weaver got to see the entire engine, piece by piece and he knows now that he’s going to have to get to work.”

When asked if he would do the same thing in return to Pope, Monteith didn’t think the chance would arise.

“If he ever has the opportunity to outrun us the rest of the year, I’d maybe like to return the favor,” continued Monteith. “Nashville(TN) is a long way from Charlie Long’s shop, so maybe they’ll have the time to get the engine back together one week.”

Monteith says that the disqualification has hurt his championship hopes at Kingsport, but doesn’t think that the drop from first to third will make much of difference at the end of the season.

“We’ll drop from first to third and lose a 14 or so point advantage and be down by five or so points. I don’t think it will be a problem, I think we can win the rest of the races this season barring a mechanical failure.”

In the end Monteith says he just wants to thank his supporters, his sponsors and fans, who stand behind him and wants them to know that he and his team will be back in victory lane again and still plans to win the championship saying, “We’re full steam ahead now”.

Monteith, whose car is decaled similar to Lightning McQueen’s car from the ever popular children’s movie, CARS and CARS 2, feels that he’s living out part of the movie.

“I told my team today that I feel like we’re living out the part of the movie where Lightning McQueen is in jail,” laughed Monteith. “We all know how the movie turned out when he got out of there and that’s what we’re looking forward to.”

Maybe Lightning “Monteith” will have a storybook ending as well …….