FanHouse JasonRatcliff

NASCAR's biggest cheating scandal of the 2008 season may finally be coming to a close for the guilty parties.

Joe Gibbs Racing's Nationwide Series crew members Dave Rogers, Jason Ratcliff and five others from the team all look to resume at-track duties at the season's second race in Los Angeles after the team applied for reinstatement last week.

The 7 team members were suspended by NASCAR indefinitely in August -- among a plethora of other fines and penalties -- after the sanctioning body discovered a plot to manipulate post-race engine data in favor of the Toyota teams following the Nationwide Series event at Michigan International Speedway.

Remember the cheating story that hit Joe Gibbs Racing like a ton of bricks after the Nationwide Series race at Michigan International Speedway in August? You know, the one involving magnets on pedals for the horsepower testing?

For those with short memories or lazy mouse-clicking fingers, the JGR Nationwide Series No. 18 and No. 20 cars were found to have magnets that prevented the throttle pedal from being fully depressed, leaving skewed numbers for NASCAR to examine during a post-race performance test.

It's a genius plan, really, and if it had worked, JGR and Toyota might have had a nice advantage in the series. But it didn't, and NASCAR wasn't too pleased. They showed it with heavy fines, suspensions and point deductions in the week that followed.

This week, though, JGR crew chief Dave Rogers -- who's still indefinitely suspended from NASCAR -- fully admitted to the cheating.

"I made a mistake, and I owned up to that mistake, and I didn't make excuses," said Rogers.

And for that, you've got to applaud him because it's not too often that NASCAR crew chiefs profess guilt instead of pleading innocence.