Daytona Beach, Fla. ? Michael Waltrip says he didn’t know anything about the illegal substance.

He says he didn’t know what exactly was being put into his car.

He says some unknown team member slipped it into his engine without him even knowing about it.

Next thing you know, Waltrip is going to tell us his crew chief told him the mysterious substance was flaxseed oil.

The only thing missing from this, the biggest NASCAR cheating scandal in history, is Waltrip standing up before Congress and declaring emphatically, “I have never put anything illegal into my intake manifold – period.”

Close your eyes and replace the names of Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire and Rafael Palmeiro with Waltrip, Matt Kenseth and Kasey Kahne, and you have NASCAR’s version of the BALCO investigation.

Hmmm, so what exactly was that gooey substance found in Waltrip’s engine – the cream or the clear?

NASCAR, like baseball, has allowed rampant rule-breaking to go on for far too long and now finally is starting to crack down. Suspending more than one-tenth of the crew chiefs for Sunday’s Daytona 500 is a good start, but NASCAR needs to go even further. Instead of kicking out a few anonymous mechanics, how about really getting everybody’s attention by suspending the drivers themselves?

And if racing really wants us to take this crackdown seriously, how about retroactively stripping defending Nextel Cup champion Jimmie Johnson of last year’s Daytona victory? Johnson, if you’ll recall, won last year’s Dishonesty 500 only a few days after Chad Knaus, his habitually cheating crew chief, was kicked out of Daytona for breaking the rules again.

Is there really a difference between Bonds, the cheater, pursuing the greatest record in American sports, or Johnson, the cheater, winning the Great American Race? And is there really a difference between Bonds claiming he didn’t know his trainer was giving him something to enhance his body and Waltrip claiming he didn’t know a crew member was doing something to enhance his engine?

“What took place was the act of an individual or individuals,” said Waltrip, the owner of his race team. “This is not a reflection of our team, our sponsors or our manufacturer.”

Oh, really?

You wouldn’t know it by listening to Dale Earnhardt Jr., who said of Waltrip: “When the driver’s the owner, he should have quite a bit of knowledge about what’s going on.”

Or Joe Nemechek, who said of Waltrip: “I think he got off easy. If somebody gets caught that blatant, they probably shouldn’t be in the Daytona 500.”

Or Jim Aust, the chief executive of Toyota Racing, who called the scandal, “Toyota’s worst nightmare.”

Toyota, a global company that prides itself on its integrity and good reputation, is new to NASCAR and, therefore, new to the old NASCAR mantra: “If you ain’t cheatin’, you ain’t competin’.”

And this is why NASCAR should come down even harder on the blatant cheaters – because mainstream Fortune 500 companies are pouring more and more sponsorship dollars into the sport and don’t want to be tainted by such corruption and chicanery.

Sadly, this year, just like last year, there’s a chance a rule-breaker will win the Great American Race.Just goes to show once again that cheaters never win – except in the Daytona 500.