Open-garage policy aimed to cut spying

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. -- If NASCAR teams ever want to rant about rivals stealing information, they'll have to march in unison to the big red truck.

The sanctioning body has mandated an open garage since its 1940s birth, and parking teams just a few feet apart each week is the most obvious rule.

"I think we take away a lot of reasons for having that [espionage] just by being as wide-open with everything that we do," said John Darby, Winston Cup series director.

Sometimes, that philosophy backfires. Teams desperate for reassurance or any invisible edge hire photographers and/or outfit shop personnel in street clothes and cameras. Or they simply break the good-taste rule -- stand before a competitor's bay and openly discuss what they see with colleagues.

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That happened to Jeff Burton three years ago, when he was a top-five fixture in the points.

"The crew chief and the driver literally came and stood in front of our car in the garage area for 15 minutes at a test," Burton said of the other Ford team, which he declined to identify. "And [they] pointed and talked about what was different about our body from their body. And not a word was said.

"I didn't go over and say, 'Hey, get the hell out of here,' [or] nothing. What're you going to do, you know?"

It was a perfect illustration of NASCAR's viewpoint. That same openness extends to more than garage bays. Other operating policies include come-on-in-style inspections and post-race and post-qualifying equipment teardowns.

But it doesn't curtail trickery.

"There's a tremendous amount of video technology being used in the garage area that people are trying to hide," Burton said. "There are a lot of things that are going on in an effort to learn what people are doing."

"We're not in the CIA stuff yet, but if we want to find out what someone's doing bad enough, we can," said Phillipe Lopez, Kenny Wallace's crew chief. "It's not that difficult."

For example, how about the now-common, low-cost surveillance gadgets that you curse on pop-up advertising? What's to keep a team from affixing one to a fender, or jack mount when a car's merely resting in its garage?

"We don't allow covers on the cars when the garage is open and in operation," Darby said. "We don't allow them to hang curtains and skirts off the bottoms of the cars and things like that. So the need for all the cutesy little spy cameras and stuff really isn't there."

Plus, Darby said he's never heard of such a thing anyway.

"It'd be very difficult to obviously trace down who put it there in the first place," Darby said, adding that NASCAR has its own surveillance cameras mounted in the garage for security purposes. "There's not a concern there."

But he knows his red-truck office might be the first to know. While Darby -- who's beginning his second season as Cup director -- can't remember any complaints about competitor spying, his predecessor can.

"Every once in a while somebody'll come in and say, 'Tell them to stay out of my garage,'" said Gary Nelson, who now oversees NASCAR's research and development center. "I guess the biggest thing we hear now is, 'He hired my best guy, because he knows everything we're doing.'"