Inspectors, teams enjoy productive relationship

BRISTOL, Tenn. -- The hours immediately after Bristol Motor Speedway's infield opens Friday morning to allow Winston Cup haulers to park for Sunday's Food City 500 are among the most stressful of the weekend.

But the relationship of NASCAR's inspectors to the race teams and their crewmen -- who work for long hours in close quarters for 36 weekends a year -- is unquestionably intimate and surprisingly chipper.

	John Darby

At BMS, 45 teams must unload their equipment and race cars -- which they have labored over for weeks to prepare for one of the fastest unrestricted track on the circuit -- and present them for inspection.

The process -- refined by Winston Cup director John Darby prior to this season --includes more than 30 body templates and a myriad of other regulations that must be met and checked by his team of between 40 and 50 inspectors.

The 2003 season is the first marked by NASCAR's use of "common template cars" in Winston Cup -- a process that was set up to limit manufacturers' complaints of advantages held by one car make over another.

That makes the inspection process more intense, and any observer would assume, more contentious. For the most part, that hasn't been the experience of most crewmen in the garage.

Roush Racing's No. 97 Ford team of driver Kurt Busch is the defending champion of the Food City 500. They don't expect any undue attention this weekend, any more than Tony Stewart's Joe Gibbs Racing team did two weeks ago at Atlanta when it was in the same position.

"When you stop and think about it," Gibbs' team manager Jimmy Makar said. "The race teams shouldn't be, and in most cases we're not racing against NASCAR, the inspectors and the sanctioning body itself.

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"We're racing against each other and what NASCAR's function should be is to keep the playing field level enough that I don't have to worry about what my competitor across the garage got away with or didn't get away with in inspection -- that he was held to the same tolerances that I was held to."

Spending any time watching the interaction between ingenious mechanics and extra-diligent inspectors is revealing.

"We have a good time with each inspector," Makar said. "They're good guys and we see them each and every week."

Makar, who until this season was a crew chief, doesn't totally miss the weekly challenge of trying to slide whatever advantage he can through the inspection process. His greater responsibility now is overseeing both defending Winston Cup champion Stewart's team as well as 2000 champion Bobby Labonte's group.

"We have a good relationship with them (inspectors) but in the end it's like anything else," Makar said. "They can make our life hard or we can make their life hard -- on a weekly basis."

Darby has instituted a system of penalties for inspection infractions, up to and including a decrease in practice time.

	The inspection process has become much more intensive this season. Creidt: Autostock

"The problem you have if you decide that's the route you're going to take," Makar said of bucking the system, "is before long you're going to be on each other's nerves and it's going to be an unhealthy relationship.

"We need to keep it healthy and fun along with being a good working relationship. At least that's what we try to do -- have fun with the inspectors and respect what they do and hope they'll respect us for what we do."

Darby agreed, saying that was something he had sought since taking the reins of the series last year.

"A lot of that came about since last year and it's something we've been striving to build," Darby said. "The majority of our inspectors have been visiting these race shops since two days after our last race last season. We want them (teams) to understand that when they see NASCAR coming it's not always with bad news.

"A perfect weekend would be no parts on the inspection table, good racing and no penalties to write the following Monday."