Robin Pemberton says the rules now are more black and white than ever before. Credit: Autostock

Pemberton: Rulebook same for every driver

Official says there are no gray areas in regards to pit road

FONTANA, Calif. -- Each weekend NASCAR officials give crew chiefs a 5x12-inch card on which there are 37 pit road rules with specific penalties for each violation.

There are no gray areas.

There are few either ors regarding penalties.

Mark Martin pitted with his tires on the line, while Jeff Gordon did not. Credit: Martin -- Terry Howell / Gordon -- TNT

So when fans cried favoritism last weekend, claiming that Jeff Gordon should have been penalized a lap for pitting outside the pit box as Mark Martin was earlier in the race, NASCAR's director of competition had to laugh.

"We don't change things from one driver to the other," Robin Pemberton said before Friday's qualifying at California Speedway. "We get blamed for that all the time; that's not the way it is."

Pemberton then pointed to the card, which actually has pictures for pitting outside the box. It shows that a car with rear tires out of the box, as Martin's were, will be penalized a lap.

It shows that a car with the right-rear bumper out of the box but all four tires inside, as Gordon's was, is within the rules.

"Everything is the same for everybody," Pemberton said.

The card, just as NASCAR's cutting down on gray areas in all aspects of the sport, has come a long way. It has grown from a 3x5 index card with a handful of rules to detailed and color coded.

Pemberton scoffed at the notion that NASCAR is too inconsistent with its rules and penalties. He said areas where the governing body leaves room for interpretation as far severity of a penalty are necessary to make the sport run smoothly.

For example, the leeway allows NASCAR to penalize in some cases a repeat offender more than a first-time offender.

"You can't have everything a cookie-cutter deal," Pemberton said. "This isn't basketball."

Hypothetically, Pemberton said the winning car at Bristol could fall under the height restrictions because of the natural punishment it takes during a race.

"The right-front control arm is bent," he said. "The track bar is bent that holds the suspension. They came from one or two laps down because of the free pass. They overcome all of these obstacles.

"What are we going to do? Do we build the gallows for somebody that has done a heckuva job that night?"

Gordon, a four-time Cup champion, said NASCAR has come a long way in consistently enforcing rules since he came into the sport in the early 1990s.

"Every year they learn more about what the teams are doing and how they inspect the cars and how to create less gray areas," he said. "Even though there were more gray areas years ago, we didn't know how to capitalize on them like we do today, so they have to narrow that down."

Dale Earnhardt Jr. agreed. His only complaint is the severity of the fines, which usually top out at $50,000.

"It'll come back and bite me in the [butt], but the fines aren't tough enough," he said. "I've paid $5,000 fines and I've never felt it. So what's the point?

"When you take 25 or 50 points, you learned your lesson then. That's a great way to get somebody's attention. But the dollars, I don't know if that matters much unless you get into the $100,000 to $150,000 range."

Pemberton won't rule that out, saying NASCAR doesn't make fines black and white so the penalties can be "ramped" up.

As for everything else, Pemberton said it's more black and white than people think. He said NASCAR has become very efficient in policing the sport, reminding there are more than 60 inspectors in the garage and on pit road during every race.

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"I can remember a time in my crew chief days that we had one inspector for like every six pit boxes," he said. "To be honest with you, at that point it was fine. You watched the people you knew were going to be competing for the win ... [Dale] Earnhardt and [Mark] Martin and Rusty [Wallace]."

Pemberton added that technology, such as the loop system that determines where every car is on the track at every moment and timing system on pit road, has played a great role in leveling the playing field.

"The pit road [speeding] thing, I know we take a lot of criticism over that," he said. "But the competitors respect it more now than ever. Those days you thought you got screwed when you knew you weren't speeding, now it's literally [black] and white."

Pemberton said the bigger the sport grows the more NASCAR will do to ensure fairness.

"The competition drives everything," he said. "It's what drives the notoriety nationally and internationally. It's what drives every rule. It's what drives pit road speed. It's what drives counting every lugnut and that every lugnut has to be a bright yellow."

The latter, he reminded, wasn't on the 5x12 card years ago.

"That comes from the day when a call was made at Rockingham with Dale Earnhardt to pit because he had a missing lugnut," Pemberton said. "When they came down pit road one of the lugnuts was dark blue that they borrowed, and the others were yellow or silver.

"Every time we add to that card it's because of things that have happened. Once people realize things like that they understand how far we've come."