Inside the Garage: Reiser

Roush Fenway Racing crew chief Robbie Reiser comes to this weekend's USG Sheetrock 400 at the Chicagoland Speedway in Joliet, Ill., based on a couple things.

He and the driver of their No. 17 Ford, Matt Kenseth, have already won at an intermediate speedway this season, California Speedway in February; and they have a great history on these type of tracks. Plus, they've been consistent enough, despite battling a number of maladies, to sit third in the Nextel Cup driver and owner standings.

Q: From a crew chief's perspective, would you rather have a pretty structured, black-and-white rule book both for what you need to do, but also a finite penalty structure if you do something you shouldn't?

Reiser: Oh, man -- that's a hard question. I will tell you this: I have enjoyed all the years of being able to work on cars in the format that we've done it with the current car.

I do like the direction of the rules with the COT, but I do hate the COT in the way that it doesn't allow us to work on the cars anymore.

When you look at the car structure and the aero platform that they have -- all the things that they have going on with the COT -- it's just taken it so much out of our hands, to production-build that type of car instead of building a racecar to go fast, and I hate that part of it.

Maybe in a year from now, maybe I'll look at that different because it's the only thing we've got to work on and we'll understand that car and understand the rules more and find more areas to work in.

But right now, it looks like it's such a tight box that it's taken a lot of the fun -- a lot of the creativity that we've been able to do over the years, in working on the current cars and come up with different ideas to try to make our cars faster and work within the rules.

Now the rules are so tight, and you've got to look at it this way, too -- when you show up with that car and it's not right, you're going to get penalized, fined and maybe thrown out of the garage.

So that being said, and to answer your question, I like to be able to work on the cars and I like to have rules that are within a box -- but the box is too tight to allow us to work on the cars that we have now.

Does that make sense?

Q: Brian France recently said penalties may ratchet up to the point where they keep drivers or teams out of races, so is there any concern on the teams' part?

Reiser: The problem is this, and here's one thing that I look at it. We pay an inspection fee to show up here. The guys should be able to unload their cars, have their cars inspected and if they're not to the rules we should have the opportunity to change them to get them to where [NASCAR] wants them.

If we prepare our cars at the shop and we read our rule book and decided 'this is within the rules,' and we show up and [NASCAR] feels it's outside the line, we should get an opportunity to fix those cars.

We shouldn't get 100 points, $100,000 [penalties] and get thrown out of the garage. Now if we go and compete with those cars, and they are not within the guidelines, then I believe the penalty fits the crime But I do feel that you should be able to unload your cars, run 'em through inspection once, be able to have an opportunity to fix what you've got and then go race. I do believe that. (Continued)