Absentee crew chiefs stay plugged in via technology (cont'd)

"Can you imagine telling Junior Johnson he couldn't come to the track?" Parrott asked in a rhetorical manner. "This has only started happening in the last seven years, NASCAR has really started clamping down."

In his long and diverse career spanning more than three decades starting in 1975, Parrott was never suspended, even though he admits lying awake some nights thinking up ways to gain unfair advantages over the competition.

"I was always a good boy, I never cheated," he said, tongue in cheek. "NASCAR did take the top off my car once in Talladega. I thought they wanted to race convertibles. I said, 'Hey my driver will get too cold.'"

Parrott said the league fined him $20,000.

"We moved the roof flaps to enhance the aerodynamics of the car but we weren't suspended," he said. "Thank goodness Jack Roush bailed me out because I didn't have that kind of money."

Even as technology emerged, electronic communication was frowned upon and fought, McKim said. If you had a radio you were probably cheating.

"Paul Parks was the first to use two-way radio in the 1950s. It was protested, threw out as an illegal advantage," McKim said.

In 1961 during the Daytona Firecracker 250, Jack Smith was ridiculed for installing a two-way radio in his helmet.

McKim said the sport has evolved tremendously in all sectors with advancing new technologies and crew chiefs, at or away from the track, need to stay plugged in.

"I think it's necessary to get as much contact with team as they can," he said. "If they don't use the technology they have, then they are not doing their job."

High-tech or low-tech, Eury Jr. is eager to have his back.

"I can't remember the last race I missed," he said. "Sonoma was my first one in a long, long time. My wife makes me work a lot harder around the house than if I'm at the track, so I'd rather be at the tracks."