Golden Age built on the assembly lines of Detroit (cont'd)

"It was a little unequal. Chrysler had their premier teams that they would give support to, and the same with General Motors and Ford. Most of your Ford support went to Holman-Moody back in the day, and they would dispense equipment to the Ford teams. Chrysler, you had to go back to Ray Fox and the Pettys, they were really the factory teams. Then you had your second tier, which were your independents, which would get most of their equipment from major teams," said NASCAR historian Buz McKim.

"A lot of the guys would buy year-old bodies or something like that. Older equipment. I know with Holman-Moody, if you had a Ford, you could go directly to them for all your suspension parts and engine parts and that kind of stuff. They had a limitless supply of new stuff, so they might run something once or twice and then sell it to Joe Blow down the street."

Golden Age?

A NASCAR statistical analysis attempts to prove that "racing since 1970 has become more competitive and more unpredictable than ever." Read NASCAR's contention, then Mark Aumann's opinion in Head2Head -- and weigh in with your take.

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Added Dale Inman, longtime crew chief to seven-time NASCAR champion Richard Petty: "The independents, like Elmo Langley and Buddy Arrington and James Hylton and all them, they kind or raced off what we had left over."

That disparity in equipment gave factory-backed teams an obvious advantage in competition, leading to seasons like the 1966 campaign dominated by manufacturer-supported drivers like Petty and David Pearson. "They had superior equipment and factory backing," said Hylton, who won two Cup-level races over the course of his career. "Let's put it this way: The odds were definitely in their favor."

Yet Inman bristles at the notion that Petty's success was all due to manufacturer help. Even then, manufacturers had their limits -- Wood Brothers, for instance, were backed by Ford, but still received engines and other factory parts from Holman-Moody. And then there were other times when the manufacturers left the sport, and weren't around to offer assistance.

"People who say that Richard won 200 races but he didn't have any competition are full of [bull]," Inman said. "You look at the top 50 best drivers that they picked, most of them are from that era. And we didn't always have factory help. They'd give you a car and fenders and stuff like that, but if we broke a spindle or we broke a ball joint, we'd go to the junkyard. If we had a Plymouth, we'd get a ball joint off a Chrysler that was bigger and make it work. The factories weren't doing that."

Even today, manufacturers aren't responsible for everything on a vehicle bearing its nameplate. Many of the parts on a Nextel Cup car come from sanctioned vendors, who supply wheels, axels, spindles, brakes, carburetors, radiators, seats and many other pieces. What manufacturers do supply is support, in the form of personnel, technological help, and cash. Kennedy points out that the Roush-Yates engine merger was negotiated by Ford, which saw two of its teams essentially doing the same thing, and brought about a compromise that its entire fleet -- even Robby Gordon's single-car operation -- could share in.

Years ago, when teams needed computer help but didn't have access to one, they called on the manufacturer. Now they do the same for wind-tunnel time or seven-post shaker rig access. Manufacturers are the ones who initially design engines and car bodies and submit them to NASCAR to approval. It's often not a matter of whether they get manufacturer help, but what they do with it that determines the level of a team's success.

"It's like the plug and the receptacle. You have to have information flowing in both directions, and it's up to teams sometime to have the resources to understand what Ford can offer to them. We try very hard to ensure fairness across the board with all our teams. That's the big difference when you're talking about the Holman-Moody days, when it was, we'll dish it out. Dearborn controls a lot more of that now," said Kennedy, referring to Ford's suburban Detroit headquarters.

"Anybody can buy a seven-post shaker and put a car on it. The question is, now what do you do? You have to have the guys who can say, 'This is what's happening with it,' and can analyze the data and say, 'Here's the direction we ought to go.' At the end of the day, they've got to have guys who can say, 'We have all the data, and we can apply it.' It's a little bit different world than it was in the '60s. There weren't templates. The box is a lot tighter now than is used to be, so the areas you have to work on, you have to be a lot more focused on."

Car owners played a part in this evolution, expanding their organizations to four and sometimes five vehicles, centralizing the sport's horsepower within a handful of factory-supported shops. Today, true independents are a rarity. Even Hylton, an independent to the core, had to give in -- when he tried to make the Daytona 500 earlier this season, he did so with a car and engineering help from Richard Childress Racing, a Chevrolet-backed team.

It's a move he could have made long ago, when Chrysler came calling with a factory-backed ride. He turned it down, wanting to make it on his own. Now, he wonders what might have happened had he chosen differently.

"I'd have had the best equipment, crews, and the whole bit," he said. "It was one of those things, when you're younger, you know everything. You think you're doing good . And I was. I was doing good then, getting top 10s and every now and then a third or fourth everywhere I went. I was on top of the world in my little world."