Before James Hylton began his first full season on NASCAR's top circuit in 1966, he bought a year-old Dodge Coronet from Cotton Owens' factory-backed team for $5,500. Hylton loaded the car onto a trailer, which he drove to Riverside, Calif., for the season-opening event. His total investment for that one race was $18,000.

That's the way it was back then for independents, those owners and drivers who ran their own teams without any direct support from car manufacturers. Carmakers supported the sport's top teams -- organizations like Holman-Moody or Petty Enterprises -- which in turn won the bulk of the races. Independents like Hylton, who often comprised half to three-fourths of a starting field, scrounged what equipment they could. When they won, it was considered an upset.

"The factory guys, they didn't have to worry about where they were going to get money to pay the crew," Hylton said. "Back then, we just got all my buddies together. About four of us, I think, went racing. We'd pick up help along the way. The factory guys, you didn't have to worry about who was going to pay your tire bill. It's strictly a money thing.

"A factory guy can relax and just concentrate on driving the racecar. He doesn't have to worry about where his next meal is going to come from, or whether he's going to get enough money to buy enough fuel to get across the United States."

Although manufacturers like Ford, Dodge and General Motors occasionally dropped out of NASCAR from time to time because of changes in corporate strategy or leadership, they played a key role in shaping the sport's competitive hierarchy during its formative years. That much is evident in the record books, which are full of races won by factory-backed drivers, while independents subsisted from one event to the next. And it stands in stark contrast to the NASCAR of today, where virtually every team in the Nextel Cup garage receives some form of factory support.

NASCAR has labeled the current era as its "golden age," citing a statistical analysis as showing closer competition now than ever before. More drivers lead races, more drivers finish on the lead lap, and finishes are closer than ever, according to data released by the sanctioning body. But if this truly is a golden age, then it was manufactured partly on the assembly lines of greater Detroit, by automobile companies who have spread their support dollars much more evenly than in decades past, and in turn helped fund more cars with an opportunity to win.

"You talk about factory support then versus now, we try to be very fair in making as many teams competitive as possible," said Kevin Kennedy, communications director for Ford Racing Technology. "A lot of that is going to be dependent on the teams with their engineering resources, and the money they have for personnel and other things. A lot of things are out of our hands. But what we try to do is be as fair as possible in terms of offering technical support and resources to them to help them get better."

It wasn't always like that. Years ago, manufacturers backed only the top teams. Those teams would sell their extra equipment to independents running the same nameplate, but the deal was far from equitable. Factory-backed teams ran cars in the current model year, while independents wound up with cars a year older.

"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."