NASCAR's crew chiefs face many impossible decisions

You have to be willing to work the longest hours of anyone in the Nextel Cup garage area, and deal with crushing levels of expectation and stress. You're on the road so often you barely see your wife and kids, if you have a wife and kids in the first place. If the car's no good, you get blamed. If the driver's no good, you get fired. You're expected to find inventive ways of improving your vehicle's performance, but risk fines and suspensions if NASCAR thinks you've pushed things too far.

Why would anyone want to be a crew chief?

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It's the most thankless job in the sport, one that receives little of the glory when things go well, and all of the criticism when things go badly. Drivers helicopter in and out, sleep in expensive motorhomes, and are often on the way home within minutes of slipping out of the car. Crew chiefs stand in line at 6 a.m. waiting for the garage to open, spend long hours toiling over a clipboard or under the hood, and stay in hotel rooms just like everyone else.

That is, if they're not banned from the racetrack for fiddling with the Car of Tomorrow. Tony Eury Jr., Dale Earnhardt Jr.'s crew chief, is serving the final week of a six-week suspension handed down by NASCAR for messing with the rear wing brackets on the No. 8 car at Darlington. Chad Knaus and Steve Letarte, the respective crew chiefs for reigning champion Jimmie Johnson and points leader Jeff Gordon, will soon begin similar mandatory vacations for toying with the front fenders of their cars at Infineon Raceway.

It's another attempt by NASCAR to narrow the "gray areas," the slight tolerances within the technical rulebook that crew chiefs have traditionally tried to pry open to generate more speed. On the COT, those areas aren't supposed to exist. But crew chiefs will keep trying to find them, no matter how many fines, suspensions or points penalties NASCAR doles out. It's part of the culture of racing, going back to the beginning. And it's part of their job.

"The best crew chiefs, if you go back 1920, 1909, or whenever they started Indianapolis, are the guys who are pushing the hardest, looking for things in the most areas, and they're the guys who are getting rewarded at the end of the day by going to Victory Lane the most times in the year," said former crew chief Robbie Loomis, now vice president at Petty Enterprises. "You want ingenuity. You want your guy to keep pushing and trying to figure the best way to make that car go faster to make it easier for the driver. That's what we're working on." (Continued)