It's 3 a.m. at Richmond International Raceway, and the crowd of 108,000 that watched Denny Hamlin win the night before has long since filed out of the grandstands. Sprint Cup team transporters are on the road home, top drivers probably already there thanks to the convenience of private jet travel. The only things remaining at the .75-mile oval are employees from the company that transports pit boxes from one race track to another, a few reporters straggling out of the media center, and the detritus of the previous evening's competition.

There are empty plastic water bottles, crushed from being stepped on or run over. There are flattened tubes of glue. There is the occasional cigarette butt or energy bar wrapper, the latter tossed about by a light wind. And there are lug nuts, dozens of them strewn about Richmond's long, curving pit road, their yellow coatings making them shine like golden nuggets under the still-bright stadium lights.

They seem like the completely superfluous pieces of equipment, these 1-inch-wide, 2-ounce steel hexagons that top teams use once and often leave behind. Fans scarf them up, sometimes giving them a second life as a paperweight or a keychain fob.

And yet, races, seasons, and championships can turn on them, just as they rotate around a stud to hold a wheel in place. It seems beyond comprehension that something as simple as a lug nut, a car part that you can hold in your hand and buy for less than $1.50, can determine a NASCAR title like the one that paid Jimmie Johnson $7.2 million last year. But it's happened before.

Greg Biffle's title hopes went up in smoke at Texas in 2005 when loose lug nuts caused him to spin out.

And given the razor-thin point gaps that are manufactured by the Chase playoff system, there always looms the possibility of it happening again. No part is too small, too insignificant, or too incapable of inflicting catastrophic damage to a driver's hopes of hoisting that large silver trophy in South Florida five weeks from now.

Just ask Greg Biffle. In 2005 the Roush Fenway Racing driver went to Texas Motor Speedway, the eighth of 10 Chase events, just 43 points behind leader Tony Stewart in the standings. Early in the race, he pitted along with everyone else after caution came out for debris. Fewer than 20 laps later, he was running third when he reported a vibration over the radio. He was forced to come back in for a tire change under green, lost a lap, and would up finishing 20th. The culprit? Loose lug nuts on the left-rear tire. Biffle left Texas 122 points behind Stewart, and wound up losing the championship by 35.

"It's really tough to deal with those things," Biffle said. "Dumb things can happen, and people can make simple mistakes. You can make huge mistakes, but the reality is you've got to deal with it and go on. When it happens, you have to try and recover the best you can from it. You've got 10 weeks to have to be flawless and every one of us know that, so all of us have prepared the best we can to make 10 perfect weeks. But it's tough to deal with. It really, really, truly is tough to deal with when something like that happens, and you never know if that's going be the deciding factor until you're down to the very last race."

That's what one, small lug nut, combined with haste and human error, can do. Kurt Busch had a wheel break at Homestead in 2004, although it occurred at a point on the race track where he was able to roll onto pit road, get the wheel changed, and win the title by the slimmest of margins. His younger brother, Kyle, wasn't as fortunate at New Hampshire in 2008, when a snapped heim joint -- a rear-end suspension part that costs about $20 -- essentially scuttled his championship hopes. Stewart has spent much of this Chase clawing back from the damage caused at New Hampshire by a loose axle cap, which runs about $12 online.

"You have to cover all your bases," Kurt Busch said. "You have to go through things with a fine-toothed comb and learn from each of those past experiences. We broke a water pump at Pocono earlier this year and I looked at [crew chief] Pat [Tryson] and said, 'Have you ever broken a water pump?' He's been racing for 30 years and I've been racing 15, 16 years, I've never heard of a water pump breaking. You find those kinds of things happen. You hope that they don't happen when all the money is on the line which is the Chase."

Everything about NASCAR's playoff system is huge, from the pressure to the media scrutiny to the race-day pomp and circumstance and the bonus checks waiting at the end. But there's also a bedeviling incongruity to it all, the lingering knowledge that small mistakes or small pieces of equipment can impact championship hopes on a massive scale. In the Chase, the little things mean a lot. Even something as little as a lug nut.

Autostock

Daniel Blizzard, left, and John Wallace are front-tire mates on the No. 31 car.

WEATHER STRIPPING AND PAM

It's 11 a.m. at New Hampshire Motor Speedway, and Daniel Blizzard is on glue duty. Every race day, it's one of his jobs -- take a tube of glue and affix the lugs nuts to the sets of tires laid out two-by-two at the rear of the pit stall. Blizzard, the front-tire changer on the No. 31 car of driver Jeff Burton, glues nuts onto the front tires while rear-tire changer Terry Spalding does the same to the rear tires. This needs to be done about three hours before the green flag, because it takes that long for the adhesive to set. After he finishes with one tire, he uses a metal plate to press down on all five lug nuts and set them flat. Then he covers them with a plastic disc.

"We cover them up just so people wont pick them up," says John Wallace, Burton's front-tire carrier and Blizzard's teammate of six years. "That's plainly the reason why. People come by and say, 'Oh, I want a lug nut,' and they'll take them right off the wheel."

Crew members ususally only get noticed when they make a mistake.

Blizzard looks up from his work. "We've had it happen," he says with a wry grin.

NASCAR teams, particularly those running for a championship, can be a somewhat paranoid, superstitious lot. Organizations with drivers in the Chase aren't fond of talking about things that can go wrong, even though the management of those inevitable failures will shape the outcome. Burton's crew isn't in the Chase this year, but they know the drill. They've been there three times, even seen their driver leading the points with five races remaining in 2006. They understand the pressure and the intensity of the playoff atmosphere, and how to handle it, and the role even little things can play.

Check that. There are no little things. Like the glue. It's not really even glue at all. It's Norton weather stripping, the same thing you'd apply around windows to keep the cold out. They've tried other types of adhesives, but some got too stiff in the cold or too runny in the heat. Some varied in consistency from wheel to wheel or even lug nut to lug nut. So they settled on the weather stripping, as a lot of teams do.

This is not a small decision -- since the nut will stop at the top of the thread and the wheel will go all the way to the back during a tire change, the adhesive has to be able to stretch that inch-long distance and yet still hold the lug nut in place. Pit-stop speeds and race outcomes can be determined by a tube of adhesive you can buy for $5 at the hardware store.

But that's the way it is back here behind the pit stall, where nothing is left to chance. Race day brings an orchestration of small, preventative measures designed to keep little pieces and parts performing at their best. The rim around the center wheel opening, for instance, is smoothed out by an abrasive pad attached to the end of a drill.

Sometimes when Goodyear technicians put the tires on the wheels, their machines will inadvertently gouge the rim, which is designed to fit snugly around the wheel hub when Wallace put the tire on the car. So they smooth it out to remove any burrs or nicks, and apply a graphite aerosol spray. It's all in an effort to get the tire on the car as smoothly as possible.

The attention to detail is staggering. Some tires, by nature of their force characteristics, will facilitate a looser or tighter race car. The tires are laid out behind the pit box in exact order they are to be used, with say the tighter ones (to offset a looser race car in the hotter part of the day) in front and the looser ones (to offset a tighter race car in the cooler part of the day) toward the back.

They use a wire brush attached to the end of a drill to remove any old glue or rust from the five openings that the wheel studs will pass through. They wipe down the wheel with brake cleaner, because unlike glass cleaner, it doesn't leave the kind of film that might compromise the seal between glue and metal. At tracks that produce a lot of brake dust, they'll spray the back of the wheels with something more domestic -- the non-stick cooking product Pam.

"It collects the brake dust and holds it to the wheel," Wallace says. "It doesn't get all of it, but it maybe gets 50 percent of it. When the changer starts hitting lug nuts and all that air is coming out of his gun, there's a huge cloud of brake dust. The smaller you can make that cloud, the better he can see. You go to every team up and down pit road, and I'll guarantee you they've got a can of Pam cooking spray."

The lug nuts themselves, made by MSI Racing Products of Troutman, N.C., come in a small cardboard box with a dab of yellow paint on the top to denote the color. Every lug nut to be used in the race is passed by hand over a wheel stud, just to make sure it turns freely. They're supposed to roll on easily. "If you can spin it on with your hand, it will go on with the gun," Wallace says.

They're also tested with a tap, which cleans out any debris in the threading. The rule is, the lug nuts have to be on the car when it leaves the pit box. Complicating the process is the fact that NASCAR mandated longer wheel studs this season for safety reasons. What used to take five or six rotations with the air gun now takes 11 or 12. For some teams, that was a difficult change, as evidenced by the spate of loose lug nuts seen earlier in the season.

The degree of preparation is meticulous, all of it designed to eliminate anything that might go wrong. But sometimes, it still does.

"Anytime you put a wheel on and they hit the first lug nut, the wheel kind of moves unless it's all the way against the back of the hub," says Wallace, a native of Winston-Salem, N.C., who's been in the business for 10 years. "So you hit five, that first one more than likely is going to be a little bit loose. It'll be tight, but it may not torque the same as the others. But if you have another one on there with the threads messed up, now you have two lug nuts loose. Now you're getting into having a loose wheel and possibly wrecking, and you've got bigger problems than just a loose lug nut. But it all starts with the lug nut."

The lug nut: NASCAR's golden nugget.

ONE AND DONE

It's 4:30 p.m. at Kansas Speedway, and the third Chase race of the 2009 season has just come to an end. Along pit road, the second- through fifth-place drivers are standing outside of their cars doing media interviews, as directed by NASCAR. The scene is a gaggle of bobbing cameras and microphone flags. Shoved up against the pit wall, along with the rest of the debris that crewmen have swept to the back of their pit stalls, are lug nuts -- hundreds of them, or so it appears, their bight yellow coating standing out against the bare concrete. Their competitive life cycle is complete. They've been used for only one race.

As hard and as durable as they are, lug nuts get pretty beat up. They get scratched, the rim around the center opening gets nicked, the corners where the air gun grips them get rounded off. For those reasons, top teams use them only for one race. Many are left behind for fans to pocket as souvenirs. Burton's team brings old ones to the race track and sells them for $1 each to benefit the American Children's Home, a nonprofit based in Lexington, N.C. Some teams take the old ones back to the shop and use them for practice, although top organizations appear to be doing that less and less.

When it's time to get new ones, most times teams turn to MSI Racing Products, a company located between Statesville and Mooresville, N.C., that handles the lug nut needs of about 90 percent of the teams on the Sprint Cup circuit and 80 percent of the organizations on the Nationwide tour. Every week, MSI ships between 12,000 and 15,000 lug nuts, which typically run less than $1.50 apiece depending on distributor costs and the price of steel. Last year, MSI sold 600,000 lug nuts.

The company started about 14 years ago with a machine shop, president Curtis Goodman said, and began making lug nuts because teams complained that those available at the time were too soft. If a lug nut is too soft, the corners dent and an air gun doesn't spin it as easily.

"It took a few years to establish the hardness that 90 percent of the teams like," Goodman said. "They don't want them too soft, they don't want them too hard. If it's too hard, they can wear out a pit socket [in an air gun], which are $70, $80 apiece right now. It took us a year or so to work with teams to establish that hardness that most tire changers like."

Even so, they weren't an easy sell at first. Teams were using lug nuts they could buy for 25 cents each, and blanched at the idea of paying more. Even today, it's not unusual for the purchasing department of a race team to sometimes try and cut corners by buying a cheaper lug nut. They often change their mind when such a decision costs them finishing positions, and therefore money, in a race.

At MSI, lug nuts begin life as 12-foot lengths of hexagonal steel bar stock, which are cut up and have the threads and chambers machined into them. The finished lug nuts are dipped into a yellow coating, and then spun in two directions so the excess is shaken off. The yellow color isn't just a paint -- it's a performance coating that includes lubricants such as Teflon, designed to make the lug nut easier to spin onto the wheel. Touch one, and its splotchy yellow skin feels almost greasy, like the surface of a non-stick frying pan.

MSI also makes some pink-colored lug nuts, because some teams mark theirs with a pink pen. The company once experimented with blue, which proved tough to see against the black wheel hub. But yellow remains the standard.

They can be elusive little suckers. Lug nuts bring with them a host of potential problems -- they can get knocked off, they can get dropped, they can be left loose. Tire changers can accidently bump a lug nut with their gun and knock it off the wheel. A tire carrier can put the wheel on crooked, which forces the stud through the nut crooked, which can knock the nut off.

Lug nuts on the left front can be left loose because of the degree of camber used on that side of the car. A driver has a strip of tape on the index point of his steering wheel to help ensure that tires are straight when he reaches his pit box. But if he's off a little, tires can bump a fender during a change, and lug nuts can go spinning to the ground.

Every once in a while, lug nuts get stuck in the socket of an air gun, which may be a little too old or have a small piece of debris inside. "There's nothing you can do about it but try and hit it on the ground and try to get it out, or hit another lug nut, and hope that pressure loosens it up," Wallace said. "It sucks when that happens."

Likewise, every tire changer or carrier gets goose bumps when he hears a driver complain over the radio about a vibration. Like Biffle at Texas in 2005, it often means a wheel has been left loose.

Crewmen have learned little tricks in an attempt to minimize problems. Wallace has two studs that screw into the back of one of his gloves, and an extra lug nut fits perfectly on each. Some keep an extra lug nut on their helmet, too. Nobody wants to be chasing a loose lug nut as its bouncing around on the ground.

At Atlanta in 2005, Wallace and Blizzard were working a stop when the tire changer inadvertently knocked a lug nut off the left front. Wallace pulled one off his glove, Blizzard kept up his pattern with his Ingersoll-Rand Thunder Gun, and the stop was still quick enough to pick up two spots.

"The thing is, don't try to hurry," said Blizzard, a native of Mt. Airy, Md., who broke into racing with an ARCA team in 2000. "If you have a mistake on the right side, you want to fix your mistake, come to the left side, and do the same thing you're always going to do. You don't want to speed up, think, 'Oh, I'm in a rush,' because all you're going to do is complicate it and make a mistake. Those are just things you learn as you do it."

Team members work on Kyle Busch's car at New Hampshire last year.

THE HUMAN ELEMENT

It's immediately following the 2008 Chase opener at New Hampshire, and Jimmy Makar is walking the race track. Like an investigator on an accident scene, the senior vice president at Joe Gibbs Racing is looking for debris. Earlier in the day, a suspension piece called a heim joint had broken on Kyle Busch's car. The results would be devastating, opening the door to a points plunge that would knock the regular-season leader out of the championship hunt. But right now, all Makar is concerned with is finding small shards of metal.

More than a year later, the mystery has long since been solved. Yes, it was indeed a broken part that began Busch's plummet from the top of the Sprint Cup standings. But the reason behind the failure was something else: human error.

"We realized what happened," Makar says now. "It was a combination of mental error, it was panic trying to do some things we shouldn't have been doing before the race ever started. They got themselves behind in their preparation of the car, they were trying to make last-minute changes, they were late instead of being done on time, they were trying to get it done before they got penalized for not getting to inspection on time. One little thing rolled it into all these other things going wrong. That's why you don't over analyze, over plan, overdo. You just do what you do every week. That's what we do."

Kurt Busch managed to win the 2004 title by eight points.

There's no question, parts sometimes break. That's essentially what happened to Kurt Busch in 2004, when he overcame the broken wheel at Homestead that nearly derailed his championship effort. But too often, there's a human element behind the failure, the result of haste or panic or simply trying too hard. In the Chase era, the two most glaring examples of title hopes doomed by mechanical problems -- Biffle in 2005 and Kyle Busch last year -- were ultimately the result of human error. Stewart's loose axle cap this season at New Hampshire, which cost him 64 points, was caused by the same thing.

As pressure-packed as the Chase is, it's no time for pep talks or requests for extra effort. More often than not, trying too hard -- well-intentioned as it may be -- becomes the source of problems. Lug nuts can be left loose by tire changers trying too hard. Car parts can be left vulnerable by mechanics trying too hard. The way to get faster, the old racing adage goes, is to go slower. As difficult as it may be to believe, the final 10 races must be approached as business as usual. At this point in the season, any kind of change can be more trouble than it's worth.

"You go too fast, you knock lug nuts off. You try something different, you get into potential problems with parts and pieces. That was a mental human error last year [with the heim joint]. It wasn't a part problem, it was a mental problem on a mechanic's part. It wasn't that the part necessarily failed. So mental errors will get you here in the Chase. That's either by over-thinking, by overdoing, or by being careless," Makar said.

"You don't change because you're in the Chase. You don't start looking at things differently, you don't start doing things differently, you don't start being extra careful. You should have been doing that all along, and that should be the reason you're in the Chase ...

"Where you get in trouble is when you start focusing more on those things than what you've been doing. I think you take your game mentally to a place it shouldn't be when you start focusing on things you already haven't been working on all year long. To me, you win with what got you here. You don't really change up anything. If you had a particular problem over the course of the year, you should have fixed it by now."

That's why Blizzard admits that he doesn't pay much attention to the race. While the cars are circling the track, he sits on a tire at the back of the pit stall, or leans against the box and takes a nap. He's not being lazy. He just doesn't want to get caught up in the excitement or the emotion of the race, and have it affect his performance. He wants every pit stop, whether it's practice or the final laps at Homestead, to feel the same.

"I don't get involved in the excitement of the race, because that changes your mood so much," he said. "Obviously I pay attention to where we are on the race track, and the guys [pitting] in front of us and behind us ... But as far as if we're running 25th or fifth or leading, you don't want to get caught up in all that.

"I have the same routine every time a caution comes out or when we're going to do a pit stop under a green flag, as far as getting up on the wall and going through my little deal with myself and John. I just try to do every pit stop the same every time. You work on doing that consistently the same every time, you're going to produce good pit stops. You're going to be accurate and consistent. It doesn't matter whether you're running 20th or you're running first. That's the way I look at it."

He took the same approach two years ago, when Burton was leading the points with five races to go. "What you did the whole year getting you there has got to work the rest of the year," Blizzard said. "There's no reason to get all amped up -- we're leading the points, or we're in the Chase, or let's try to do this or do this, let's go faster. You just try to do the same thing every time and be consistent. That's what gets you there. You don't want to change a bunch of stuff up after what's gotten you there has worked."

There are occasions when parts do break. But Makar said that's happening less and less, because teams are better with metallurgy, and are more conscious about making sure that parts don't have too many miles on them. Top teams also make more of their own parts, relying less on vendors, whose quality control, personnel and specifications they can't oversee. Even something like wheel spindles, which most teams used to outsource, are being built more and more in-house.

It's another method of removing a variable, just like a tire carrier smoothing the inside of a wheel or testing a lug nut to ensure it spins freely. It's getting to the point where there's only one variable that race teams cannot control -- the human element. It was a tire changer who left lug nuts loose on that fateful stop at Texas four years ago, in a championship race Biffle would ultimately lose by 35 points. It's not difficult for many of the crewmen along pit road to envision themselves in his place.

"I think it was the first Richmond race this year that Denny Hamlin dominated, and their front changer had some lug nuts pop off on the right front," Blizzard said. "I don't know if he knocked them off or they popped off or how it worked, but they went back and circled that guy on TV. You feel bad for him, because you're like man, he just got called out two or three different times on TV, and Hamlin couldn't make it back up through there and win the race. Yeah, you feel bad. I've been that guy, and it's not fun. It's not fun at all."

"The thing I've always got to remind myself is, I'm human. I'm not a robot," added Wallace. "That's kind of the approach that I like to take toward it. I'm not saying that making a mistake is OK, and brushing it off. But if it's not a consistent mistake, if it's something that happens once a year, twice a year, you've got to let that stuff roll off. It happens. We're all human."