There are times when Mondays and Tuesdays are the worst parts of Robin Pemberton's job. Those are the days when NASCAR's vice president for competition has to dish out penalties for violations discovered during the previous race weekend, alerting drivers, car owners or crew chiefs of point deductions or monetary fines headed their way.

“

You get hit with a penalty right now, your Chase hopes are going to go out the window. Everybody is being smart and saying, we can't be on the other side of that line and push NASCAR.

”

STEVE ADDINGTON

"I really can't express enough my feelings that the last thing we want to do on Mondays and Tuesdays is [assess] penalties," said Pemberton, a former crew chief on NASCAR's premier series. "That is not enjoyable. We look to race. We look to have good races, all that stuff. The worst thing in the world is dealing with penalties on Mondays and Tuesdays."

Now, though, those opening days of each week may be a little easier on Pemberton and the other top cops in NASCAR's Concord, N.C., office. Not too long ago, it seemed NASCAR was handing out its standard penalty for violations found on the new Sprint Cup car -- a 100-point deduction, a $100,000 fine and a six-week suspension for the crew chief -- with regularity. Between the vehicle's debut in March of 2006 and the summer event at Daytona International Speedway in 2008, eight teams were hit with the maximum for violations ranging from illegally mounted rear wings to unapproved bumper covers to front fenders pulled out a little too far. A number of lesser penalties, which included probation rather than suspension for the crew chief, were also assessed.

These days, those violations have all but disappeared. Although NASCAR continues to hand out fines and suspensions for a variety of offenses, it's been almost a year since inspectors have discovered an infraction on the new chassis worthy of a major penalty involving suspension. The last one came prior to last year's Coke Zero 400, when the roof on the No. 1 car of Martin Truex Jr. failed to meet specifications. Truex and car owner Teresa Earnhardt were each penalized 150 points, crew chief Kevin Manion was fined $100,000, and Manion and car chief Gary Putnam were each suspended for six weeks. That infraction was discovered in initial inspection on July 3, 2008, and the penalties were handed out five days later.

NASCAR hasn't suspended a crew chief for a new car penalty since. Have crew chiefs been scared straight? Have they quit trying to work the gray areas on a car encased in a tight, technological box? Have they figured out the extent of the vehicle's limits? The answer may be a little bit of everything.

"I think the crew chiefs know the continuity of keeping a team together and keeping a crew chief together for the entire year, with no vacations. They know the value of not having distractions and things like that going on," Pemberton said. "I think we've got enough time under our belt that everybody understands how to build cars. It isn't just us and our penalties, even though they are high. It's everybody working together, the teams and us. We're doing a great job of inspecting, they're doing a great job of staying in bounds. You'll go through a time like that, and hopefully not, but more than likely things will change. You'll never know when you'll go through a rash like that again."

“

The body things that guys worked on in the past were to get aero balance shifts and to get different numbers on side forces and things of that nature. This car has those features built into it, so you don't have to go outside the rules to achieve some of those numbers.

”

ROBIN PEMBERTON

And yet, a common understanding between teams and NASCAR may not be the only reason crew chiefs seem to be toeing the line. Given the current economic situation and how difficult it is to find sponsors, some teams are being a little more careful to ensure they don't do anything to embarrass or scare away the companies adorning the sides of their cars. It's not the $100,000 fine they're worried about, but the stigma of a 100-point loss.

"I think it has to do with the economy more than it has to do with the car," said Todd Berrier, crew chief on Casey Mears' No. 07 Chevy. "Take Richard Childress Racing, you think we could stand $100,000 and 100 points, and a sponsorship to walk and it cost you $20 million? It's the economics of the business at this point more than anything else. We're sitting there with companies that have too many people and can barely make ends meet, and Cup sponsorships and things like that ... At the end of the day, you can't take chances that in turn would cost your company millions of dollars and cost people their jobs. That's in essence what it's about at this point in time."

Still, if Berrier or any other crew chief wanted to try and push the envelope a little more, they probably could. The difference is that these days, they don't want to. Nobody wants to give their sponsor a black eye, nobody wants to risk losing the bonus money that would come with a Chase berth, nobody wants to risk losing a job in an industry that's already been devastated by layoffs.

"I have a firm grasp knowing that I'm not going to do anything to cost the company any money or any points, anything like that. That's the main thing," Berrier said.

"When you're looking at all these companies, there's a lot less people in this garage than there were a year ago, and a lot more people outside the door trying to get in. There are probably 10 people wanting jobs to every one that has one in this thing now. At the end of the day, everyone has to protect, play a little bit on defense at that point. It probably doesn't make for the best of scenarios when it comes to being more competitive and things like that, but the most important things are that our families eat and we keep our sponsors and we don't do anything that will affect our companies in a detrimental way."

And then there's the Chase, the year-end playoff system that looms over everything, especially in a season where so many teams are in contention and the point margins around the 12th-place cutoff are so tight. Teams vying for one of those coveted berths don't want to incur a 100-point penalty that could doom their chances.

"I think with the penalties and all, everybody is working inside that box and staying within the rules and not trying to push any limits, because making this Chase is so important," said Steve Addington, crew chief on Kyle Busch's No. 18 Toyota. "You get hit with a penalty right now, your Chase hopes are going to go out the window. Everybody is being smart and saying, we can't be on the other side of that line and push NASCAR. If we lost 100 points, we could go from fifth to out of the Chase. It's a lot tighter battle right now, and if you get knocked out, there are a lot of good cars and drivers here right outside the top 12. So everybody is being a little bit smarter and watching what goes on with the race cars."

Many of those penalties assessed over the first two seasons with the current car were the result of teams trying to find out where the vehicle's technological limits were, Berrier believes. The car looks different, is built differently, and is inspected differently than its predecessor. A crew chief may have had habits or tactics that were fine with the old car, but earned him a six-week vacation with the new one.

"It was figuring out where the limits were. There are so many things in that rule book. You couldn't build this car and come here just having a rule book. It's impossible. You still have to come here and go through the motions and understand what's what. It's all a matter of how what's on paper translates into real life," Berrier said.

"When something starts new, you've got to realize how they check it, what pushes their buttons and what doesn't. Once you figure that out, you operate every week on the premise, they're going to look for this, they're not going to look for that. It's just getting used to the system. Certain things you got by with for 20 years before this car came along, whether you were working on a spoiler or working on kicking out the nose or whatever it was, they were blind to. You come in here originally with that same mentality, and all of the sudden they start slapping your hand for it and you've got to realize you have to go in a different direction."

Pemberton doesn't necessarily buy that argument. From the beginning, teams were told that they were building cars under a completely different set of rules, which included things like pre-certification of Sprint Cup chassis at the NASCAR Research and Development Center, built-in features like the rear wing that replaced body areas that crew chiefs once finessed, and template tolerances that have dropped from a quarter-inch or half-inch to thousandths of an inch.

"It's just a tight set of rules," Pemberton said. "I don't know what the right or wrong term would be, because anytime you say the rules are too tight, guys perceive that to mean that they can't work on their cars. When in fact, they can. The body things that guys worked on in the past were to get aero balance shifts and to get different numbers on side forces and things of that nature. This car has those features built into it, so you don't have to go outside the rules to achieve some of those numbers."

Whatever the reason, it's working. On a car with miniscule tolerances, the fact that no Sprint Cup crew chief has been suspended in nearly a year seems to clearly indicate that the garage area has fallen into line. No one wants to get walloped with a 100-point penalty with so much -- sponsorships, Chase berths, even employment in a down market -- at stake.

"We don't risk it, because that's the Gibbs policy. They don't want to be hit with any penalties or anything like that," said Addington, who works for Joe Gibbs Racing. "But right now, it's so tight, I don't think anybody in this garage area wants to go down that road and push the limits to see. I know I don't. We just try to come here and work in that box NASCAR gives us."