They have formed something of a brotherhood, these men who once built race cars and race engines and ran race shops, and now have nowhere to go. Once in a while several of these out-of-work mechanics and fabricators and engineers will get together, to eat dinner or watch a ballgame or just talk. And every now and then, a familiar conversation topic will arise.

Does anyone even realize we still exist?

It's easy to see why so many of them feel that way. It's been more than a year since the "Black Monday" layoffs that put an estimated 1,200 NASCAR team employees out of work, a recession-driven purge that followed the 2008 season. Now, with a new campaign dawning and the Daytona 500 but a month away, the garage area is considerably leaner -- there are fewer teams, and those that survived have learned to make do with fewer people. But the starting fields are still full, and the top drivers still pull down seven-figure salaries, and the races still go on and the champagne still sprays in Victory Lane. Although sponsorship is far from the sure thing it once was, it all creates a perception of a sport that has weathered the storm.

Don Gemmell knows better. Last week he posted 20 more resumes to dontcheckup.com, the Web site he founded to lend hope and support to men and women put out of work by sponsorship shortages, team mergers, or other factors that have adversely affected the industry over the last year. There were the roughly 200 people laid off when Richard Petty Motorsports, which will field Roush-powered Fords this coming season, shut down its engine shop late last year. There are the occasional layoffs by larger, more successful, seemingly more secure organizations, which aren't getting the sponsorship value they once were, and are reducing their payroll as a result.

And then there are the people still out of work a year later, men and women for whom auto racing was all they had ever known, people who are subsisting on government-supplied unemployment checks and supplemental health insurance, and are beginning to realize the industry they once called home may never have room for them again. A few find contract work. A few got hired only to get laid off again. A year after Black Monday, it's become increasingly clear that the sport has endured a painful type of correction, and that the expansive personnel rolls once so indicative of NASCAR teams may be a permanent relic of the past.

"We're getting a growing number of people leaving the area," said Gemmell, a former production scheduler at Dale Earnhardt Inc. who, along with hundreds of others, lost his job the week after the 2008 season and has yet to find permanent work. "And some of whom have called and said, 'Remove all my information from the site, because we're leaving the house.' We have had about a dozen guys who have walked away from their homes. They can't stay and they can't afford to keep going, so some of them have decided to make that choice. There are some drastic changes that people are making."

Gemmell's Web site, which he designed with the help of a computer-savvy neighbor, posts resumes for potential employers and provides information on everything from insurance to real estate to continuing education. For former race shop employees, it's become something of a lifeboat. There are small shreds of positive news -- a 20-week extension on unemployment benefits because of the large percentage of people out of work in North Carolina, an eight-month extension on the subsidy for federal health insurance coverage, a real estate professional who has worked some magic and helped some people save their homes, former track promoter Humpy Wheeler putting one fabricator to work on a personal project.

But the vast majority of these displaced workers are still locked in a day-to-day struggle that's clearly wearying. To call it hopeless may be unfair; these are proud people who understand that their industry is performance-driven and inherently unstable, and many of them have lost jobs before. The difference is that before, there was always another job to go to. They were always just a telephone call away from more work. That's no longer the case, and the reality is sobering. The longer they're unemployed, the more resigned some become. Gemmell can see it. You can almost hear it in his voice.

"Because of what I started with my intentions, I get these phone calls. Guys are just calling to listen to somebody to say, 'Tell me something good.' It gets harder and harder to inspire or pump up or give somebody the good spin they're looking for," he said. "Some of them quit calling because there's just not much more I can say. And some of them made the switch quicker than others, but a lot of them are coming to the point where they're saying, 'This is not an option anymore. Going back to this industry is not an option anymore. I have to do something.'

"I'm not a racer, but a significant number of the people on that Web site, you could put 'racer' next to them, because that's what they do. That's what they've lived their lives for. And they're coming to the realization that they're not a racer anymore, that they've got to go do something else."

Others forge ahead through desperate times. There was an opening for a crew chief's position in California, but it offered no moving costs. The shop of Kyle Busch's new Camping World Truck Series team has a mailbox out front just for resumes. Gemmell tells a story of a displaced worker who finally wrangled an interview with someone he had worked with and known for years. But in this environment, nothing is automatic -- his former teammate may have known everything about him, but still requested a resume. Some find scraps of work on the fringes of the industry, or find something that pays them under the table and will do anything to hold onto it.

"A guy I talked to ... his words were, 'I've taken the attitude of, I'm going to go to work, I'm going to do whatever they ask me, I'm going to do it with a good attitude, and I'm going to go home and I'm not going to care about it,'" Gemmell recalled. "But the point was later made that that approach just sucks the lifeblood out of what made this sport what it is, the people behind the scenes putting the hours in without being paid, and putting all the hours in at the track. When the pendulum swings, the majority of the people are just taking that attitude. Not that they're going to do less of a job. Not that they're less of a person. But their whole approach to what their life is, is different."

Any sort of rebound has yet to occur. It may never happen. While a few people have found work, it hasn't been in numbers large enough to make a difference. Men with 15, 20, 25 years of experience in race shops are finding themselves priced out of the business. Big teams are feeling the pinch because some sponsors aren't renewing at the financial levels they once paid. You would hope that, a year after Black Monday, things would be better. If anything, the opposite has occurred. Being unemployed was bad enough. Now they feel forgotten. "This has been a continuing slide down the hill," Gemmell said.

He knows this first-hand. Gemmell's role as a motivator and an information source to many of his brethren belies the fact that he was one of those purged in the great contraction following the 2008 season, and that he's suffering just like everybody else. And then late last year, his wife, who also worked in the industry, lost her job. Like most in his situation, he has no choice but to come to grips with his fate and try somehow to move forward.

"This is all being planned out by somebody bigger than us," he said. "We're just keeping our ears and eyes open for whatever doors may open, and continuing to do some good while we're in this period. We're not sitting around doing nothing."