It's easy to see why anyone would want to be a driver. You get to go fast for a living, you have access to high-performance street cars, you date beautiful women and you travel on private aircraft. No question, the job requires a wearying 10-month-a-year grind that can insulate you from the real world, and it's a deadly serious business when you strap into a 3,400-pound stock car that travels at tremendous speeds between two concrete walls. The risks, the demands and the pressure to perform are ever-present. Even so, to a large extent, it still seems like a dream life.

So yes, it's completely understandable why someone with the need for speed rooted in their genetic makeup would want to step into one of those figure-flattering firesuits and slide behind the wheel. But climb on top of the pit box? That's something else altogether. Being a crew chief is an invitation to the most difficult, most thankless job in NASCAR, and one that seems only to be getting tougher with time.

Bless the crew chiefs, who get none of the credit when things go right, and all of the blame when they go wrong. That's especially true now, in this era of fuel-mileage madness, when the slightest miscalculation or lapse in strategy can torpedo a good run and, by extension, potentially a team's championship chances, as well. We're not even three weeks into this Chase for the Sprint Cup, and already crew chief decisions have helped shape the title picture as we currently know it. One (Chad Knaus) got called out by his driver over the radio last week for cheerleading. Another (Steve Addington) was chastised by NASCAR for being late to inspection. More than a few have been left hanging their heads after fuel-mileage decisions gone awry.

At NASCAR's highest level, being a crew chief is an unforgiving career choice filled with relentless expectations and a to-do list that never gets any shorter. No question, drivers live in the same world and face the same pressures. But after the race, drivers go home. Maybe they check in at the shop once during the week, maybe they go test or take care of sponsor or media obligations. But to a certain extent, they can remove themselves from it. Crew chiefs can't. Crew chiefs oversee a seven-day-a-week operation where there are always new cars to prepare, always past performances to review, always some details -- like pit-road video or team radio communications, which some study on a weekly basis -- to be reviewed. The comparison to a head football coach, who sleeps in his office and eats takeout while his quarterback is off dating supermodels, is not too far off.

And yet, they can be completely overlooked -- which is what happened in 2009 when voters determined the list of nominees for the inaugural NASCAR Hall of Fame class, which despite the multiple-championship exploits of Ray Evernham and Dale Inman, was devoid of a crew chief. Thankfully Inman was later nominated, and even elected last year, though unforgivably the groundbreaking Evernham still can't make the cut. But that's the way it goes with crew chiefs, even great ones, who seem invisible until something goes wrong. This sport is unquestionably driver-centric, until somebody drops a lug nut, or not all the fuel gets in the car, or your team takes two tires when everybody else takes four. If crew chiefs are in the spotlight, it's usually for all the wrong reasons.

Just ask Mike Ford. The crew chief for Denny Hamlin has faced withering criticism ever since the penultimate race of the Chase last year in Phoenix, where Jimmie Johnson saved fuel to the end, Hamlin pitted, and a lead that had ballooned to 78 points over the course of the event was reduced to something small enough for Johnson to overcome the next week. What was supposed to become another run at a title this year has instead become a case in crisis management, with the No. 11 team forced to overcome all manner of obstacles just to squeak into the Chase. Not unsurprisingly, they were buried after the first week after a series of problems than began with a wheel left loose on pit road.

* Video: Hamlin's Chase off to tough start

And then last week at New Hampshire, Hamlin was one of several to run out of gas at the end. That seat on top of the pit box can be uncomfortable enough as it is, given that feedback from drivers can sometimes come in the form of non-stop complaining about the car, and every move is scrutinized by people who wouldn't know a sway bar if it hit them in the face. Mix in the heat of a championship race, and everything becomes magnified. It's natural for some to wonder if the first two weeks of this Chase are the beginning of the end between Hamlin and his crew chief. The driver, though, gave no such indications.

"We all know this is a performance business, and obviously you've got to be competitive and contend for race wins so everyone feels good about their job. I feel like Mike is the guy for me. I feel like he's done a great job. He won me eight races last year," Hamlin said this week on a conference call with reporters.

"Some of the things that we've had go wrong this year are crew chief-related, some of them are not. Most of them are not. Some of them are driver-related. It weighs on all of our shoulders equally, and I feel like he's kind of received a bit of a bad rap because of that. But I feel like he's ... kind of the backbone of this race team, and obviously if you made a change, it would take a long time to get back to where I feel like we're capable of running at this point right now. I think at times during the season we've gotten off track between the two of us, and I feel like these last four or five weeks the communication has been better. I feel like we were heading in the right direction, we've just had some things go wrong these first couple Chase races that makes it look worse than it really is."

No question, crew chiefs are ultimately responsible for everything under their command, a manifest that includes not only pit-road personnel but also team engineers and the number-crunchers whose job it is to divine the murky mathematics of fuel mileage. But a crew chief is not omnipotent. Many of the problems that have plagued Hamlin this season, like pit-road gaffes or engine breakdowns, are clearly beyond Ford's control. Of course, that doesn't mean he won't get blamed for them, given his position on the organizational flowchart. That's the nature of the business. But the No. 11 team's problems have been so varied, it's tough to pin them all on one person, unless you're of the belief that the only way to rectify such a situation is to clean house and start over. On that subject, Hamlin doesn't agree.

"There's been some weeks that it ultimately goes on my shoulders, and there's some weeks where it's things back at the shop that need to be improved on," he said. "Until we have one specific thing that we need to work on and can identify as a problem, I can't see changing much. But I feel like we have a good group of guys. I can win a championship with Mike -- I really and truly do believe that. But we've just got to work to get our ship righted. It seems like our communication at some point in the year got stale. I felt like we've turned that around this last month or so, and we had three good finishes going into the Chase, and of course we had flat tires and a loose wheel [in] the first Chase race. That's stuff Mike can't help. ... New Hampshire, fuel mileage, it's 50-50. It's one of those things where maybe I used up too much gas, maybe it was too risky of a call. But either way, it weighs on us equally when we don't run well. So I'm not going to completely throw him under the bus."

* Sound Off: Hamlin on hopes for rest of season

Ford isn't alone here. Knaus, Addington, Steve Letarte, Dave Rogers and Alan Gustafson are among those who also have watched best-laid plans unravel to certain degrees, and the Chase only is just beginning. With four 1.5-mile tracks still ahead on the schedule, plenty of potential headaches remain over stretching fuel runs to the limit. The only solace may be that Dover International Speedway, site of Sunday's third round, doesn't typically lend itself to producing fuel-mileage finishes.

"I don't think that this will be a fuel-mileage race at all," Brad Keselowski told reporters Friday at the track. "The tire fall-off here, looking at our records, is over a second. With that kind of fall-off, I don't think that it will apply."

Whew. Congrats, crew chiefs, you get a one-week reprieve.

Or maybe not.

"To be honest with you, it can lend itself to being a fuel-mileage race," Kyle Busch countered at Dover. "Anything can happen in these things and the way they play out. You go about 80 to 90 laps here on fuel, so if the race plays out ... and you pit at Lap 300 because there is a caution out and it goes green the rest of the way, there's going to be some guys that may stretch it, and other guys that may just do a fuel stop or two tires or something like that. Anything can happen."

Yes it can. And when it does, no doubt crew chiefs will be right in the middle of it, managing a constant flow of information, making snap decisions on which the outcome of the race and the championship may ride, dealing with a workload and a level of pressure that only their peers can truly appreciate. It shapes up as just another Sunday afternoon for the guys who have the toughest jobs in NASCAR.

The opinions expressed are solely those of the writer.