But when the sanctioning body announces for two straight weeks that it will take the tires from the SHR No. 4 as part of a routine audit, eyebrows raise and questions start circulating — especially when the speculation swirls about teams altering their standard Goodyears. Rodney Childers, the car’s crew chief, has grown frustrated by the extra attention, but he’s still laughing some of it off, taking it as a compliment.

"Honestly, I’m flattered," Childers said with a grin at the back of his team’s hauler. "I love it."

Harvick leads the NASCAR Sprint Cup standings by 28 points, a significant gap heading into only the sixth race of the season, on Sunday at Martinsville Speedway. Harvick’s run of finishing first or second stands intact at eight races, stretching back to last season, and he’s the only multiple winner thus far in 2015.

With all the success and accolades, it’s natural that the class of the field would get the lion’s share of scrutiny. But Childers calls it simply the cost of doing business.

"I don’t think everybody realizes that they’ve taken our tires 17 times in the last 18 months," Childers said. "Every time we finish first or second, our car goes back to the R&D Center with the tires we won the race on. NASCAR’s doing their jobs and everybody else is making a big deal about it, right? If I’m one of the other competitors, yes, I would want them to take the 4 car’s tires. Of course I would.

"They’re doing their jobs, just like they’ve done year after year after year. …I’m starting to get a little bit ill about it. It’s turned into a joke."

NASCAR has taken the tires from select teams the last two weeks for further review at an independent lab. Rumblings persist in the garage that teams have been placing small holes in their tires, with the goal of leveling air pressure when tires heat up during green-flag racing, but NASCAR officials reported that the tires from the first audit showed nothing illegal. Results of the second review haven’t been released.

The only common thread in both examinations was that Harvick’s No. 4 was chosen as part of the audit both weeks. But Childers’ reasoning goes, wouldn’t a car that’s consistently near the front of the pack be inspected with the finest-toothed comb?

"That’s their job. Why would they not?" Childers said. "If you’ve got a car that’s on a streak like the 4 car’s been and they’ve got eight top-twos in a row, nobody’s done that since 1967 when there was 2.5 cars on the lead lap at the end of each race, it’s a big damn deal, you know. I don’t blame them at all. I’m 100 percent on their side. You’ve got to do what you’ve got to do to keep a level playing field.

"If I was on another team, I would feel like I had pretty good cars and I had a good driver and we were doing the best job we could. You would hope that your cars are pretty close to somebody else’s and your driver’s pretty close to someone else, and when you can’t run with them, you get aggravated and start looking at what could be different. They also need to look at qualifying because bleeding your tires for qualifying for one lap, it don’t help — we beat ’em every week. They better get working on their cars, I tell ya."

Childers said trips to the NASCAR Research & Development Center have been business as usual, but some of the newfound consideration may stem from a new level of transparency from NASCAR officials. The recent philosophy shift, owed in large part to the sanctioning body’s marketing and communications arm, has pulled back the curtain on many technical procedures that used to be conducted behind the scenes.

"I think so. And as a competitor, we don’t mind that," Childers said. "The only thing I don’t like is when it stirs up a bunch of drama because there’s no need for it. But it’s part of it. You don’t want the drama surrounding your team. You want to keep them focused on what you’re doing. All in all, they’re doing their jobs."

For Childers, the accusations are nothing new. He says he’s been hearing them since he started racing at age 12. The allegations have followed him throughout, even through his days as a Late Model hotshot at Tri-County Motor Speedway in the North Carolina foothills where he assembled a hot streak that rivals Harvick’s current run — winning what he estimated as 11 straight races in the 1998 season.

"The tech official had searched my car to death," Childers said. "It’s like the last race of the year, and I’d beat this guy, and he kept paying to get (my engine) tore down over and over and over. The head tech official comes over, gives me the head back for my engine and goes ‘you’re good.’ "

Childers said the official then asked an odd question — if he could borrow his right shoe. He handed it over.

"I didn’t know what he was doing," Childers said, "and he walks it right over to that guy that had paid to tear me down all year and handed it to him and said, ‘I guess this is what you need.’ "

 
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"It’s hard to speculate because that’s all I can do, but in my experience there’s a lot of smoke around that, right?" said Gustafson, who oversees preparation for Jeff Gordon‘s No. 24 Chevrolet. "There’s a lot of talk, there’s a lot of dialogue, there’s a lot of rumors in the garage. So yeah, I think some people think something is going on. And is NASCAR reacting to that or do they feel uncomfortable with what’s going on? I don’t know that answer.

"I do think that it is something that’s on the forefront of a lot of people’s minds and obviously NASCAR is trying to make sure that we’re all on a level playing field and if anyone is violating that that they’ll pay the price, which they’ve reminded us this morning is very, very stiff. That’s all I know, but anything beyond that speculation beside the fact is that it’s a hot topic obviously."

NASCAR took the tires from two teams — those of points leader Kevin Harvick and Joey Logano — after the season’s fourth Sprint Cup Series race, at Phoenix International Raceway. Harvick’s tires were taken again for independent study after last weekend’s race at Auto Club Speedway, joining those from the cars driven by fellow Chevrolet drivers Kurt Busch, Paul Menard and Ryan Newman.

Officials issued no penalties or expanded details from their findings, and NASCAR Executive Vice President and Chief Racing Development Officer Steve O’Donnell said in a recent appearance on SiriusXM NASCAR Radio that the "audits" were routine.

WATCH: Drivers sound off on tire tampering talk

Any infraction involving manipulating tires falls under the heading of a P5 penalty — the second-highest severity in the NASCAR deterrence system, which was introduced before the 2014 season. The NASCAR Rule Book provides examples of P5 penalties, including a specific passage about tires in Section 12.5.3.5.1.a, which states, "Effecting, modifying and/or altering the standard tires in any way, other than through authorized means such as tire pressure adjustments within the recommended range, permitted tire cooling when mounted on the race vehicle; or heat-cycling on the race vehicle on the race track earlier in the Event."
 
The punishment for a P5 violation includes the loss of 50 points in the driver and team owner standings, a fine ranging from $75,000 to $125,000, a six-race suspension for the crew chief, probation until the end of the calendar year for all suspended crewmembers, and any other applicable penalties.

The practice of teams potentially "needling" tires with miniscule holes, Gustafson said, would "be a very difficult thing to police." The tactic is intended to provide a slow release of air, which would allow tire pressures to remain more consistent — while improving grip and durability — over the course of a green-flag run. Ordinarily, pressures rise as the tires heat up, changing the handling characteristics of the car.

Gordon said that he has been a longtime advocate for NASCAR adopting bleeder valves on its tires to better regulate pressure.

"I came from sprint cars where they’re just built into the wheel," Gordon said. "You set them. Those might not be advanced enough for what we need in a Cup car and a Cup tire, but it just makes sense. It’s crazy what we do with air pressures and these big, heavy cars build the air pressures up so much that we’re always trying to start them real low, which always causes issues for Goodyear and the teams. They just increase, increase, increase.

"So it makes sense to me that we have bleeder valves, but because we don’t, it’s pushing the teams to do things. … I’ve heard about a lot of things with valve caps and poking holes in tires for years, but I’ve never seen it done, have never had proof that it was done, so it’s very interesting to me that NASCAR is investigating this further and I look forward to seeing what comes out of it.

"If they find a way to stop that, if it’s really going on, I get excited about our chances because I know that we’re not doing it, so it will close the gap for us to whoever may be doing it.

WATCH: Chris Rice explains the issue

Gordon was at the center of another TireGate in September 1998, when rival team owner Jack Roush accused his Hendrick team of using illegal, chemically treated tires to gain an advantage. He said Friday that if Ray Evernham, his crew chief, was doing something illegal back then, he wasn’t aware of it.

No team has been outed as a rule-breaker yet, but the murmurs of unusual happenings in the garage persist. Gordon said when the rumor mill churns as loudly as its current tenor, there’s something to it — just how it’s being done is the question.

"I don’t know if there’s anything or not," said Knaus, crew chief for Hendrick’s No. 48 Chevy driven by Jimmie Johnson — like Gordon, an eight-time Martinsville winner. "I’m busy on Sunday and I don’t have a lot of friends in the garage. I don’t talk to anybody else, either, so it’s OK. My friends are outside of racing. So I don’t know what’s going on. I know I sent (Sprint Cup managing director) Richard Buck a text and I said, ‘Hey man, can we poke holes in our tires? Is that OK?’ and he sent me a text back that said, ‘Absolutely not.’ So that’s all I know."

Denny Hamlin said that NASCAR told all crew chiefs at Phoenix International Raceway last fall to discontinue the tactic, but since it deals with one of the three so-called sacred areas — engine, tires and fuel — the penalties should be fittingly severe.
 
"If it’s out there and they know about it, you should be gone forever," said Hamlin, a four-time Martinsville winner. "I mean, that’s a major, major, major thing. This isn’t like the old rodeo days of being able to go out there and run a big motor or soak the tires. This is a professional sport and when people alter tires that’s a big, big deal. Definitely no room for it in the sport, that’s for sure. Hope they clamp down on that if they do find it, and if they find it multiple times with somebody, they should have a permanent vacation somewhere."
 
That said, Hamlin acknowledged that trying to make the distinction between a natural tire leak and a man-made one is difficult.
 
"They’ll figure out a way, and whether it will be with someone else taking a look at the tires to try to figure it out, they’ll find it," Hamlin said of NASCAR officials. "And when they do, that person when they feel NASCAR getting hot on them, they’re going to stop doing it and that’s maybe when you’ll see some performance differences. You never know."

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