When it comes to new car, crew chiefs toeing the line (cont'd)

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."