Spy game: NASCAR teams always on lookout for outsiders

Mike Hembree | Special for USA TODAY Sports

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Kirk Halstead, father-in-law of crew chief Steve Addington, was walking around the Sprint Cup garage during a recent race weekend. He was wearing an HScott Motorsports cap.

“A couple of teams stopped him and asked him what he was doing,” Addington, pit boss for HScott Motorsports and driver Justin Allgaier, told USA TODAY Sports. “He was just in awe of all the cars and stuff, just walking around and looking. He didn’t mean any harm.”

It was a 007 alert.

Halstead was simply an interested visitor, but the fact that his face was unknown to most sent up some red flags. It’s not the first time.

After Kevin Harvick smoked the field to win last fall at Phoenix International Raceway, site of this weekend’s penultimate Chase race, a picture appeared of a photographer lying on his stomach shooting images of the underside of Harvick’s No. 4 Chevrolet. Crew chief Rodney Childers was not pleased.

The concept of the “spy in the garage” has been a reality in NASCAR virtually since the early days of stock car racing, but now, with the stakes higher than ever, the cars closer than ever and Chase spots at risk, there is renewed interest in every team learning as much as possible about the opposition.

As Jeff Gordon, who already is in the finale, said: “You learn from your competitors. We have spies everywhere, constantly looking at our competitors.”

Thus, even fans in tacky shorts and faded Rusty Wallace T-shirts can draw attention in the garage. The cell-phone cameras they’re using could hold images of considerable value to the opposition.

And Childers - who is trying to get the defending champion back to the Chase finale this weekend - and others will stay vigilant.

“The last few years it’s gotten worse and worse,” Matt Puccia, crew chief for Greg Biffle, told USA TODAY Sports. “You don’t know if it’s members of the media taking pictures or just a race fan. There are always people coming up and taking pictures. The way social media is now, it could look like just a fan taking a picture and the next thing you know it’s all over Twitter.

“You just have to be conscious of it. The competition is so close now, and everybody’s trying to protect what they’ve got.”

NASCAR garage areas are mostly open environments. Cars are parked within a few feet of each other, and much can be learned simply by a sideways glance at a next-door neighbor’s car. But critically competitive areas of the car – particularly the engine compartment and suspension components underneath – generally aren’t visible to the naked eye, and photographs shot on the sly can be beneficial.

Almost every leading team has had occasions when personnel have told people snooping around their garage stall to move away – some more forcefully than others. Some crew chiefs are particularly sensitive to visitors who might have nefarious intent.

“We all keep an eye out,” Addington said. “You want to know who’s hanging out and hanging around. Everybody’s looking for that little edge. They’ll just look at the aero stuff and maybe how somebody has their crush panels fixed. The front suspension. You can get a general idea of what people are doing.”

Open vs. closed garages

It is not unusual for people with cameras to suddenly appear when a race car’s hood is raised or a wheel well is exposed outside the relative protection of the garage stall.

“When Kyle (Busch) hit the fence at Chicago and the car went to the garage, there were at least five team guys from the competition that were doing everything they could to see,” said David Wilson, president of Toyota Racing Development, told USA TODAY Sports. “Although the car was torn up, there was some pretty sensitive stuff there. They were pretty upset about it. Somebody made the comment that they might bring a couple more guys to try and make sure the garage stayed secure.”

NASCAR wants its garages to be open work spaces (as opposed to the closeted stalls of some motor sports series), but there are limits.

“Even with an open garage the way we do it, there is still a moral compass that goes along with it,” said Mike Helton, NASCAR vice chairman, told USA TODAY Sports. “It wouldn’t be fair for a media photographer to climb under a brand of car on behalf of another brand. There are limitations to how far that can go.

“Every now and then, we see something that doesn’t feel right. For the most part, a conversation fixes it, but in today’s modern world with the technology and the ability to record and photograph and document things, it’s part of our sport. There’s probably a lot that goes on that we don’t know about, but if somebody’s misusing that we’ll have a conversation.”

If NASCAR’s inspection process and its dozens of templates limit the aerodynamic creativity of teams, is there anything to be gained from “spy” photos and other sorts of garage espionage? Plenty, potentially.

“Although our template count is around 85, they don’t cover everything,” Helton said. “There is still space between those templates. It all has a lot to do with the science and engineering aspect of how to take our rules and regulations and work with them in different aero packages and different nuances. It’s much more complex. There is still a lot of effort on how to move inside those things and gain an advantage.”

Using photography to get an edge

Tucks and tweaks to race cars can mean valuable split-second gains at some tracks. The importance of aerodynamics in the sport is illustrated by the fact that each of the three competing manufacturers – Ford, Toyota and Chevrolet – pay photographers to shoot thousands of images of cars on track during every Sprint Cup race.

In a legal process under NASCAR rules, the images, typically shot in turn banking, are transmitted almost immediately to manufacturer engineering trailers at the track, and teams have access to them on their pit wagons during races. The manufacturers call this “technical” or “engineering” photography.

On-track images are more important than shots in the garage because engineers and other team members can view how cars – theirs and others -- react during competition.

“In the garage, you have a static environment,” Wilson said. “On the track, you have a transient environment. What you’re not able to see in the garage is what the car does under load. For the most part, what we observe is the attitude of the car, how the car under load is behaving, where the splitter is in relation to the racetrack, things like that.

“So much of the sport now is about collecting as many points of data as possible and then trying to figure out what you can learn from it and what you can act on.”

The in-race images rarely lead to pit-stop changes during races but normally are used for consideration of modifications for events to come.

“They’re helpful for a lot of reasons,” Cole Pearn, crew chief for Martin Truex Jr., who also is vying for a spot in the Chase finale this weekend, told USA TODAY Sports. “You can tell if your car is off on attitude or whatever from shots on the track. The pictures confirm. They’re also helpful with looking at damage on the car.

“Every little bit helps. Information is information. You can always stand to learn something.”

It is not unusual, several team members said, for photographs shot during races to lead to questions about whether the competition has stepped outside the rules in car preparation. On-track images sometimes reveal flared sideskirts and other challenges to the rulebook, they said.

The ultimate goal is to have the best car at each track, with each team reaching for the top spot on the pyramid.

“There is a real understanding that any advantage you get is always short-lived,” Wilson said. “You want to come out with a head start any time there’s a change to the rules. Maybe you’ll be ahead for three weeks or three months. But there are smart people on every one of these top-tier teams. In an evolutionary sense, if NASCAR froze the rulebook, in one billion years every single team would build the exact same race car.”

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