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Spy game Roving eyes look for competitive edge all around garagePosted: Wednesday February 12, 2003 6:13 PMUpdated: Wednesday February 12, 2003 7:55 PM
By Denise N. Maloof, SI.com DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. -- In NASCAR, sometimes the weekly race-within-a-race isn't computed in milliseconds, quarter-inches or even finishing position. It's how much you know about your neighbor. In a sport laced with innovation and tradition-supported silence (see Brooke Gordon's subpoena spree), knowledge is superiority. And despite shops teeming with mechanical imagination, some teams rely on a low-tech tactic to learn more -- spying. Call it what you like: Espionage, knowledge theft. Covering thy rear end. It's a regular part of many teams' repertoires, and it's as old as the sport itself. Penske Racing co-owner Don Miller remembers laughing over the late Tim Flock's yarns of guys sneaking in the garage overnight, stuffing rocks in gas tanks and measuring opponents' cars. Ricky Rudd's recollection is more recent. "I remember sitting in a tree in the backstretch with stopwatches and binoculars," Rudd said of a rival manufacturer's 1981 Daytona 500 test. "I remember I had sneaked to get in there, and I remember a security guard kept riding around, and my feet were dangling out where you'd about run into them. So it's changed a little bit from that." Not only do team members eyeball each other every week, they employ elaborate resources to do it. Some media photographers allegedly make tidy sums by shooting cars in prescribed detail. At Daytona and Talladega, it's not unusual for unfamiliar shop folks to be present wearing plainclothes and armed with a camera, a la fans. "About three weeks is the most you can keep anything a secret," said Paul Andrews, Jeff Burton's crew chief. "It's just a matter of there's so many people in this big family of ours that there's no way you can't get around [it]." Subterfuge is maddening yet necessary, most guys say. "It's so tight you have to look at everybody's stuff to see exactly where the limits are sometimes," said Bill Wilburn, Rusty Wallace's crew chief. "If I say I'm going to lower my bumper an inch, and I look at some guy who might have it down two inches -- it's really against the rules but he's getting away with it -- I gotta push the limit. I gotta drop mine two inches if I think it's an advantage." Wilburn claims he's not into photography. "We don't necessarily have espionage agents roaming the garage," he added. But a lot can be accomplished with corneas.
"I look at everybody's stuff I can," Wilburn said. "And I know for a fact that people look at our stuff because I've stood there and watched them. It's not just us, it's everybody. And if they tell you they don't, they're lying." Some do plead the high road. "We focus on our car and our car only," said Lee McCall, Sterling Marlin's crew chief. "In the meantime, if we can help our teammates, then we'll do that." "I really try to stay focused on my stuff alone and just try to make it better," said Gary Putnam, John Andretti's crew chief. Depending on your conversation, garage espionage is worse than ever, or not as prevalent as in the past. Most say it was more rampant at the superspeedways a decade ago because of some teams' inability to achieve, or build, restrictor-plate success. But 10 years ago, teams also exercised more patience, according to one driver. Jeff Burton says most struggling Winston Cup teams are no longer willing to earn their way up the technological and performance ladder. "There's less willingness -- and rightfully so -- to not run well," Burton said. "So there's more emphasis on stealing, probing, spying, doing those kinds of things than there used to be." He cited Brett Bodine -- the Cup garage's lone owner-driver -- and not in accusation. Bodine's sponsorship struggles are well documented, and Burton said if a similar team can decipher what the mega-organizations are doing, it's a thrifty strategy. "So if I can get a hold of something they've got and not have to spend that dollar on that, then that allows me to spend a dollar somewhere else and to try to get something that they don't have," Burton said. "Oh, it's a catch-up deal," said Rudd, who spent six seasons as a financially frustrated owner-driver from 1994-99. "You do what you gotta do." Rudd said he'd give photographers a list -- forward shots, back shots, tilt, etc. "A team that's not doing so well, that was its friend," added Rudd, who doesn't think garage espionage is as epidemic it was. "It's a constant thing," said Penske's Miller, politely contradictive. "But I say over the last two or three years, it's got almost out of hand. When you see a photographer kneeling down in the garage area, shooting under another guy's car, you know he's not trying to take a picture of his mother-in-law." So what do teams do with "I spy" photos? They use them as overlays; scale dimensions off advertising decals, then computer-map an entire body, sometimes in hours. That's the double-edged sword of real-time digital photography: Photos can be e-mailed to a waiting technician at the shop, and changes enacted by the next practice. "We've got the Goodyear [decal] as a scale, and we can scale that whole car out and get it pretty close to what they've got," said Phillipe Lopez, Kenny Wallace's crew chief. As for that double-edged sword ... "I've also learned if you're so focused on worrying what another team's doing, and think you're going to apply it to your car and your driver, you're misleading yourself," Lopez said. This season's new matching templates may curtail some garage spying, Miller said. But it also might inflame it. "I know a lot of people who have spent a lot of time in the last couple of months working on other's people's radiator duct work and brake scoops," he said. "'Cause there's a lot in that. There's a lot of performance enhancement by getting the radiator ductwork to be so efficient that you can tape it up real well. I saw a lot of photographs last year, especially down in Miami." Some espionage is less subtle. Your teammate is parked beside someone who's fast, so you ask a teammate's crew member to peek one spot over the next time both cars are jacked and he's lying on a creeper. Burton also knows what's happening when he sees a photographer snapping each car at the same pit-road point during practice. Less conspicuous than taking pictures in the garage area, photographers (paid by other teams) snap off frames so the team can compare cars' body work. "I have had some words with a few people," Burton said of peers and mercenaries alike. "Just told them if they want to look at what we're doing, if they'd just come and ask, and do it the right way, then we'll probably let them do it -- although I'm probably lying. "Not lately, because we haven't run well enough to run anybody off." Information also gets overheard, or slips by accident. That's one reason McCall confines his non-team talk to a few friends. "There's a stopping point when you quit telling everything, but for general information, there's a couple of guys out there that I trust," McCall said. Andrews, who has commissioned photos in the past, was among the first Cup crew chiefs to build carbon-fiber brakes in the early 1990s. Now, everyone uses them. "It's just word-of-mouth sales," Andrews said of the garage. "Everybody's there." Penske's engineers are particularly nervous about espionage, says Miller, who comforts them with this advice -- that the genius of any idea lies not in what's seen, but how it came to be. "He might go faster that one day," Miller said of someone who's purloined information. "But he won't be able to come back and do it again because he can't repeat it, because he doesn't know why he got there. If that's any consolation, that can be the only one I can think of."
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