Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, May 27, 1995 TAG: 9505300057
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BOB ZELLER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: CONCORD, N.C. LENGTH: Long
They dress like NASCAR fans. They act like NASCAR fans. They carry cameras like NASCAR fans.
But they don't take pictures of Dale Earnhardt or Jeff Gordon. They sneak photographs of car bodies, cylinder heads and engines.
And if the spies in the NASCAR Winston Cup garages think they're doing their undercover work without anybody noticing, they're mistaken.
``We see them all the time,'' said Gary Nelson, NASCAR Winston Cup director, who as a crew chief became wise in the ways of stock car espionage many years ago.
``Somebody is running good. You want to know why,'' Nelson said. ``So you send a guy in a T-shirt with a camera into the garage with his girlfriend. They get a couple of autographs and stand around a car.''
And eventually, they snap a photo or two of the engine, or a different-looking chassis post, or an exotically shaped quarter panel.
``You can watch 'em,'' freelance racing photographer Don Grassman said. ``I can pretty much tell when somebody is doing it because they look sneaky. I don't do it myself. I represent too many people in here to do that.''
It is rarely if ever written about, but spying has been widespread in NASCAR for decades, probably dating back to the birth of the sport in 1949. Racers always have had their secrets, and they always have had their spies.
``In 1981, I was with [crew chief] Jake Elder before Daytona,'' Ricky Rudd said. ``He was curious about the Ford test. At that time, security was a lot tighter. It was a closed session.
``And I remember being up in a tree outside the backstretch at Daytona with two stopwatches, a notepad and binoculars, watching and timing the cars that were testing. A security guard kept on driving by below me. And the guy did happen to stop and eat a sandwich right underneath me.
''I was just hoping he wouldn't look up. He didn't.''
Spying never has been an issue with NASCAR because it promotes, in its own surreptitious way, closer competition among the teams.
For that reason, there are no walls between stalls in NASCAR garages, except at Indianapolis.
``Years ago at Pocono, we made Doc [track owner Dr. Joseph Mattioli] take down the walls in the garage buildings,'' said Dick Beaty, former Winston Cup director.
Only a few feet separate parked race cars in Winston Cup garages, and crew members sometimes literally rub shoulders as they work. NASCAR encourages the interchange of information, and the arrangement makes it easier.
NASCAR inspectors often are asked by crew members to shoo away suspected spies or fans that have become too nosy in the garages, Nelson said. And he said the inspectors are happy to help.
Beyond that, NASCAR couldn't control spying even if it wanted to.
Caught in the act
Stan Creekmore, of Virginia Beach, covers the Grand National series for National Speed Sport News. He first heard about garage spying while chatting with a NASCAR inspector after the Atlanta Winston Cup race in March.
The inspector even pointed out a pair of likely suspects - a young couple dressed like fans who were taking pictures of cars going through post-race inspection.
His curiosity aroused, Creekmore began hanging around the NASCAR post-race inspection area, a prime spot for spying. The inspection area is roped off, but still is far more accessible than the garage stalls of individual teams.
It took a few races before Creekmore saw some of the spying that inspectors see all the time.
But as Dale Earnhardt was being photographed in victory lane after winning the First Union 400 at North Wilkesboro, N.C., Creekmore spotted the same ``fan'' he had seen in Atlanta. The ``fan'' was busy snapping pictures of Earnhardt's engine parts in the post-race inspection area.
Minutes before the spy sighting, Creekmore had been watching an inspector take the electronic ignition out of a car. NASCAR has suspected for some time that teams may be hiding illegal computer chips in ignition boxes to improve traction control.
``Just as the inspector opened that electronic box, a guy with a camera comes over my shoulder and the camera went click, click, click,'' Creekmore said. ``This guy looked very nondescript. He was wearing a green shirt and jeans. He had no visible credential'' that would identify him. ``And not five minutes later, this guy was over talking to a crewman from another team, and handing him the film.
``There's so much going on after a race, if you're not looking for it, you'd never see it.''
Teams are well aware that spies lurk in the post-inspection area, as Creekmore found out when he wandered over to a work table to watch a crewman tear down an engine.
The crewman eyed Creekmore and said, ``Can we have some privacy here?''
Creekmore protested that he was outside the inspection area.
The crewman complained to NASCAR pace car driver Elmo Langley, who told Creekmore: ``Hey, the guy doesn't want you looking at his stuff. You need to move on.''
``I stepped back about three feet,'' Creekmore said. ``So the crewman finally comes around the bench and stands between me and his cylinder head.'' (The cylinder head can be modified by engine builders and thus contains the most horsepower secrets).
It was a different story 15 minutes later, when Jeff Gordon's engine was torn down. ``Here's this same crewman who was complaining about me,'' Creekmore said. ``And he starts doing circles around the table. And every time he passes in front of Gordon's cylinder head, he pauses for a moment.''
It runs in the family
``Every now and then, you gotta see what the other guy is doing,'' said Robin Pemberton, Rusty Wallace's crew chief. ``When you hire a photographer, you gotta use a normal-type fan. They don't know the importance of what they're looking at, but the teams don't hide it from them either.''
Five years ago, Robin's younger brother, Ryan, the crew chief for Grand National driver Larry Pearson's crew chief, was working with the Robert Yates team and the late Davey Allison.
The team was in Daytona testing a car with door panels that had been rounded, in hopes of improving aerodynamics and making the car faster. Ryan suspected they would not work. They didn't.
After the test, Ryan Pemberton returned to his hotel room. The phone rang almost immediately. Ryan picked it up and heard laughing. It was his brother, Robin, who then was with Mark Martin's team.
``What are you laughing at?'' Ryan said.
``Man, that stuff will never work,'' Robin said.
``How do you know what's going on?''
``I know.''
Robin later told his little brother that he had photos of the car within three hours of the test.
But shed no tears for Yates. He's a master eavesdropper.
``Just a few weeks ago at Talladega, Rusty asked me for a different gear and I told him over the radio that we didn't have that type of gear on the truck,'' Robin Pemberton said. ``Yates was parked right next to us and a moment later he came over and told me he had one of those gears on his truck if we needed it.''
``They used to say Robert Yates could count the hairs on the back of my head because he'd be standing there looking at our cars for so long,'' crew chief Waddell Wilson said.
``I tell you what,'' Yates said, ``I definitely would have to agree with Waddell. When it came to Daytona and Talladega, he was the guy to watch.''
More than a decade ago, Wilson and his team returned to the garage from a ceremony in which they had received Daytona 500 winner's rings.
``We come back and there was a prominent member [of the NASCAR community] underneath our race car,'' Wilson said. ``Drug him out by his feet.''
``And guys used to be paranoid about other guys being able to lip read,'' said Goodyear's Phil Holmer. ``It was funny. A guy would be talking and he'd be holding his hand over his lips so you couldn't see his lips. Mostly old-timers would do that.''
Fighting back
Espionage is not limited to the NASCAR teams.
At any level of the sport where there is competition - Ford versus Chevy, Goodyear versus Hoosier - there is spying.
``Everybody looks at everybody. Everybody spies on everybody,'' said Terry Laise of General Motors.
And with spying comes the inevitable counterattack - the disinformation campaign.
One day a few years ago, when car owner Michael Kranefuss was Ford's racing chief, his fax machine unexpectedly spit out a mysterious report of seven or eight pages. There was no cover page, and Kranefuss was unable to trace the fax.
But on the face of it, Kranefuss said, the report was the three-year plan of the General Motors Motorsports Technology Group.
``My first thought was, `Great!''' Kranefuss said. ``My second thought was, `This is a set-up.' Anyway, it said certain things that seemed to be true.''
Kranefuss was wise to have his doubts.
``We've never had a three-year plan,'' GM's Don Taylor said.
Goodyear's Holmer said that during last year's tire war with Hoosier, his company used tires in testing that they never intended to race with, figuring that Hoosier had its own spies.
``We actually messed them up a couple of times, I think,'' Holmer said.
``There's been a lot of sending people down the wrong path,'' NASCAR's Nelson said. ``I used to do that a lot. And people did it to me, too.
``Back in the early 80s, we used to take a small block of styrofoam and paint it silver to look like a piece of lead. And we'd bolt it under the frame on the back of the car where you could see it.''
The ruse gave the impression that Nelson had found a new location to place the lead weights that are used to bring the car up to its required weight. Actually, he had found a new place, but it was in the front of the car.
Speaking of new places, Creekwood spotted those ``fans'' from Atlanta once again at Martinsville. There they were, once again, in the post-race inspection area.
A few feet away, a car went through inspection. The hood was up.
The man casually raised his camera, and took a picture of the engine. And then the couple wandered away.
Keywords:
AUTO RACING
by CNB