A Rule Not Meant to Be Broken

The ethics of NASCAR can make an outsider queasy. But the sport's moral code is actually pretty clear to drivers who explore various levels of controlled vertigo for a living. To them, there is a distinct difference between fudging rules in pursuit of the Daytona 500, and cheating. Michael Waltrip's crew cheated. They car-doped.

The NASCAR rulebook is about as comprehensible to the average spectator as Egyptology. You could be pardoned if, before yesterday, you thought a "manifold" was a briefcase. But the complexity of the rules and specifications only made the offense by Waltrip's crew on the eve of Daytona all the more flagrant. It's one thing to try to make a car faster with an iffy aerodynamic conformation. But in this case, a NASCAR official stuck his hand in Waltrip's engine and came away with a bunch of goop that more rightly belonged in a jet plane.

The lameness of the offense only compounded it. When you cheat in car racing, it's supposed to be inventive. This was just cheap, lousy, four-flushing chicanery.

It's not moral relativism to say that rule-breaking in NASCAR is supposed to be better than that. Here's why: In NASCAR, anything that's not expressly prohibited is open to exploitation. Car owners, mechanics and drivers alike look for gray areas to take advantage of, because it's a fine line between a broken rule and a breakthrough. There's a kind of honor -- usually -- in finding something that makes a car run better or handle easier at 200 mph over the 2.5 miles of the Daytona speedway. Sometimes that mechanical creativity is rewarded, and sometimes it's called going too far.

Exploiting and surmounting rules is a distinctly American characteristic in all sports. Mike Oriard, a former NFL player turned literature professor and sports historian, has observed that the need for referees to enforce rules is a distinctly national trait. The public schools of Victorian England, from which we derived most of our games, operated on an honor code. When the penalty kick was instituted in soccer, British gentlemen were outraged.

"It is a standing insult to sportsmen to have to play under a rule which assumes that players intend to trip, hack and push their opponents and to behave like cads of the most unscrupulous kind," one said. "I say that the lines marking the penalty area are a disgrace to the playing field of a public school."

Americans, on the other hand, have been inherent rule breakers from the start. Our football is essentially the result of American college boys bending the rules of soccer and rugby. Oriard writes, "Behind the always present threat to proper balance lies the open assumption that rules in American sport exist to be exploited as much as followed."

This is nowhere more true than in NASCAR. Drivers play a constant game of cat and mouse with officials. The rule makers place inhibitions on the cars, and the competitors toy with them. The sport is all about delicate balances: between speed and control, commercialism and populism, technology and athleticism. On the one hand, the sport depends heavily on large sponsorship, but it's also mindful that the little guy, the small, lightly funded driver, should have an equal chance, so it imposes an artificial ceiling on science and spending.

More often than not, NASCAR strikes a successful balance. Part of the appeal of Daytona is that while the cars approach speeds of 200 mph, they are all rough equals, and maneuvering is just as important as horsepower. It's a dance between machines, none of which has a distinct technological advantage. It's about driver ability and interplay.

The brazen attempt to upset that competitive balance was Waltrip's real offense. Currently, NASCAR is in the midst of a crackdown in the name of preserving the sport's technological equilibrium: the crew chiefs for Matt Kenseth, Kasey Kahne, Scott Riggs and Elliott Sadler have all been suspended and fined. But in their cases, the infractions had to do with fairly esoteric car specifications.

The transgression by Waltrip's crew was different, coarser and clumsier. NASCAR has sometimes been accused of looking the other way on rule violations in the interest of popularity. But under any circumstances, fuel-tampering is regarded as a cardinal sin. For that reason, Waltrip's crew chief, David Hyder, was handed a fine of $100,000, the largest in NASCAR history.

"Throughout the garage area, I think everybody knows you don't mess around with tires, you don't mess around with the engine, the restrictor plates," NASCAR competition director Robin Pemberton said. "Those things are very taboo."

The implication, of course, is that it's okay to mess around with some things, and not with others. It's a sport in which messing with certain rules is openly acknowledged and accepted.

"Don't get me wrong," Kyle Petty said at one point, on a Speed TV interview. "I'm not throwing rocks at glass houses here. I've cheated a lot of times, just not gotten caught like these guys have."

If that makes you uncomfortable, then don't watch the Daytona 500; it's not for you. Stock-car drivers and crews have their own ethical system, and it's not for literalists, or those with no tolerance for ambiguity, who have to square the corner of every rule or argument. Nevertheless, it's a sport with clear-headedness on the difference between misdemeanors and felonies, while the rest of us can be damn nervous on the subject. You get the feeling they are as in control of their standards as they are of their cars.