Editor's Note: ESPN.com is excerpting sections of Cheating: An Inside Look At The Bad Things Winston Cup Racers Do In Pursuit Of Speed, by Tom Jensen. The book is published by David Bull Publishing, 2002. This is the final part of a five-part excerpt appearing on ESPN.com this week.

Although Gary Nelson's rule-bending reputation got him his job as Winston Cup Director, the way in which he has tightened up inspection and eliminated arbitrary interpretation may well prove to be his enduring legacy.

At Daytona in 2001, Nelson and his inspectors had their hands full from the moment the NASCAR Winston Cup teams rolled through the gates of Daytona International Speedway.

While the Winston Cup drivers spent Feb. 8 in a mandatory "media day" event, schmoozing with journalists and getting their promo pictures taken in a huge tent outside the speedway, tech inspection inside the track was not going well. Just as at Talladega 10 months earlier, teams were trying to cheat the air with slicked-back bodywork, while inspectors were trying to detect every infraction.

And just as at Talladega the year before, car owner Richard Childress was ordered to make substantial bodywork modifications on both of his team's Chevrolet Monte Carlos, which had been carefully prepared for drivers Dale Earnhardt and Mike Skinner. But while the Childress-NASCAR battle had taken center stage at Talladega, here its significance was dwarfed in significance by the largest collection of unapproved parts and illegal cars anyone had seen in recent memory.

During practice February. 9 and Daytona 500 pole qualifying February. 10, inspectors seized so many illegal parts and fined so many crew chiefs that Nelson decided to hold an impromptu press conference late on the afternoon of February. 12 to explain the specific penalties. He had no shortage of topics to talk about. "We started talking to people this morning about 9:30 and just finished about 15 minutes ago," Nelson said. "The interesting part is there's a story behind every one of these, and I heard 'em'em all today. It was a long day."

Heading the list of scofflaws with stories to tell was Tony Furr, crew chief for Jerry Nadeau's Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet. Nadeau, an affable young driver, had blossomed in 2000 after struggling in his first two seasons.

When Nadeau appeared to qualify second for the Daytona 500, it didn't come as much of a shock to fans watching the race. But to his fellow competitors, it was another matter entirely. After Nadeau's qualifying run, several teams radioed NASCAR to say they sawy something fall off the right rear of his car. The something was an illegal spacer inserted into the jack screw/spring plate assembly on the right rear of the car. The spacer had been cleverly engineered to hold the right rear of the car at legal height until it hit the first bump at speed. Then it would fall out, lowering the car and giving it less aerodynamic drag, thereby increasing speed. Furr's device was not a "gray area" item, not something "pushing the envelope." It was a flagrant attempt to circumvent the rules, and it wasn't the only such infraction that would be found on the car that weekend.

"The cleanup crew found one of the parts on the racetrack," Nelson said of the suspension components on Nadeau's car. "This piece was designed to break away or fall out when the car was on the racetrack. So when the inspector looked at it, it looked like a normal piece, but when the car got on the racetrack, it popped out and the car got that much lower." It wasn't much more sophisticated than the rocks and sticks mechanics from the 1960s used to jam in the springs at Daytona to keep the cars up during inspection, only to fall out once the car hit the first bump at speed.

"We went to the crew and said, 'What were you thinking?' Nelson said. "And we did not get an answer." What they did get, though, were more infractions. Nadeau's car was found to have an illegal fuel cell made of too-thin metal. According to Nelson, this infraction was every bit as flagrant as the rear suspension spacer was: The fuel cell was the proper thickness of metal where NASCAR usually measures it, but too thin everywhere else. Crew chiefs have been known to use compressed air to expand a "thin-wall" fuel tank just enough to fit another gallon of gas in it, which can make the difference between winning or losing, especially at a place like Daytona.

As a result of his actions, Furr earned $12,750 in fines and a four-race suspension. Nadeau's qualifying time was disallowed as well. "We made a mistake and we're paying for it, simple as that. That's all I can say," Furr said, when asked about the rules infractions. "Hopefully, it'll send a message out to make everybody quit. This may make everything a little more equal."

This from the same crew chief who got caught in practice at the same track in July 1997 with illegal carburetor studs on John Andretti's car, a car which would go on to win that race.

Of course, Furr was far from the only offender at Daytona this time. On February. 12, NASCAR announced that Jason Leffler's Chip Ganassi Racing Dodge Intrepid R/T had been caught with a "discrepancy" in its fuel supply. Leffler's Daytona 500 qualifying time was disallowed, as Nadeau's had been. His crew chief, Kevin Cram, also was suspended for four races and received a $10,000 fine. Both Cram's and Furr's suspensions would begin February. 23rd at North Carolina Speedway.

Just like Jeremy Mayfield's tainted fuel controversy at Talladega in 2000, Leffler's crew professed not to know how it happened. "Even though this news comes as a surprise to all of us, we are looking into the matter and will abide by NASCAR's ruling," Ganassi Team Manager Andy Graves said.

Felix Sabates, the team's former owner and now a minority partner to Ganassi, suspected sabotage, but offered little explanation as to motivation or how the sabotage may have happened -- the exact strategy employed by Mayfield's car owner, Michael Kranefuss, after that team's incident.

"I really believe somebody actively sabotaged the car," Sabates said. "There's no doubt in my mind. The other guys on the team don't want to say anything because they have to live with these people every weekend (but) I believe it in my heart that they did."

NASCAR inspectors were busy elsewhere, too. They seized oversized fuel cells from cars driven by Dale Earnhardt, Jeff Burton, Joe Nemechek, Kenny Wallace, and Steve Park. Nemechek also had his windshield taken because it didn't fit NASCAR templates. Front suspension A-arms that didn't meet minimum thicknesses were confiscated from the cars of Bill Elliott and Andy Houston, while and Terry Labonte's Chevrolet had both a roof spoiler and body filler material taken.

Four cars -- those driven by Jeff Gordon, Todd Bodine, Steve Park, and Morgan Shepherd -- had fuel cell intake caps seized for various modifications. Gordon also was nabbed with an unapproved air deflector, and Mike Skinner's car had an underpan removed.

Unapproved rear springs that failed to meet NASCAR's mandated minimum of 345 pounds of resistance, were taken from the cars of second-qualifier Stacy Compton, Dale Jarrett, Casey Atwood, Morgan Shepherd, and Norm Benning.

But the hottest items NASCAR inspectors found were adjustable -- and therefore, illegal -- body braces, which could be used to pull the sheetmetalsheet metal in closer to create just a little less aerodynamic drag. Those nabbed with these parts included Bodine, Nadeau, Leffler, Mike Wallace, Ricky Craven, Rusty Wallace, and Casey Atwood. The devices were similar to the turnbuckles used by some of the Ford teams at Daytona nearly 40 years earlier, when teams were just starting to figure out that the way you went faster was to lessen aerodynamic drag.

The Richard Childress Racing Chevrolet Monte Carlos of Earnhardt and Skinner were forced to make extensive bodywork modifications to pass tech inspections. By the end of the weekend, 18 crew chiefs had been fined and two suspended, in a crackdown unlike any other in recent memory. Hendrick Motorsports had the dubious honor of having all three of its crew chiefs on the receiving end of Nelson's penalties: Furr was suspended; , Gary DeHart was put on probation for infractions found on Terry Labonte's car; and Robbie Loomis was fined for work done on Jeff Gordon's car.

Part of Nelson's challenge is similar to that of any judge: He has to interpret both the rules and the motivation of those who break them. For example, Loomis was caught at Daytona with an unapproved air deflector underneath the front of three-time champion Gordon's No. 24 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet. He got off with a modest fine and no suspension, while fellow Hendrick crew chief DeHart was put on probation for improperly mounting the roof spoiler on Terry Labonte's car.

"The entry blank for the Daytona 500 and the Bud Shootout had a full paragraph describing how to put the roof deflector on the car, where to fit it, how it's to be mounted, what you can and cannot do about it," Nelson said. "There was no gray area on how that deflector was to be mounted. Every team got that entry blank, read it. Most of 'em'em called me and asked me questions about it. The difference in what Robbie did was, yeah, that's a gray area in the rulebookrule book. It would have probably gone without a penalty except for the fact that he made it out of clear plastic in hopes that we would not see it and take it from him. So he was hoping we'd roll under the car and see through it and not notice it. He said, 'I knew it probably wasn't legal, but I figured if I make it clear you might not see it and I might get away with it.'"

And yet, through all the controversy and the stash of confiscated parts, most competitors held their ground about their actions.

Ray Evernham, car owner for the Daytona 500 pole-winning Dodge of Bill Elliott and also Casey Atwood's, made no apologies about the fact that his two cars needed a little tweaking to pass inspection. "I know we had to do some work on both cars, not a lot," Evernham said. "You're trying to hold tolerances of .060 of an inch and get any advantage you can, and I would have been a little disappointed if they didn't have to work on any one of those cars."

And Mike Ford, Elliott's crew chief, made no bones about the fact that the limit gets stretched most often for the Daytona 500. "If you look at it, it's the biggest race of the year, you have the most time to prepare," he said. "It's bragging rights, more or less. It's the big race, the one everybody wants to win. You definitely want to qualify well. It's a big push to try and come down here and do well," he said.

Compton, who , like many drivers, made several trips through tech before his car was cleared for inspection, was philosophical about the process. "Everything you do, you do it on the limit," he said. "Everything we do, everything that Ray (Evernham) does, everything that (Robert) Yates does, everything is right on the edge. You push it as far as you possibly can. We have a lot of things that are right on the edge, but 99.9 percent of 'em'em got through."

To Compton, this was all no big deal. "That's all part of the game," he said, "As Gary Nelson says, there's 600 of you guys (crewmen) trying to outsmart 30 of us (inspectors). Everybody is doing what I said. (NASCAR requires) a 345-pound rear spring in the rear, we try and go through with a 344-pound spring. You've got to take that chance. You've got to try and get everything you can get. That's the reason I saw about 20 springs sitting out there that had failed (inspection). When I came through Thursday evening, there was a whole lot of sheet metal being removed and replaced and a whole lot of grinding going on."

Still there are limits. "You just can't do stupid things like that and expect to get away with it," said Tommy Baldwin. "NASCAR's pretty on top of those things. You know, a lot of those piles of parts on that table, a lot of them are honest mistakes. Some of 'em'em aren't. You try to get away with what you can, but you've got a lot riding nowadays. You've got major corporations spending millions of dollars and car owners that are spending millions of dollars. You can't get that reputation (as a cheater), and I think some people in the garage have a reputation of doing that, and I think it's going to be tough getting jobs in the future."

But cheating is tempting, if for no other reason than the odds remain in favor of the teams, not NASCAR. "It's impossible to catch everything," said 1980 Daytona 500 champion Buddy Baker. "There's still some people laughing that they got caught and making comments about somebody else getting in trouble, and they're probably sitting there with about the same stuff and just hasn't been caught yet. Boy, I'll tell you, back home it doesn't look so bad when you're 'fixing' it," he laughed when describing some of the creative preparations on the various race cars. "You get down here and you get caught, it looks awful."

Nelson is nearly mobbed at his press conference, with the usual assortment of motorsports journalists being joined by maybe 100 more reporters eager to see the first race of NASCAR's new television and Internet partnerships and Dodge's return.

Toward the end of the press conference, Nelson is asked point blank if NASCAR competitors are simply a bunch of cheaters. "What we have is what we have," he shrugged. "We're not trying to gloss over anything. We've got individuals that violated our rules, and we are addressing it. From a sanctioning body, from an inspector, a NASCAR official's standpoint, we have to look at it like the best way to quit finding illegal parts is to convince 'em'em not to do it."

Later that week, Nelson would compare the spate of infractions in the garage to those in the world at large. "Racing is hard and there's always temptations, just like there's temptations in real life to break laws," Nelson said February. 17. "But you try to understand that the majority of our garage follows the rules. There's only a few guys that try and take the shortcut and flat-out cheat. Life's the same way. If a convenience store has hundreds and thousands of customers, every once in a while, somebody tries to rob it. That's just a fact of life, and we deal with it in a way that we think discourages that kind of activity."