The sway bar and the way things are

MARTINSVILLE, Va. – Jack Roush is probably getting tired of people talking about him like he’s a crazy ol’ coot over this business of Michael Waltrip Racing having one of his front sway bars from Dover in September until sometime in January.

Waltrip said Saturday that it was a mistake. The part got to his team by mistake and when somebody from Roush called to ask if they had it, Waltrip’s team looked for it, found it and returned it.

Waltrip is right when he says that stuff gets flung around in the garage area all of the time. When races end, crews pack their gear up rapidly because everyone’s trying to head for the plane or their cars to get home as fast as they can.

Supposedly this sway bar is longer than your average sway bar and wouldn’t fit in the place where sway bars normally live on a team’s tool box. This one was placed under Roush’s tool box in some manner and it seems possible that it could have literally rolled too far and been picked up by mistake by Waltrip’s team.

The way Waltrip tells it, somebody saw they had this oddly long bar painted in a different color and just put it aside figuring that there was no telling where it came from.

The way Roush tells it, though, in January a vendor called Roush Fenway Racing and said it had been contacted to see if that vendor could make pieces copying whatever it is that was special about the ends of this piece that the Roush guys had developed for the car of tomorrow.

OK, that’s where this story that so many people are joking about gets serious in my eyes.

Even if the way the part got “misplaced” was completely innocent, if somebody is trying to copy whatever makes this bar unusual then that’s a pretty sinister turn to the whole affair.

Some people have questioned what good a sway bar could do, how much better it could be and how much better it could make a car. Those are all legitimate questions, but if somebody saw what Roush Fenway Racing had done and decided it was good enough to try to copy, doesn’t that justify Roush’s contention the part had “proprietary” value?

The crux of the question, to me, is where the line is between right and wrong in the eyes of the garage area on this matter.

Roush said Friday that he’s been in the sport 22 years and never felt he’d had anything outright stolen from him or that he’d never condoned having anyone on his team steal anything from another team. Dale Earnhardt Jr. said he felt like a theft of that nature would be an egregious offense, too.

But others laughed at the idea of calling this a “theft.”

It is true that the garage area is open and teams “spy” on each other all of the time. Cars are inspected in the open. Every once in a while people stand around and watch a teardown. When a Daytona 500 winner’s car is put on display at the Daytona 500 Experience, other teams sometimes send somebody over there to take detailed pictures and even do drawings of certain parts of the winner’s car.

So are there really any parts or pieces that are “off limits” to such scrutiny?

What’s considered proper and what’s considered over the line in looking at what the other guy’s got?

That’s one of those questions that you can get 20 different answers on if you ask 20 different people.

I guess it’s also like stealing another teams signs in baseball or videotaping a rival football team’s coach when he’s signaling in plays. Some people think that’s dirty pool and others think that’s just the way the game is played. Any way you can get an advantage you get it.

If you’re walking through a hotel lobby and you see a copy of the playbook or game notes from the team you’re getting ready to play, what do you do? Do you pick it up and use it, feeling that the team that lost it should have known better? Do you just pretend you never saw it? Or do you pick it up and then call the opposing coach and tell him you’ve got it and arrange to return it?

That answer to that question, I think, depends on how much integrity you have. In racing, though, you wonder how much good integrity does you.

Cars that don’t pass postrace inspection can still win races. The garage-area mantra has always been “if you ain’t cheating, you ain’t trying.”

The rulebook is looked at as an outline of suggestions and interpreted whatever way it can be to justify whatever it is you’re trying. Where in all of that does honorable behavior fit in?