With Jimmie Johnson's crew chief on suspension from NASCAR for cheating at Daytona and the team leading the Nextel Cup points standings, there has been much debate during the past four weeks about breaking the rules in NASCAR.

The central question: Is cheating really cheating in NASCAR?

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To truly understand the sport's culture, it helps to go back to the moonshiners and bootleggers who started it. It clearly was illegal to make moonshine and transport it, but it was the only way many people in hardscrabble regions of the South could feed their families. It also was an art form, and in many ways, a competition between liquor folks and lawmen, who often shared a mutual respect.

Making whiskey in the woods required a skilled craftsman to build a still and the ingenuity to hide it. And it took a pretty sharp revenuer to track it down. Since the inception of NASCAR in the late 1940s, crew chiefs and mechanics have used the inventiveness of a moonshiner to outsmart the "law" in the technical shed.

The competition continues today.

It has been brought to light most recently by the four-race suspension, $25,000 fine and season-long probation imposed on Johnson's crew chief, Chad Knaus. Knaus used a trick device that raised the rear window the No. 48 Chevy during qualifying at Daytona, giving the car an aerodynamic advantage.

The consensus in NASCAR is that Knaus should have been punished more than he was. The majority believe that he and his team, which has won two of three races this season and finish second in the other, should have had championship points taken away, as other teams have had recently for similar infractions.

Most say that what Knaus did goes beyond working in the "gray area" of NASCAR's rulebook to find an advantage that isn't specifically forbidden. In fact, he's pretty good at it.

At Daytona, Knaus tinkered with the track-bar adjuster so that when it was turned, the rear window of the car bowed out. Last year at Las Vegas, he was put on probation, fined $35,000 and the team was docked 25 points when the roof of the car was too low after Johnson's victory. In July 2002 at Daytona, he was fined $25,000 after he was caught using offset mounting bolts on the car's trailing arms to gain an aerodynamic advantage. In 2003, he was fined $2,500 for using refrigerant to cool the car's fuel and $1,000 for an improper air-deflecting device.

But the biggest innovation may have come last season at Dover, when Knaus engineered a Johnson victory in the MBNA 400 by using trick shocks that raised the rear of the car during the race, giving it improved aerodynamics. The car initially failed a postrace check, but passed minutes later on a secondary inspection after the shocks bled out, dropping the body to specifications.

Knaus wasn't penalized, but NASCAR quickly outlawed trick shocks.

Bill Davis, who owns the Dodges driven by Dave Blaney and Bill Lester, said working in the gray area is considered OK by NASCAR and competitors alike.

"If you push and shove on the templates or try to get the nose a little lower, to me that's something that's acceptable," Davis said, adding that some of Knaus' tricks haven't been.

"When they went with cheating shocks and built a piece to deliberately put the rear window up, that's cheating and that ought to be points and fines and anything they throw at them," Davis said.

But Davis admits that sometimes you have to admire a mechanic's creativity, even when it eventually brings on punishment.

"I got caught with my hydraulic spoiler at Daytona one time," he said. "We were down there with an old Pontiac and were struggling. We didn't want to sit on the pole. We just wanted to make sure we made the race. We had a spoiler that you go down the backstretch and let her down about 20 degrees. It was sweet, until a rival team threw us in the river."

Robbie Loomis, a long-time crew chief who works as a vice president at Petty Enterprises, said cheaters in NASCAR aren't much different than baseball players who get caught with corked bats. He feels both should be punished appropriately, but he doesn't look down on those who cheat in NASCAR.

Just like the Depression-era moonshiners, crew chiefs today sometimes do what they have to do to survive. In today's NASCAR environment, where all drivers are talented and the difference in running up front and in the back often is under the hood of the car, there's tremendous pressure on the crew chief to make the car faster.

"It's a double-edged sword," Loomis said. "If you're not running good, the car owner's coming down hard on you, so if you want to keep your job and put food on the table, you're going to have to do what it takes to run good.

"Then, as soon as you get in trouble, the car owner's coming down on you because you're giving the sponsor bad press."

Loomis said that often the difference in cheating and legitimate work in the gray area is a matter of interpretation.

"I never looked at it as cheating," he said. "I look at it as finding a competitive edge. I always try to find an advantage in the gray area. But where the line gets crossed is when NASCAR determines it's cheating."

Loomis and Davis say technical trickery is risky today, more because of pressure from sponsors than from NASCAR's beefed-up force of inspectors and severe penalties.

"It's a higher-profile sport, with higher-profile sponsors spending a lot of money, and that's dictating it a lot," Davis said. "Our sponsors aren't into cheating, point blank, period. It's not going to happen."

It remains to be seen how Knaus will adapt to the scrutiny when he returns to the circuit next week.

He has had a relatively quick climb in NASCAR. He started out working on short track cars around his hometown of Rockford, Ill., before moving south. He began his Nextel Cup career with Alabama's Stanley Smith, but soon moved to Hendrick Motorsports, where he has been Johnson's crew chief since 2002.

Knaus acknowledged on a recent teleconference that his cars will be getting plenty of hard looks from NASCAR inspectors because of the reputation he has developed, and that will limit his ability to try new tricks.

"I think that's obvious," he said while vowing to continue to find ways to make his car fast. "We do everything we can to build the best race cars out there and be as innovative as we possibly can. . . . We're not going to go out there and pull punches."

But he also knows he'll have to be careful.

"I want to be here a long time; that is what I want," he said. "So if I have gotten that little bit of a label, I need to try and change that to make sure that I am here and am successful for years to come."