So out on the streets Long went, and that's when his life truly started to sour. And it had nothing to do with Front Row Motorsports. "This guy, he's wanting to crew chief your car, but yet he's on the cell phone half the day with lawyers and media folks and whoever else just trying to drum up support for his case. " just chewed up so much of his attention and focus, and it was hard for us to sit there," he said. They didn't win, but they retained their sponsor, and a bunch of guys retained their jobs." Then, all of a sudden, they run 13th, and NASCAR - I mean, there's some people at NASCAR that inspected the things, and you never heard nothing about it because it was good for the sport.
I even know a race team that had motors a lot bigger than mine, that for one reason or another they had to try to keep their sponsor and they wasn't running so good. "What bothers me and everybody else that's been in the garage area, there's things with lots of teams where there was not an intent to cheat - and they worked with the teams," Long explained.
The organization has always defended itself by claiming it was just playing by the rules - that Long still believes can be selective when it benefits NASCAR. The tough sentence became a sizzling summertime story, with fans decrying NASCAR's picking on the little guy while it was mired in an economic slump.