Dino Vournas / AP

Jeff Gordon's No. 24 Chevrolet, being inspected here by NASCAR officials, failed inspection before practice on June 22 in Sonoma, Calif.

“I had a lot of enjoyment when I felt like I had thought of something that somebody else hadn’t, meaning other crew chiefs and the rules makers,” Leslie said.

“That’s the job I was given. My car owner gave me the task of making the (No.) 6 car as fast as possible, and NASCAR gives their inspectors the task of making sure everybody’s on a level playing field. Yeah, it takes some of the fun out of it. But some of it might have been getting out of hand.”

Team owner and former driver Richard Childress agrees that things might have been getting out of hand in manipulating the bodies of the cars in recent years.

“If you look at the current car, it had gotten so far out of the box — it’s twisted and looked like it had been wrecked before the race started,” Childress said.

“This (COT) is the car that NASCAR has given us and these are the set of rules and, even though I’m not in that job, it’s still our job as competitors to beat everybody else in the garage area,” he added. “You take pride in other areas now.”

John Darby, NASCAR’s garage boss, doesn’t believe the changes NASCAR is making should stifle creativity at all.

“I haven’t seen the toolboxes get any smaller, which tells me there’s still plenty of stuff to work on,” Darby said. “The real fact of the matter is the ingenuity and the things like the car body, which is what we’re talking about specifically, it’s still there.

“The (rear) wing has got over 16 degrees of travel in it to tailor your rear downforce to whatever you need to do to balance the car. Your front splitter is adjustable. They have a pretty full selection of what wing end plates they can put on the car. Changing all of those things represents the same result as when you used to go home and cut a whole body off and change something.

“It’s just a whole lot less work and a whole lot less expensive,” Darby said.

Robbie Loomis, a former championship crew chief with Gordon and now a vice president at Petty Enterprises, said he believes the penalties to Knaus and Letarte were too harsh and that the key to the situation is more communication.

“We’re going through a tough time because it’s a transitional period,” Loomis said. “Mainly, the communications from the teams to NASCAR has got to really get a lot stronger so that it’s defined very clearly what a gray area is and what it isn’t.”

Childress agreed with that, saying, “We all have to be on the same page and, sometimes, that just doesn’t seem to be the way it is. We all, NASCAR and the teams, need to work on that.

“I still enjoy (the sport) but, today, the competition, the responsibility, the microscope we’re under, it’s so much greater than it was. It never gets easier.”