A conversation I suspect might happen Sunday morning in the NASCAR garage at Indy.

“Everything good with the car? We ready for inspection?”

“Did you just wink at me?”

“I don’t know, did I?”

“You did it again! Knock it off. I’m serious, is everything OK with the car?”

“Damn straight, boss. Jusssst right.”

“Stop it. I’m serious this time, no fooling around. No tweaks, no gray area, no secret sauce. Didn't you see what they did to the Hamlin and Busch teams last week?”

“All right, all right. Wheel ’er back in the garage, boys, we need to go back to Plan B. And that’s B, as in Boy Scouts.”

A generation from now, insiders may look back fondly and talk of how they skirted the rules by shedding two ounces of weight here, or adding 1.3 degrees of tapering there, tickling the tolerance levels of NASCAR’s technical troops.

Adding a 5-inch piece of clear tape, something like you see at the pack-and-ship, seems downright primitive compared to what the engineers could concoct down in the lab.

“Tape? Neanderthals! What’s next, a chute full of ball bearings with a release hatch?”

Oops, that one has been done — shedding car weight adds horsepower, you know. A basketball inside the gas tank? Yep, made the tank seem the legal size, yet when the ball was later deflated, you get another gallon or so of fuel in there. 

All so long ago, and tales of obfuscation are part of the lore. Hell, whenever an illegal part was discovered, NASCAR’s rules czars would place it on a table outside their organizational hauler in the garage. Often, several parts were on display — it would sometimes look like a bizarre mix of this-and-that at a backwoods flea market.

DENNY'S DQ:A "taped" apology, and frankly, what's a hundredth of an inch among friends?

THRU THE GEARS:An Uh-Oh at Pocono: Hamlin wins, then loses after inspection; Chase Elliott says thanks

There will be no table outside the hauler at Indy, and no display of the dastardly tape, which was placed near the front wheel-well openings. The tape would help ever so slightly with air flow, which in turn would presumably help the cars get through the corners just a wee-bit faster.

At a reported hundredth of an inch in thickness, maybe it was a wee-bit of a wee-bit. 

OK, a hair thicker than a hundredth of an inch, quite literally — 0.012 inches, the Gibbs Racing team shared after its No. 11 car (Denny Hamlin) and No. 18 car (Kyle Busch) were disqualified after their 1-2 finish at Pocono last week.

Until this past week, NASCAR had been reluctant to take away a win, regardless of what might be found during the winning car’s post-race tear-down. A few years back, they introduced the term “encumbered win,” meaning they’d fine and penalize an offending winner, but leave the victory in the books. 

As the Next Gen car was preparing to roll off the floor this year, teams were warned there’d be no tolerance and no more encumbering. Find horsepower where you can within the motor — there, too, you find some guardrails, of course — but DO NOT tinker with the parts. 

They sent a strong message to Brad Keselowski’s team earlier this season after NASCAR deemed an auto part “modified.” 

And just this past week, it wasn’t just Hamlin and Busch, but Michael McDowell’s No. 34 car — a Front Row Motorsports entry — was hit with a $100,000 fine and loss of driver and owner points (100 of ’em) for a modified part. Front Row, unlike the Gibbs team, is appealing the ruling.

The Hamlin-Busch whacking got a heap-load more attention, obviously, because they’d just finished first and second — Hamlin had gone through the Victory Lane rituals, and third-place Chase Elliott was practically tucked into bed back in Dawsonville when he was belatedly declared the winner.

The next day, Elliott did a little teleconference and, keeping with his low-wattage demeanor, shrugged off the whole affair. He has no choice but to accept the spoils of his upgraded finish (points and money), but wasn’t wasn’t exactly thrilled and certainly wasn’t pointing fingers and assigning blame — or shame.

“Them asking race teams to not over-engineer something is like asking a football player to not practice,” he said. “If the roles were reversed and we got tossed . . . my viewpoint on it would be, hey, we’re trying everything we can do and it didn’t work out I guess.”

He also seemed to suggest there will be more to come.

“As much as they want a cut-and-dry car, where you bolt pieces together and go race, this level of motorsports is entirely too smart to just leave it at that,” Chase said, before adding the human-nature angle.

“There’s too much on the table, to benefit by performing at a high level, to not go out there and try to push and maximize everything you can.”

The days of shrapnel in the roll cage or a basketball in the fuel tank are gone in one sense, but in another, they’ll never leave. Not as long as first pays more than second — or, for that matter, as long as 12th pays more than 13th.

They’re just finding the ragged edge in simulators and wind tunnels these days, not a dusty garage.

— Reach Ken Willis at ken.willis@news-jrnl.com