The main problems in preparing a book such as this are obvious. Firstly, separating fact from fiction is almost a life's work in itself. On this count, Jensen does pretty well. His intimate and lengthy involvement with NASCAR probably paid dividends here, for once you become a part of a particular racing scene (especially a high-profile one), you become privy to a side of the sport that is rarely seen by the fans. When it comes to getting to the bottom of something, having that kind of relationship with the sport and its participants is invaluable.

This leads on to the second problem. Once people within the sport are familiar with, and trust, a particular journalist, the scribe will frequently find themselves learning about all kinds of things – off the record. As an example, the editor of the magazine for which I work in my 'day job' tells of a very high-profile racer from another international category that once complained to him that his main rival, who had just won the championship, was cheating. 'How do you know?' asked the journo. 'Because we're cheating like mad, and we can't get close to them!' came the reply.

In other words, getting people to own up to cheating, (or, more likely, having cheated in the past) is not always hard if they know you. But try getting them to say it when the tape is rolling. Aside from rare exceptions like Smokey Yunick, whop derive an almost perverse pleasure from getting one up on authority, there are very few people who want to be painted as being dishonest. In fact, not even Smokey wanted that – he just wanted people to know that he was smarter than the rulemakers...

Richard Childress illustrates this at the start of the book.

"We've always used the term 'trying to get a competitive edge' instead of cheating. I don't like the word 'cheating'. It's trying to get a competitive edge." (p. 15).

Rusty Wallace's ex-crew chief, Barry Dodson, backs Childress up on this: "We call it self-defense, not cheating."

Jensen is far too much of a gentleman to let on, but when you're reading this book it's hard not to feel that he knows more than he's telling you. That's not a huge problem in itself, but it does limit the amount of material that he can present with any degree of authority. Perhaps as a result, he tends to overstate some of the infractions that have been committed over the years, and more annoyingly still, repeat the same type of infringements from chapter to chapter.

There are a number of infamous examples of rule-bending in NASCAR history ranging from the winner of the very first race being disqualified (for running non-stock, 'bootlegger' springs), through to an awful lot of the cars prepared by the likes of Junior Johnson and Yunick, and on to more modern scandals such as Jeff Gordon 'Tyregate' war against Mark Martin in 1998. Jensen explains all of these thoroughly, although he sometimes falls short of filling in the blanks.

When talking of Yunick, for example, he says that the various accounts of particular incidents that floated around – particularly those involving contradictory recollections from Smokey himself – makes nailing the truth down simply too hard a task. Whether more digging could have revealed more is anyone's guess, but it's a shame that Jensen seemed to drop it and move on so quickly.

There are occasions where, from the perspective of a reader with a working, but not expert, knowledge of NASCAR, Jensen does set the record straight, the most notable being Jeff Gordon's T-Rex car that was built specially for the one-off The Winston race in 1997. Of course, how revelatory some of this material might be to somebody that follow Stock Car racing more closely, I can't say. But as eye-opening as certain passages may have been, there seemed to be other opportunities to clear things up that went begging.