See spot see: tight racing has made the spotter—part coach, part emergency alert system, part seeing-eye dog—an invaluable part of a driver's team

It was a typically brutal morning in Charlotte traffic--bumper to bumper, stop and go. Greg Wallace was on his way to his school, an hour's drive each way from home.

His father, Rusty, had given him the keys to one of the family vehicles, a Toyota 4-Runner. The veteran NASCAR driver had been succinct with his instructions when Greg turned 16 and got his driver's license: "Don't wreck," he said.

But that morning, someone stopped suddenly on Interstate 77, and Greg plowed into the back of the car in front of him. Nobody was hurt. There was no major damage. Still ...

"Imagine," Greg says, "having to pick up a cell phone and tell Rusty Wallace you just wrecked his car."

These days, Greg is making the calls to keep Rusty from his own wrecks. He is his father's spotter, a second set of eyes and a second voice--along with the crew chief--in the driver's ears all race long.

The spotter is an alarm system of sorts, watching for wrecks ahead on the track and quickly warning the driver to take evasive action. A spotter also monitors the traffic near his team's cars, keeping tabs on other cars that might be in his driver's blind spots. In the chaos of a pit stop, he helps guide the car down pit road, helping guard against too much speed, watching the manuevers of cars pitting near his team, then easing the driver back into traffic.

For each race, Greg and 42 other spotters ascend above the track to a perch high and spooky enough to give vertigo to a Flying Wallenda. It is not a job for the acrophobic, though there are spotters who do suffer from fear of heights. Eddie Massencup spots for Bobby Labonte but confesses: "I can't stand to get on a ladder. I don't like heights. I get eight feet up, my knees get shaky."

Spotters spend four hours in extreme temperatures, unprotected from the sun and wind, choosing to either stand through the race or sit on uncomfortable aluminum bleachers, without the facilities available to their teammates in the pits or fans in the grandstand.

"Sometimes," says Roman Pemberton, who spots for Johnny Benson, "you pray for a caution. Not for anybody to get hurt, but to rest your eyes, change your batteries." Or, he adds, to make a break for the bathroom. "You go down three floors some places and just bust into a suite."

A spotters job is full of nerve-jangling responsibility. "The main thing," says driver Jeff Green, "is to keep you out of wrecks: That's a two-fold chore--preventing the driver from being either the wrecker or the wreckee. A spotter must have one eye on the entire track, so he can make a quick, decisive call when an accident happens ahead of his driver, and a spotter also must keep an eye on his own driver, keeping him clear while passing--or being passed by.

If a fan squirmed his way into the cockpit of a Winston Cup car, the first thing he'd notice--aside from the fact the seat is likely designed for someone a few rump sizes smaller--is the driver's limited range of vision, which could bring on raging claustrophobia. The roll cage padding, extended head rest, helmet and head-and-neck restraint system all conspire to scrunch peripheral vision, and the windshield and the narrow crescent of a rearview mirror leave a driver with extremely limited sight.

So, the spotter's job includes seeing cars both to the driver's left and right--"let him know where the other cars are in relation to him, and you have to have the information right there," Greg Wallace says.

In the movie M*A*S*H, nurse Hot Lips Houlihan complains in one scene about the behavior of a surgeon, saying: "I wonder how a degenerated person like that could have reached a position of responsibility in the Army Medical Corps."

Father Mulcahy responds: "He was drafted."

Spotters also are drafted. Or, in the words of Massencup, "I got volunteered."

Back in 1988, Massencup, who is a weekend pilot, flew Terry Labonte to a track and was in the garage area before the race. When Labonte's usual spotter failed to show, crew chief Tim Brewer said to Massencup, "You're a pilot. You can talk on the radio. Go spot."

Pemberton was volunteered for his first spotting job by his brother, Robin, then the crew chief for Rusty Wallace. Greg Wallace was volunteered to spot for his father two years ago at Indianapolis, where teams employ several spotters because of its size and quirky sightlines. That's also the case at road courses and other large tracks,

"They put me in Turn 3 thinking nothing was going to happen there," Greg Wallace says. "They thought all the accidents would happen off 4 or the other end. It just so happened every accident happened in Turn 3. I guess I kind of surprised him (his father, of course) how well I did."

In a reshuffling of the No. 2 team this spring, Earl Barban, Rusty's spotter last season, was moved back to his old role of jackman, and Greg was volunteered once again.