When Junior Johnson had a multicar operation, a creek ran through the property at his headquarters in Wilkes County, N.C. Darrell Waltrip’s team had a shop on one side of the creek and Neil Bonnett’s team was on the other, and Waltrip remembers Johnson shuttling from one side to the other spurring his teams by hinting that the boys across the creek were eager to whup up on them.

Dale Earnhardt never was a big fan of having a teammate at Richard Childress Racing, and anybody who ever had any doubt about that needed only to watch what Earnhardt would do to Mike Skinner in the draft at Talladega.

Stock-car racing’s culture has worked directly against the idea of teamwork for decades. From Carl Kiekhaefer’s teams in the ’50s right on up to today’s multicar operations, it has been a grand struggle to convince competitive people that, in the long run, they’re better off to cooperate than compete with people who are supposedly on the same side.

In the past few seasons, it has become obvious that in today’s economic and competitive environment, no team can successfully go it alone. It has been 78 races since Ricky Craven, driving for car owner Cal Wells, won a race for a single-car team with a victory at Darlington in March 2003.

It also has become clear, however, that the matter of simply having more than one team is not a solution in itself, especially if a team strives to do more than simply survive in NASCAR’s top series.

That is a lesson, however, that some teams have apparently been slow to learn. The poster children for Team Dysfunction in Nextel Cup racing in the past few months clearly has been Penske Racing South.

The squabble between drivers Rusty Wallace and Ryan Newman mushroomed out of an on-track incident in a race at Martinsville last fall.

Since then, neither driver has elected to take the high road and, even for appearance’s sake, made a move toward reconciliation.

“It’s really two separate teams totally,” Wallace said in an interview at Phoenix earlier this year. “The 12 car (Newman’s) is totally off limits. It’s totally a separate team. They’re at one end of the shop, and it’s unfortunate. I’m resigned to the fact. I’m tired of wearing myself out trying to fix it.

“I’ve beat this 12 thing to death forever, and they’ve got a whole different train of thought, and that’s fine. : I know it’s not right. There’s nothing I can do about it. That particular question needs to be posed to Roger Penske.”

Wallace was correct about that.

The responsibility for what’s happened to the stock-car teams that bear his name lay right at the auto racing and business mogul’s feet. And you don’t have to work for the team to figure that out.

“Maybe I’m burning a bridge I shouldn’t burn, but I am shocked that upper management allows that to go on,” said Jeff Burton, who drives for Richard Childress Racing. “If I was running Penske Racing, they’d either be working together or they’d be working somewhere else. That’s how it would be.

“It’s amazing to me that you can have that much funding and effort to win championships, and yet have that big of a division. I’d find a way to fix that. If I couldn’t, then I’d have to start getting rid of people.”

It’s impossible to argue that Penske doesn’t know what he’s doing. He’s been the winning car owner for the Indianapolis 500 an unbelievable 13 times. He runs dozens of successful business ventures, employing more than 30,000 people, and right now he also is heading up Detroit’s host committee for next year’s Super Bowl.

Penske has 53 career victories in the Cup series. But no Penske-owned Cup car ever has won a points race at Lowe’s Motor Speedway, Daytona, Talladega or Indianapolis.

Last month, Penske completed a deal to buy out Wallace, Don Miller and John Erickson’s ownership interest in Penske Racing South.

Perhaps that signals the beginning of a new era for Penske’s stock car operation, and that Penske is ready to start making the kind of decisions appear to be overdue.

“There were just too many partners in Team Penske, just way too many,” said Wallace, who will retire as a driver at season’s end. “They’re all good guys, but I know in my Busch team I can do anything I want, and I don’t have to go get approval from four or five different people. Roger felt the same thing. He’s able to run his IRL team the way he wants to run it, and I am all for him wanting to do this.”

Newman should be, too. Unless Wallace, who won his Cup championship in 1989 with car owner Raymond Beadle, writes a fairy-tale ending to his brilliant career, it will fall on the 27-year-old Newman to try to bring Penske his first NASCAR crown.

Matt Borland, Newman’s crew chief, has signed a new contract, and Newman is about to do the same. He was being courted by other car owners, but now he says he’s going nowhere.

“I never said I was going anywhere,” he said recently. “I’m happy doing what I’m doing where I’m at. I’m having a lot of fun.”

He’ll have more fun if Penske makes it clear to Newman and Borland, to their teammates with the No. 77 Dodges driven by Travis Kvapil and to whoever is brought in to replace Wallace that the infighting is what is always has been : history.