Racers and the rule book
I love the restrictor plate cheat. Almost as good as Toyota's WRC turbo hack. The good old days with fat 20 foot fuel lines, basketballs in fuel tanks, 7/8 scale bodies, nitrous, "water cooled brakes," hidden lead shot, etc etc.It's also great because of Donohue and Penske it's not cheating it's an Unfair Advantage.
"Racin' in the gray area is one thang but this was out and out cheatin'"
But it worked.
Caldwell D9B - Sold
Crossle' 30/32/45 Mongrel - Sold
RF94 Monoshock - here goes nothin'
Some of it was, some of it wasn't. A whole bunch of additional fuel line isn't cheating if the rule book specifies the maximum size of the fuel cell/tank but doesn't address the size of the fuel lines from the tank to the engine and/or cell to the filler inlet. It is cheating if the rule book specifies the maximum fuel capacity.Originally Posted by TimH
I am and always have been a very serious reader of the rules i learned this while werking in Nascar land so when i stopped NASCAR racing i read every word in the SCCA gcr and any other scca publication that had to do with the racing and this resulted in 5 official protests and 2 unofficial engine tear downs while finishing 2nd at the runoffs. The net result of every protest was that we were LEGAL IN EVERY CASE. The hard lesson to learn is if you make something too trick and you have to change it so i am now more conservative with my creativity. Still ALWAYS been legal. EVERY TIME ! So no whinning allowed when you see the new car, it will be legal
Thanks ... Jay Novak
313-445-4047
On my 54th year as an SCCA member
with a special thanks to every SCCA worker (NONE OF US WOULD RACE WITHOUT THE WORKERS)
That's why you make "IT" just trick enough, instead of more trick than it needs to be. It's also why you give them something else to focus their attention on that you don't mind changing at all.
A movable airfoil wasn't gray, no matter how well he hid the actuator. He wisely decided that it was so flagrantly clear during practice that it would never pass inspection in competition.Originally Posted by TimH
"Racin' in the gray area is one thang but this was out and out cheatin'"
Some of it was, some of it wasn't.
My favorite story, though, was Bill France declaring that a perfectly legal car was going to be illegal the next day even if he didn't know how they'd done it.
Caldwell D9B - Sold
Crossle' 30/32/45 Mongrel - Sold
RF94 Monoshock - here goes nothin'
I remember the bored out cylinder cheat, where the cylinders that were legal we easier to get to for pumping where the big ones were blocked by headers and stuff.
Still, the best story to me was always Smokey firing up his car and driving it back with the gas tank out.
Which reminds me, I need to find the Playboy that published a Stroker Ace story once upon a time. It talked about Lugs Harvey's "catch-me-come-****-me" suspension, where after tech he'd just "breathe" on it and it would hunker down. (The rest of the story is him hiring an inner-city gang as his pit crew because they were able to strip his Caddy in 60 seconds.)
A few decades back, an aquaintance won a major championship with a 7/8ths scale car. They constantly had some blatantly illegal stuff on the car to draw the inspectors attention, after which the inspectors were so proud of themselves that they never once put the templates on the car to check its shape and size. Their biggest challenge every race was to make sure that they never got parked by another car of the same make and model.
Another friend on a manufacturers GTP team always had a bit of fun cranking the inspectors a bit by handing them his rulers every time they went to measure things like wing width and height. The rulers were pattern makers rulers. The inspectors never caught on, even though the car always measured as being well below the maximum allowed measurements. The cars were perfectly legal, but the inspectors for the life of them understand why the car always had undersized wings, etc.
Last edited by R. Pare; 11.30.20 at 8:25 PM.
There's more cheating going on in auto racing than we'd like to admit. I detest cheaters but respect those with the intellect and ingenuity to play in the grey.
However, watching these videos and reading these threads makes me question where more embellishment occurs, bench racing or fishing stories?
Sure, it's not cheating. It's just incredibly dangerous. You aren't going to like all that extra fuel when the line tears open in a crash.
Fuel cells and nomex suits weren't even utilized until the mid-late 60's in NASCAR and INDY. It's not too unlike the demolition derby guys driving around with a 5 gallon jerry can inside the car held in with plumbers' tape. Just because it's not smart doesn't mean it's not smart
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