The Last Lap

Another Cheating Escapade

2012-02-17T12:40:00.001-08:00

Editor's Note: This is an excerpt from the 2004 update of my book about cheating in NASCAR.

In the two and a half years since the first edition of Cheating wrapped up, NASCAR has undergone myriad changes, many of them dramatic. Brian France has replaced his father, Bill, Jr., as NASCAR’s CEO. After 33 years as the sanctioning body’s prime benefactor, R.J. Reynolds and its Winston cigarette brand opted out of title sponsorship of NASCAR’s top series, which is now known as the Nextel Cup. Union 76, which had been the official fuel of NASCAR for 50 years, was replaced by Sunoco, and for 2004, the NASCAR point system was overhauled for the first time since 1975. Former Winston Cup Director Gary Nelson assumed a new position, managing director of competition, and now runs NASCAR’s $10 million R&D center in Concord, North Carolina, a spectacular facility that opened in January 2003. He was replaced by the popular John Darby, a gruff chain smoker who has earned a reputation for being a straight shooter.

A new generation of drivers, the so-called “Young Guns,” has emerged as superstars. Men like Dale Earnhardt, Jr., Matt Kenseth, Kevin Harvick, Jimmie Johnson, Kurt Busch, and Kasey Kahne have pushed veterans Bill Elliott, Mark Martin, Rusty Wallace, Ricky Rudd, and Terry Labonte out of the headlines. An entire pack of mid-level drivers—Ted Musgrave, Chad Little, Bobby Hamilton, and Johnny Benson, to name just a few—have been bumped out of NASCAR’s top series to make room for the Young Guns.

Yet for all the changes, one thing has remained constant: The Winston Cup garage—now the Nextel Cup garage—is still a place where crew chiefs, engineers, and mechanics push the letter and the spirit of NASCAR’s rule book. And lest one think the early chapters of this book exaggerated the creativity and out-and-out deviousness of NASCAR’s top crew chiefs, the 2002 and ’03 seasons saw some of the most extraordinary rule-bending in NASCAR’s history. And several infractions and the subsequent penalties doled out by NASCAR had a direct impact on the Winston Cup championship race, especially during the 2002 season.

Not surprisingly, the trouble began at Talladega in April, where penalties were doled out to no less than five Winston Cup crew chiefs and one Busch crew chief for rules violations that occurred during the weekend at the Alabama track. Most all of these were relatively benign, as rules offenses go. John Andretti’s crew chief, Steve Lane, earned the Alabama daily double, with fines totaling $1,500 for both a non-conforming rear spoiler and a too-thin fuel cell. Michael McSwain, crew chief of Ricky Rudd’s Robert Yates-owned Ford Taurus, and Paul Andrews, crew chief of the Dale Earnhardt Inc., Steve Park-driven Chevrolet, each received $1,000 fines for using axles that didn’t meet NASCAR specs. The cars driven by Brett Bodine and Jimmy Spencer were found to have fuel-system issues, specifically oversized fuel-filler necks that could have held a little bit of extra gasoline, while a Busch crew chief was fined for using an aluminum brake pedal.

The next weekend at Martinsville, Roush Racing’s Jimmy Fennig, crew chief for young phenom Kurt Busch, was caught with a rear-deck lid that failed to conform to NASCAR templates, while three more crew chiefs were fined the next race at California Speedway, all for minor infractions. Soon, the penalties and offenses both would escalate.

Another Roush crew chief, Ben Leslie, was fined $50,000 after his driver, Mark Martin won the Coca-Cola 600 at Lowe’s Motor Speedway on Memorial Day weekend. Martin’s car was found to be one-eighth-inch too low in post-race inspection. It was the third time in the last 18 Winston Cup races that the race-winning car was ruled to be too low. Yet another Roush car, this one driven by Matt Kenseth, had flunked the height test after winning at Rockingham in February. Generally speaking, the lower a car sits, the better it handles and the less aerodynamic drag it has.

“NASCAR set the height rule and it doesn't matter whether it is one inch or one-eighth of an inch,” crew chief Leslie told Jim Utter of the Charlotte Observer after being penalized. “With 600 miles of racing there is a great deal of wear and tear and adjustments that have to be made on the car. Still, NASCAR has to draw the line somewhere and we didn’t measure up to that line. It’s a steep fine, but those are the rules of the game.”

Some pundits in the Winston Cup garage wondered if $50,000 wasn’t a cheap price to pay for breaking the rules, given that the Coca-Cola 600 purse was a robust $280,033 and the championship purse at the end of the season was worth an extra $4.25 million.

For its part, NASCAR had seen enough of too-low cars. Faced with public pressure from fans, the media and teams themselves, sanctioning body officials decided to up the ante for scofflaws.

What happened next was unprecedented. NASCAR President Mike Helton came into the weekly pre-race meeting of drivers, crew chiefs and NASCAR officials prior to the start of the MBNA Platinum 400 June 2^nd at Dover International Speedway. Helton laid down the law, threatening for the first time to impose penalties more severe than simple fines. “So far we have chosen to use a system of fines to address these violations,” Helton told the drivers and crew chiefs. “We just wanted everyone to know there are other options available if it continues.”

Two weeks later, Jim Long, crew chief for two-time Winston Cup champion Terry Labonte’s Hendrick Motorsports team, earned a $25,000 fine after being caught with a bogus fuel cell in pre-race inspection at the Sirius Satellite Radio 400 at Michigan. “The penalty was a result of the team attempting to increase the capacity of the fuel cell through pressure,” NASCAR officials said—the same trick teams had been using since the advent of the fuel cell nearly four decades earlier. Surprisingly, given Helton’s edict at Dover, Long’s only punishment was monetary.

The perpetual game of cops-and-robbers between NASCAR and the crew chiefs took a much more serious turn in early summer, as the Winston Cup circuit rolled into Daytona for the annual Fourth of July weekend race, the Pepsi 400, formerly known as the Firecracker 400.

This was the very same event that Greg Sacks won under mysterious circumstances in 1985, driving a DiGard Racing “R&D car” wrenched by none other than Gary Nelson. In 2002, though, Nelson was working with NASCAR, and the perp in the latest caper was a brilliant young crew chief named Chad Knaus, who had learned his craft working for Ray Evernham on Jeff Gordon’s car at Hendrick Motorsports, where he had worked from 1993-97. Knaus had worked his way up at Hendrick from a general fabricator to tire changer to manager of the entire chassis and body construction of Gordon’s cars during the team’s heyday.

After leaving Hendrick, Knaus bounced around among several Winston Cup teams, including joining Evernham’s fledgling Dodge team, before returning to Hendrick Motorsports prior to the start of the 2002 season. Knaus was paired with young rookie Jimmie Johnson, who came on like gangbusters after a brief, and frankly unspectacular stint in the Busch Series. Both Johnson and Knaus were whip-smart and by turns fiery and clever, the perfect faces for the new NASCAR.

The Johnson-Knaus team took the Winston Cup circuit by storm in their first season, winning the pole for the Daytona 500 and three races during the year. Johnson, like his mentor Jeff Gordon, combined both ferocious driving skills and casually elegant, made-for-TV good looks.

When Johnson and Knaus arrived at Daytona in July, they already were fourth in points, still in contention for a Winston Cup championship, an almost unheard of position for a rookie driver and team to be in. Prior to the start of practice at Daytona, however, the team got caught with a particularly egregious offense: offset bolts on the rear-trailing arms.

Trailing arms are long, steel beams that run from the center of the underside of the modern Winston Cup car, back all the way to beneath the rear axle. The trailing arms move up and down with the rear springs and axle as the car goes around the track.

Johnson’s Daytona car carried a trick designed to make the car sit lower in the rear and therefore, presumably, have less aerodynamic drag and more speed. The front bolts on the trailing arms were offset, yet designed to look normal from the outside. Essentially, the rear-trailing arms are like levers. If one can move the point where the lever pivots, it will allow the car to drop lower at speed.

“You look at the bolt, it looks like a normal bolt,” explained NASCAR’s Nelson. “You look at it from the side, it’s offset. It’s all about the rear springs at Daytona and Talladega. They have a minimum; they can be no weaker than 345 pounds per square inch. If you think about it in real simple terms, the spoiler is held up in the air by the rear springs. We regulate the size of the spoiler, and all the air [that passes over the body of the car] is catching that spoiler. If you can get that spoiler to drop down another quarter of an inch, that’s the same thing as taking a quarter of an inch off the top of the spoiler.” And that translates into faster speed.

“The only way to get it to drop down is to make these (the rear springs) lighter,” Nelson said. But NASCAR has a machine to measure the stiffness of rear springs and those that fail the 345-pound minimum are easily detected.

“So how do you make the spring travel more and still pass the spring-rating machine inspection?” asked Nelson. “You make the springs sit at an angle, where only half the coils are compressed, rather than all of the coils compressed. Or you take this,” he said, holding up the bolt off Johnson’s car, “and move the trailing arm back for leverage. And if we measure from the center of the bolt, but the trailing arm is actually longer, it’s pretty ingenious. You have more leverage against it. It doesn’t take much to make a quarter-inch of difference.”

NASCAR’s reaction was swift. On July 10, the sanctioning body fined Knaus $25,000 and, more critically, penalized Johnson 25 driver points and car owner Rick Hendrick 25 car owner points. Knaus took the penalty in stride. “Being creative is my job,” Knaus told Charlotte Observer reporter David Poole. “If I am going to get fined and penalized for being creative, then that’s just part of it.”

In discussing the incident, Knaus used one of the most time-tested crew chief arguments: The other guys are cheatin’ more than we are. “I’ll guarantee you a lot of the cars out there weren’t the fairest cars, or the most strict on the rules,” Knaus told the Observer’s Poole. “A lot of people go out to the speedways and try to find an edge. They find it in many, many different ways. The No. 48 Chevrolet is one of the most legal cars in this garage. The reason our car is going so fast is we have an awesome driver and an awesome team and that’s all there is to it.”

Six other crew chiefs were penalized by NASCAR that weekend, but the point penalty levied against Johnson was particularly severe, especially given that the bolts were detected in inspection prior to the car ever taking a lap on the track. Several drivers and crew chiefs said a nonconforming part discovered prior to practice should be treated with far less severe a penalty than if the same part had been caught in a race.

“By penalizing Jimmie, they are sending a message that trying to stretch the rules will not be tolerated,” said his teammate Jeff Gordon, who co-owns Johnson’s car with Rick Hendrick. “But I believe if you go on the track, you deserve to be penalized. Something caught before the car even makes it out there—take it away and make sure it never comes back. That's enough.”

Bacon Arrabiata

2011-12-31T18:47:00.000-08:00

Haven't posted here in forever, but here goes:

OK, here’s a modified version of my baconator arrabiata. Tweaked the final recipe a little .

Bacon: Take 1-pound of bacon, pan fry until extra crispy. Remove from pan, pat down and let cool. Crumble or at least break into small parts.

Gravy: Fry 1/2 onion, finely chopped, and half a dozen cloves of finely minced garlic in olive oil.

Once the onions turn clear, stir in a cup of chianti, 1 tablespoon of sugar, 1 1/2 tablespoons of basil, 1/2 teaspoon of red pepper, 2 large cans of diced tomatoes, 1 small can of tomato puree or paste.

Bring to boil, then turn down heat and cook on low for one hour. Stir in crumbled bacon in last five minutes.

Serve over the pasta of your choice, and have a good, hearty bread on the side for dipping in the gravy.

Enjoy!

Remembering My Sister

2011-09-01T16:46:00.001-07:00

Today is the 16th anniversary of the death of my sister, Eileen Zelig, who was murdered in a Los Angeles courtroom. Eileen was shot in the chest at point-blank range with a .38-caliber handgun by her ex-husband Harry Zelig. He was able to bring a gun to court because the metal detectors were boxed up and stuck in a closet, the city and the state arguing over who would pay to operate them. Because they couldn’t agree, the metal detectors weren’t set up.

On the morning of Sept. 1, 1995, Eileen and Harry had appeared in court and were in a hallway outside the court when Harry pulled out his gun and shot Eileen. The bullet went into her chest, deflected off a rib, nicked her aorta and exited out of her neck.

Six-year-old Lisa Zelig, the youngest of their three children, was there when it happened and was an eyewitness, just a couple of feet away when her dad pulled the trigger and shot her mom.

The last words my sister ever spoke were, “Let me hold my daughter one more time before I die.”

Eileen was smart, tough, funny and completely full of herself, and I mean that in the best way possible. Even in her darkest days, she was someone with a mischievous grin, a kind word and a big hug for anyone and everyone.

And in an instant, she was gone. Just like that. Forever.

There aren’t enough words to describe the pain our family endured or the profound sense of loss and tragedy we went through. I’ve spent much of my life since trying to escape from what happened, only to realize it’s as much a part of who I am as my arms and legs are. It is the defining moment in our family’s history. Grudgingly, I’ve learned to live with it.

I’m happy to say that despite their immeasurable loss, Eileen’s three children have all grown up to be great young adults and tremendously well-grounded in the light of their tragedy.

Raised by my parents, heroes in their own right, I’m incredibly proud of each of them. Dana, Sean and Lisa are proof of the good Eileen always carried inside her, and when they laugh, she does, too. In my ears, I always still hear her voice and it always makes me smile. Every time.

Even 16 years on, there isn’t a day that goes by when I don’t miss Eileen.

And if there’s anything to be taken away from her story, it’s this: The clock is running for all of us. We only have a finite time here. Don’t squander it on hatred or jealously or anger or pettiness. Every day counts, every minute matters.

Get busy living today, because trite as it may seem, none of us is guaranteed tomorrow.

RIP, my dear, sweet sister. I love you and miss you more than you’ll ever know. But you made the most of what little time you had, because I see it in those three amazing kids, who are now three remarkable and loving adults.

You did good work, kid.

Just wish I could have seen a lot more of it.

Tom

P.S. — On Sept. 2, 1995, one day after Eileen died, the metal detectors went up in the Los Angeles civil court. They’ve been operable ever since.

You can read about the case in these two articles below.

http://articles.latimes.com/1995-09-03/local/me-41818_1_harry-zelig

http://www.thefreelibrary.com/ZELIG+GETS+29+YEARS+TO+LIFE.-a083860952

2011-06-18T17:07:00.000-07:00

The vast majority of what I write here is about NASCAR. But some of it's life and on rare occasions, death, too. My father died Dec. 9, 2006. Here is what I wrote about his passing. And on Father's Day, I'll be thinking of him.

At the last minute, I skipped the Nextel Cup banquet this year to drive up and see my parents in Pennsylvania. Mom is battling cancer and spending a couple of days with them seemed liked a good idea. Turns out it was, for all the wrong reasons.

The three of us spent three days together, doing little things - shopping for Christmas presents for my kids, driving out in the country just to have some time together alone, eating out at a couple of their favorite dives.

I left on Dec. 1 and was almost back to Charlotte when I got the news over the cell phone from my wife: Dad had suffered a stroke during what was supposed to be a routine and minor surgical procedure. She told me he was going to be alright, that the doctors said the prognosis was good but, somehow, I knew it wasn't. My wife had lost her father to a stroke three years earlier and both our fathers would have made horrible patients. Neither man had a lick of patience and both were fiercely proud and independent, rotten candidates for prolonged therapy with uncertain results.

And so, with my father as with my wife's, the end was inevitable. Eight days after Dad suffered his stroke, he died in a hospital in suburban Philadelphia. His brother, Butch, and I were by his bedside when he took his final breath, and his passing was remarkably peaceful. To my eternal gratitude, we had nothing unsaid between us, no issues that we hadn't managed to work out years earlier.

Anyone who knew John Jensen knew it wouldn't be a stretch to call him a great man, fascinating and complex in both his achievements and flaws. The oldest of 13 children in an impoverished Chicago Catholic family, Dad grew up fast and he grew up hard, the way people did when born to the working poor in the middle of the Great Depression.

He started working for a living at the ripe old age of 7, riding the trolleys in Chicago as he delivered flowers all over the city. Some days he'd drop off a floral arrangement to a cancer patient in Cook County Hospital, then a dozen roses to a dancer at one of the many burlesque theaters that flourished back in the day.

Even as a kid, he was a fearless brawler, afraid of no one and deeply disdainful of people and institutions of power and privilege. At the long-shuttered St. Mel's High School, he occasionally got in trouble for his pranks, including once teaching obscene and creative idioms to a visiting French-Canadian priest who spoke no English.

After somehow surviving his Catholic education, Dad left for the military. On his very first night in Marine Corps boot camp at Parris Island, S.C., Dad picked a fight with his drill instructor. The first night. That was a big part of who he was: A warrior and a fighter, someone who never backed down from anything, a man as tough as nails. He was classic Old School the way Bogie and Earnhardt the elder were.

When you grow up the oldest of 13 kids in the Depression, you get tough or you don't survive. In Dad's world, things were either black or white, right or wrong. There was no room for gray, no ambivalence. He was sometimes wrong about things, as we all are, but he was never in doubt, nor was anyone around him ever in doubt about where he stood.

Along with the warrior mentality, Dad was a passionately devoted family man. When he was a kid, anyone who picked on one of his brothers or sisters picked on him, and God help the occasional dolt who thought it was a good idea to challenge a Jensen. To the very end, Dad regaled us with stories of the days as a kid in Chicago, stories he told with great flair and aplomb. They were almost always hilarious, frequently outrageous and sometimes featured subject matter that couldn't be repeated in polite company. Not only was Dad tough, he was one of the funniest men I'd ever met.

Dad and Mom got married in 1952 - he was 21, she 20 - and they stayed married for 54 years. Less than a year after their wedding, Dad's own father died and for the rest of his life, he would be the go-to guy in his family, someone who could always be counted on to take care of his own. When he needed to, he put the family on his back and carried them.

Dad and Mom raised six kids, three of their own and my older sister Eileen's three, after she died in 1995. In times of crisis, Dad was a rock. When Eileen died, he and Mom flew to California the same day, took their three grandchildren aside and told them that from that moment forward, they would always have a warm, safe home and would never want for anything. And that was that.

Dad had a successful business career and retired at age 59. Over the last 15 years, he and Mom traveled the world, visiting Europe, Asia, Australia and South America. He loved to travel and he loved muskie fishing, single malt scotch, playing golf and, of course, the Chicago Bears.

Most of all, though, he loved his family. On the night before his stroke, he pulled me aside just as we were supposed to leave for dinner and told me he was going into the hospital at 6 a.m. the next morning to have a clogged artery unclogged. He swore he'd be out in a day or so and that, if the operation went perfectly, he might even be released the same day. I knew he was lying and I didn't have the heart to call him on it.

The last conversation we ever had was just before he left for the hospital, when he asked Mom if she had finished her Christmas shopping for all the grandchildren. When she answered, "Yes," he asked again, naming them individually. Then he turned to me, held up his index finger to his mouth and said, "Don't say a word." He kissed me on the cheek and he was gone, just like that.

Eight days later, I held his hand in the hospital bed and told him it was time to go home, that the fish were biting and that there was a tall scotch waiting for him. Then he took his last breath.

All eight of Dad's living brothers and sisters came to his funeral, and afterwards we did what working class families do: We ate, we drank, we laughed and we cried, telling stories and closing the circle.

And as the year winds to a close, my father is no longer with us and for that I am indescribably sad, sad for myself and sad for our children, whom he loved so much. But at the same time, I'm a rich and lucky man for having grown up with him as my father.

Rest easy, Pop. From here on out, I've got your back.

Chapter 4, Part 2

2011-06-18T04:02:00.000-07:00

But the teams all saved their best tricks for the Daytona 500, then as now the most important race of the year. Daytona drew the most attention and sponsor interest, got the most exposure, and paid extremely well. But in those days, the annual January testing at the 2.5-mile superspeedway was not closely supervised by NASCAR, and cars didn’t have to test in legal trim. If a team was looking for a sponsor prior to Daytona and wanted to generate some buzz, all it had to do was bolt in a 500-cubic-inch motor for a January test session and run some blisteringly fast lap times. All of a sudden the word would get around about how fast it was running. There was no better or quicker way to attract a sponsor’s dollars.

And sometimes the big engines found their way into real races. In the 1973 National 500 at Charlotte Motor Speedway, tensions were high among competitors, who felt that cheating had reached epidemic proportions. Even those doing the cheating were concerned. During a practice session three days after qualifying, pole-winner Charlie Glotzbach was found to have an illegal carburetor plate in his Hoss Ellington–owned Chevrolet. NASCAR disqualified his pole-winning time, forcing him to re-qualify. Ellington swore the offending part was used only in practice, not qualifying, prompting journalist Benny Phillips to note that “The penalty of disqualifying Glotzbach is like putting someone in jail on Saturday for being drunk on Wednesday.”

After the race, the cars of race winner Cale Yarborough, who drove for Junior Johnson at the time, runner-up Richard Petty, and third-place finisher Bobby Allison all had their engines torn down. Some 25 hours after the race was over, Yarborough was declared the winner, even though there were allegations that the first- and second-place cars were running oversized engines.

“Prior to the inspection Allison claimed he saw crew members from Petty's crew run over and, using rags to hide what they were up to, remove something from the engine compartment, while a nearby NASCAR official conveniently turned his back,” recalled Matt McLaughlin of the Web site SpeedFx. “Allison's car passed quickly, but there was obviously something up in the inspection garage, as the post-race inspection dragged on six hours. Rumors were circulating [that] Petty's engine was a little oversized and Yarborough's was way out of line.”

According to accounts from NASCAR journalist and historian Greg Fielden, track promoter Richard Howard blew his cool over the lengthy inspection process. “They give you a stamp of approval at race time and six hours later can’t give you a winner,” Fielden quoted Howard as saying. “I’ve been paying NASCAR inspectors to be here all week and ensure that the cars are legal. Now they tell me they might not have done their job and some illegal cars may have gotten by them. If so, what have I been spending my money for? If they rule against the order of finish that the fans saw on Sunday, I’m going to court. By letting the cars start, the NASCAR inspectors said that they were OK. Now they are reneging. I’m not bluffing about this. I’m sick and tired of seeing stuff like this be allowed to happen, possibly leading to the ruin of a great sport.”

Amazingly, NASCAR made an announcement the next day that the Yarborough-Petty-Allison finishing order would remain one-two-three because its post-race inspection was “inadequate” to determine the cubic inches of the cars involved. “The decision to let the results stand was made following a meeting of NASCAR officials after reviewing information that showed in a post race inspection the procedure used to check all of the engine sizes in the previous race inspection proved inadequate,” the sanctioning body said in a prepared statement. “Since the purpose of the pre-race inspection is to determine that the cars in competition conform to the rules prior to the actual running of the race and that this procedure was in effect for the Charlotte race, the results are official.”

Outraged, Allison threatened to sue, claiming NASCAR officials had told him Petty’s engine was a little oversized, while Johnson’s was “a whopper.” On October 11, Allison announced his plans to pursue legal action. “If you use the standards utilized by NASCAR, we ought give [former vice president and convicted felon] Spiro Agnew his job back,” Fielden reported Allison as saying. “If you get caught cheating, it doesn’t seem to matter in NASCAR’s eyes. I’m just one of 38 guys who got cheated. It was just a case of NASCAR having to discipline the little guys because they don’t have enough guts to do what’s right with the big guys.”

He dropped the idea after a lengthy closed-door meeting with NASCAR President Bill France Jr. on October 15. “I have received satisfactory restitution, and you can read that any way you want” was Allison’s only comment, though it was widely rumored that France had used his legendary powers of persuasion to calm the driver down. In fact, the rumor—never proven or disproven—was that France had given Allison a hefty check to settle the issue, perhaps as much as $50,000. Neither man would ever speak of the incident publicly again.

Twenty-eight years later, Robert Yates, who built the engine for Cale Yarborough’s Charlotte-winning car, confirmed that it was way oversized, but insisted that those found in the competitors’ engine bays were, too.

“I just built a big one,” Yates said. “There were so many ways of beating the system. Finally, I just got great big [with engine displacement]. We had 500-cubic-inch motors. I sent one to Martinsville, and [crew chief] Herb Nab called me back at the shop and said, ‘Man, this thing is so bad it's laying two streaks of rubber all the way down the straightaway.’ It was just a hog motor. We went to North Wilkesboro the next week and then to Charlotte, and by that time NASCAR knew that something was going on. So they were going to pull the cylinder heads off everybody. We won the race. We were there all night. They pulled the heads off and started trying to measure the bore and stroke. They didn't really have the equipment to do it. Eight different people checked our engine and came up with eight different sizes. They finally let us out at midnight. So what? Everybody else had big motors. From that day forward they started pulling heads off, that made you look around and say this is all fair now. I sort of was happy that it all got [more heavily policed by NASCAR].”

While it was Allison who had raised a stink at Charlotte that year, the proverbial shoe would be on the other foot a year later, when Allison ran afoul of NASCAR inspectors. At Ontario, California, Allison won the final race of the season, only to have his car caught with illegal roller tappets, instead of the solid ones mandated by NASCAR. The roller tappets, which fit between the camshaft and pushrods have less friction than solid lifters and thus produce more horsepower.

“He almost got away with it,” former NASCAR Winston Cup Director Dick Beaty said in a 1988 interview with NASCAR Winston Cup Scene’s Deb Williams. “I told one of the crewmen to hand me one of the tappets. At first, they pretended like they couldn’t get if off. I told him he was going to take it apart if we had to cut it. Finally, they got one out. The one he handed me was as cold as ice. He had a rag in his hand and it had a flat tappet in it. When he pulled the roller tappet out of the car, he kept it in his rag and handed me the flat one. Now, there’s no way a tappet that’s just come out of a car that’s run 500 miles is going to be cold. I grabbed the rag that was in his hand and sure enough, there was the roller tappet. If he had taken that [flat] tappet and heated it, he would have gotten away with it.”

But illegal engine modifications weren’t the only way enterprising teams tried to skirt the rules. In an effort to equalize competition among the various makes and hold speeds as well, NASCAR stepped up its use of restrictor plates. The way a restrictor plate works is very simple: It is a machined flat aluminum plate that fits between the carburetor and intake manifold and uses small-diameter openings to limit the amount of fuel-air mixture that flows from the carburetor into the engine, drastically reducing horsepower. Although NASCAR has used a variety of different sizes and configurations of restrictor plates over the years, in the contemporary motors used today at superspeedways, they cut horsepower from about 780 to 400.

From the onset of their use, however, restrictor plates have been a source of almost infinite temptation for engine builders and crew chiefs who want to tamper with the devices. During the running of the 1973 Winston 500 at Talladega, Marty Robbins, a country and western singer and part-time stock-car racer, finished 18th and turned race laps 15 mph faster than his qualifying speed, raising some eyebrows in the garage.

“Marty loved to race for a hobby. He didn't do it for money,” recalled Dick Thompson of the late singer. “He went to Talladega and he was running like a bandit, but what they had done, is they had fiddled with his restrictor plate. He won rookie of the race and everything, but he went to NASCAR and he told ’em, ‘I'm not running legal, I just wanted to get out there one time and race with ’em.’ Nobody would hold that against Marty ’cause he was such a great guy.”

“When they first started putting the plates on the cars, when I drove for Holman-Moody, old Jake [Elder] had a big restrictor plate taped up under the fan cover,” recalled David Pearson of the early 1970s. “Back then NASCAR would hand you the plate and you’d turn around and put it on. Old Jake just turned right around and stuck the one NASCAR gave him up under the fan cover and pulled the other one out and put it on the car. Looking at it, you couldn’t tell the difference. You can take a knife and go around those holes in the restrictor plate, open them up just a little and pick up 10 horsepower. We run the 125-milers [Daytona 500 qualifying races] that way. NASCAR came over and said they wanted to see it. All they wanted to do was look down in the carburetor and see that the plate was still on it. Jake got mad and jerked the seal off. They said, well since you broke the seal just go ahead and take the carburetor off. If he hadn’t done that we would have gotten away with it. But all I was doing was looking in my mirror and driving just fast enough to stay in front of them. I could have run a lot faster, but you’ve got to use your head when you’re doing something like that. But we got caught. There has been a lot of cheating going on with the plate. I would say there still are people cheating with it someway, somehow.”

Another master manipulator of the restrictor plate was former car owner Hoss Ellington, who campaigned cars for Sterling Marlin and the late Tim Richmond, as well as Charlie Glotzbach’s disqualified 1973 Charlotte car, among others. His most famous car was the one Donnie Allison drove in 1979, when he crashed with Cale Yarborough going for the win on the last lap of the Daytona 500.

“When the carburetor plate first came out, Hoss had a device,” said Bob Moore. “The restrictor plate was set in there. Hoss developed a pull device, and it would actually slide the hole completely open. It was incredible. It was so intricately machined it was almost invisible to the human eye. And he actually got away with it for a couple of races before they found it. Hoss was a little bit strange in that he enjoyed getting caught. Then he'd make a big uproar and cause a big stink. Unlike, say, Junior [Johnson] and a few others, whose whole idea was never to get caught, if Hoss got away with it, fine. If he didn't get away with it, fine.”

In 1986, Marlin’s Ellington-owned Chevrolet Monte Carlo was penalized for having an illegal fuel cooling system prior to the Firecracker 400 at Daytona in July. Marlin’s car had a hidden padded metal box filled with dry ice and a spiraled fuel line that ran through it. The dry ice cooled the fuel, making it more dense, so it would generate additional horsepower under combustion.

Pearson, who drove briefly for Ellington, said the outspoken owner loved the conspiracy aspect of cheating but was not mechanically inclined himself. “Hoss never did know what to do,” Pearson said. “[Engine builder] Runt [Pittman] was the main one on that car. He’s the one who did all the cheating and stuff. I know one time when I drove his car, Runt took a grease fitting and screwed a hole for it in the intake manifold. Hoss couldn’t stand it. He wanted to know what that grease fitting was for. Runt told him, ‘Don’t worry, it’s something that’s going to help it.’ Hoss couldn’t wait to tell people about it. But Runt was just messing around with him. It didn’t really do anything.”

For NASCAR Winston Cup teams in the 1970s, though, the clear performance booster of choice was nitrous oxide, or NO₂. Known as laughing gas and used for years as a medical sedative, nitrous oxide injected into an internal combustion engine generates a tremendous horsepower boost—upwards of 100 horsepower over a short period. In the mid-1970s, many NASCAR Winston Cup teams hid nitrous oxide canisters in the bodies and frames of their cars. Though a tank might last long enough for only 30 to 40 seconds, used at the right time, it could mean the difference between winning and losing.

Nitrous oxide was especially popular during qualifying, when it could mean the difference between sitting on the pole and missing the race entirely. The biggest nitrous oxide scandal occurred in 1976, at the biggest race of the season, the Daytona 500. Pole-sitter A. J. Foyt and second-qualifier Darrell Waltrip both had their times disallowed after nitrous oxide was found in their respective cars. During the same race, Dave Marcis’s qualifying time was also disallowed because he was caught with a movable air deflector in his car, a device that could reduce drag and make his car faster.

Foyt and NASCAR President Bill France Jr., who had succeeded his father as NASCAR’s leader in 1972, nearly came to blows at Daytona back then, with the volatile Texan proclaiming he hadn’t used nitrous oxide. Twenty-five years later, prior to the running of the 2001 Daytona 500, Foyt still maintained he didn’t use the performance-enhancing substance. “He’s not talking to anybody about it, but if he was, he’d tell you the same thing he did back then: He didn’t do it,” said team spokesman Michael Rompf.

The ever-effusive Waltrip, however, admitted his team had nitrous in the car. “If you don’t cheat, you look like an idiot. If you do it and you don’t get caught, you look like a hero. If you do it and get caught, you look like a dope. Put me in the category where I belong,” he said at the time.

Prior to the 2000 running of the Brickyard 400, Waltrip spilled the whole story. “We went to Daytona and [crew chief] Mario Rossi took what we called the wedge bar and made that into a cylinder and packed it full of nitrous,” he told reporters Robin Miller and Curt Cavin of the Indianapolis Star. But NASCAR officials became suspicious of Foyt and Waltrip when their practice times were a second per lap slower than their qualifying speeds.

“So here comes NASCAR. They took my car into the inspection room and had people crawl all over it. We were trying not to laugh, but it was hard because they were hanging on that bar with the nitrous,” Waltrip said. “Finally, Bill France Sr. and Bill Gazaway came over and said if we didn't tell them where the nitrous was, they were going to go get the saw and cut every bar on the car out. Rossi got nervous they might cut into something and blow themselves up, so he told them where it was.”

The fears of a nitrous oxide tank exploding were not unwarranted, either. “In the nitrous oxide days, when everybody was doing it, I saw an oil tank blow apart down at Darlington one day on a race car, because the nitrous oxide went off in the car,” said car owner Richard Childress.

“The funniest one of those was G. C. Spencer at Talladega, because he had it in his car and it went off in the garage area. There was this loud hissing sound,” said historian Bob Latford. “Another time, D. K. Ulrich, one of the independents, had a cylinder hidden in the front cross-member. And when he crashed, it was stripped away from the car.”

Car owner Bud Moore said nitrous oxide was fairly common in the 1970s. “Several people got caught using it. They had it hidden all around. All you had to do was turn a little valve and shoot it into the air cleaner,” he said. “It’d raise the horsepower, 30 or 40 more, just like that. You run your first lap, got the speed up, then put that boost to it. Most of them had the bottle inside the seat. Tube ran out the seat bar, worked its way around, and got its way into the air cleaner. It was hard to detect.”

Although he denied using nitrous, Foyt did admit to Miller and Cavin that he wasn’t 100 percent legal all the time in the 1970s. “The biggest thing you could get away with was messing with the body of the car,” he said. “Cale [Yarborough] and I had Oldsmobiles that we narrowed, but somebody blew the whistle on us and NASCAR wouldn't even let us unload them off the trailer.”

Chapter 4, Part 1

2011-05-05T09:19:00.000-07:00

If you don’t cheat, you look like an idiot. If you do it and you don’t get caught, you look like a hero. If you do it and get caught, you look like a dope. Put me in the category where I belong. —Darrell Waltrip

As the tumultuous 1960s came to an end, NASCAR was at a crossroads of sorts. The Big Three automakers scaled back their involvement in racing as they began to scale back their manufacturing of high-performance muscle cars for the street. The old phrase “win on Sunday, sell on Monday” seemed less relevant as Chevrolet, Ford, and Chrysler all phased out their respective 400-plus cubic-inch big-block engines in the early 1970s and starting building economy cars like the Vega and Pinto.

With less factory support to rely on, corporate sponsors entered the scene. R. J. Reynolds joined forces with NASCAR in 1971 to take over sponsorship of what had been known since the 1950s as the NASCAR Grand National series, renaming it the Winston Cup Series. Corporate America mainstays such as Coca-Cola, STP, and Gatorade became sponsors of race teams. Where a stock car once might have had its quarter panels festooned with the name of a local car dealership, now they became 170 mph billboards hawking beer or soft drinks. Teams started to look for sponsors to help foot the bills, and sponsors wanted to be associated with fast cars. And for some teams, the easiest way to run fast was to bend the rules—or break them altogether.

“The factories were getting out, so guys were trying to find ways to make more money by winning races,” said Bob Moore. “That was when we first got sponsorships. So to help attract attention to themselves, they wanted to win. It's like anything else. The more visible you are when you go into somebody's office, the better chance you have of them saying, ‘Oh yeah, we'll give you $50,000 or $20,000 or $10,000, whatever.’ And also, when Richard [Petty] won the 27 races [in 1967], the other competitors got tired of Richard beating them to death. So they decided the only way to beat the boy was they had to cheat to beat him. So that was part of this equation that was going on back then. They were convinced he was cheating, they didn't know how he was cheating, but they figured the only way to beat him was to outcheat him.”

Little did they know that Petty wasn’t cheating, but he had found that putting as much weight as possible on the left side of the car would make it handle better. Petty and his teammates could actually adjust the weight balance of the car from inside the cockpit with a device called a weight jacker. It was a huge competitive advantage at the time, though not an illegal one.

“I’ve got pictures of Richard Petty getting in his car at a short track when he blew the engine in his car and got into Jim Paschal’s car, which was owned by Petty,” said Ford’s Charlie Gray. “He was over a lap down. He was getting in his car and had a socket wrench in his firesuit, in the left-hand pocket. Within 40 laps he was running faster than anybody. We all knew he was running a weight jacker.”

“The left-side weight on the car [was] something that nobody was doing, and the rule book didn’t address it because, in those days, they weighed the whole car, and the car was supposed to weigh 4,000 pounds,” said Humpy Wheeler. “It didn’t matter where the weight was.”

As always, Junior Johnson was a force to be reckoned with, whether his cars were 100 percent legal or not. “If you wreck a car, you always try to build it back better. You'd keep adding little things and little ideas to it,” Johnson explained. “Over a period of two or three years, first thing you know you've found something you like that really helps you. In the late 1960s, I had cars that were offset, motors moved back in them, wheels that were moved forward or backward depending on where I was running. Many, many things that I was doing were an advantage. Moving the wheels underneath the car to the left, widening the car out. There were many things that would help a car handle better.”

Although not formally educated, Johnson figured out what the paid engineers knew about chassis setups. In general, the car would be fastest with its weight lower than higher. It would also be offset to the left as much as possible and back toward the center of the car rather than at the ends.

“In the early ’70s [with Cale Yarborough driving] I did an Oldsmobile that I moved the wheels on, moved the motor back, moved everything to the left side. Moved the wheels further to the left side and to the front. It kept the front end down where it wouldn't lift up. It's a tremendous advantage to get the car down on the racetrack,” Johnson said.

One of Johnson’s favorite short-track enhancements was to start the race with trick tires and then change them on the first pit stop. “Junior, he was a master at self-defense,” laughed Barry Dodson. “I know particularly at North Wilkesboro, when Cale would start the race, he'd be all over the racetrack until the first pit stop. They'd take those four tires off, and the rest of the day that car was a rocket. Little did people know those four tires had steel bands welded around them and they were poured with lead and they weighed a hundred pounds apiece. All of a sudden, he’s 400 pounds light. They finally caught on to that when it took three crewmembers to get them over the wall. Junior always was a master at taking advantage of stuff like that.” Eventually, NASCAR would decide to weigh cars both after the race and before.

“Talk about creative,” said former crew chief Larry McReynolds. “It was against the rules because they were 80 or 100 pounds light [per tire], but you think about the places where they always kicked butt—North Wilkesboro, Martinsville, the road courses, Richmond—that's places where that was so important. And it was done pretty regular. NASCAR didn't weigh cars after the races then. They do now.”

Johnson was pretty sharp on the aerodynamic front as well. “If you remember his race cars, they always had pretty extravagant paint schemes,” said McReynolds. “It wasn't because Junior thought that was pretty. Paint schemes can cover up a lot of stuff. You can put several different colors and maybe some pinstriping, where if you painted it solid if would have a totally different look. Most of Junior's cars had some pretty creative paint schemes to them, because he was hiding aero stuff. If he had something that was supposed to have a sharp edge but a radius was a lot better, he put in a paint line or maybe a pinstripe. It gives it that edge look but it’s a radius the whole time.”

“Junior Johnson was a stand-on-the-gas, go-for-it kind of racer. He was a good racer,” said Robert Yates, who worked for Johnson in the 1970s. “He didn't care about something being pretty as much as he wanted it effective. It was quite a university there. I learned a lot about how to build engines. If you had some idea about something new or different, he would really wake up to it. ‘Let's do it.’ I'd say, ‘I don't know, it might not be legal.’ He’d say, ‘That's all right.’ He was the type of guy that you sort of wanted to be on his side if there was going to be a fight. His theory was let's design something and design it wrong, but be able [to make it legal] in seconds. I probably have some of his mix in me. He's one of my big heroes. He would be aggressive. He wasn't a right-by-the-book kind of person. His adrenaline pumped when he was fudging things. That was racing back then, doing things differently. There just weren't enough policemen. There were too many of us trying to beat the system.”

In doctoring his cars, Johnson ran into the same problem Yunick had 10 or 15 years earlier. “I had people who worked for me who would talk, couldn't keep their mouth shut,” Johnson said. “Couldn't keep things a secret very long. But I could go back late at night and do things myself, and nobody would know anything about it. When I did that, I could get by with a lot of stuff. And it wasn't that you were cheating. There weren't a lot of rules. It was just that you found a way to beat everybody because you had done enough homework to be where you were at.”

One place where Johnson and many other teams did their homework was on the weigh-in scales. Getting a light car through became a high art.

“We decided at Martinsville to run light was really a good deal. We figured out a way to beat the scales. In fact, we beat the scales a lot of places,” said Yates. “Just knew how to drive the car on it right. You could beat the scales at every racetrack, I believe, except Charlotte. I even figured out a way of beating the Charlotte scales by putting a piece of tape under the left rear tire and timing it and turning my steering wheel a little bit so we could pitch the weight to the right side. I could beat every scale just a little bit just knowing how to drive the car on there. Finally, NASCAR put separate scales out for each of the four wheels to eliminate that.”

“We used to have the old grain scales that we'd roll the cars across,” Dodson recalled. “ We didn't have the digital stuff you have today. If you were one of the last cars to be weighed, you could take a little magnet and hang it on the bottom of that car and change the reading on the scale by a hundred pounds.”

“When they ran them across the scales and weighed each wheel, we always had somebody standing around with their arm propped on the car or something like that,” said Bud Moore. “You could get by fairly good on a lot of stuff. We were supposed to weigh back then probably 3,700 pounds. We were usually a hundred pounds light.”

Perhaps the most clever way to beat the weight limit was discovered by a young mechanic named Gary Nelson, who worked with Darrell Waltrip at DiGard Racing in the late 1970s.

Nelson came up with a variation on the old drop-the-buckshot trick that racer Jack Smith said he first saw in the early 1960s. Nelson’s execution was brilliant in its simplicity: The buckshot was dumped into the frame through a hole under the battery and released from the jack plate on the frame rails. So whenever NASCAR inspectors went to look under Waltrip’s car, the very first thing they did was put a jack under the side of the car and lift it up, which covered up the spring-loaded release plate. When he’d release the buckshot, Waltrip often would get on the team’s radio and announce, “Bombs away!” Instantly, the car was 75 to 300 pounds lighter, depending on how much buckshot had been put in to begin with.

To be continued ...

Cheating, Chapter 3, Part 2

2011-05-01T09:50:00.000-07:00

The bigger, faster tracks and the aerodynamic innovations of the early 1960s had some chilling, unintended consequences. For one thing, longer tracks and more aerodynamic cars meant speeds rose sharply, and with those speeds danger increased exponentially. In 1964, three of the sport’s most popular drivers, Joe Weatherly, Fireball Roberts, and Jimmy Pardue lost their lives in separate crashes. When races were 100 miles on dirt tracks, gas mileage and fuel capacities weren’t an issue. But when the races became 500 miles long, suddenly teams began illegally hiding fuel wherever they could find a place in the car, at grave danger to the drivers.

This led directly to the development first of the rubberized fuel cell in 1964 and then the purpose-built stock-car frame and roll cage, which was developed by Holman-Moody in 1966, approved by NASCAR, and is in fact similar to the chassis still used today. The Holman-Moody chassis/roll cage unquestionably was a huge improvement from a safety standpoint, but it was, for all intents and purposes, the end of true stock cars and the beginning of stock appearing cars that can only be driven on a racetrack. And the less cars were stock, the more people were tempted to cheat them up, especially when it came to weight, fuel, and aerodynamics.

Journalist Bob Moore recalled one such example from the early 1960s. “One of the teams basically had extra gas stored in the car for every race. They went the whole season putting in extra gasoline at every race. It'd be different places, different times, because the competitor might find out where you had it hidden, they'd go and tell NASCAR, they'd check and it wouldn't be there,” he said. “This particular race team was extremely smart, extremely innovative, and they'd use every single way to hide gasoline you could possibly think of. Frame rails, roll bars, in the fuel cell, in the dashboard, wherever they could get it so that it would flow into the carburetor or the gas tank and give them an extra one to three gallons of gas.”

Racer Jack Smith said he saw rivals hollow out front cross-members, the center support that runs under the engine joining the left and right sides of the frame together, to hold extra gasoline. “They’d weld that up and take and run the fuel line like it was going through the side of the cross-member, but they’d hook it up to the cross-member, which had gas in it. And there were some that tried to put it in the roll bars.”

“They checked the fuel cells pretty closely. Couldn’t hold but 22 gallons,” added Bud Moore. “We all had a little gimmick going. Some of them had gas in the roll bars. Some had it here, some had it there. I did mine a little different. When we went through inspection, they checked the fuel cell and sealed it all up. I waited until a certain time and stuck an air hose in it and blew that jewel up and made it bigger. They never took the fuel cell back out of it after they checked it. I just put the air hose to it. Blow the cell container, stretch it. I’d get a gallon, gallon and a half, sometimes two more gallons in it.”

Crewman Barry Dodson would later use a similar trick when he worked for Petty Enterprises in the early 1970s. “We'd come here to Daytona. We always had the end garage stall. I'd hide in the trunk and open up the fuel cell to where it held two more gallons than it was supposed to. I'd tap on the quarter panel, and they'd open up the trunk and get me out,” he said.

Still, some car owners drew the line at what they would do with fuel. “Putting fuel in roll bars, I never did it because it was bad enough to have fuel in the rear of the car, much less having it up there around you,” said Cotton Owens. “But some people made special bars for the left door and put it in there. To me that was crazy, because the driver was sitting right there with it. You could hide three or four gallons like that, and that could make the difference between winning and losing. They had it rigged so it would free-flow from there into the tank. After they ran so long they had a valve they'd trip and let it run in the tank.”

Historian Bob Latford recalled one fuel-related incident that involved one of NASCAR’s most time-tested tricks: replacing an illegal part with one even more flagrantly illegal. “One time at Martinsville, Holman-Moody's car that Fred Lorenzen drove got caught. It was supposed to be a 22-gallon gas tank, and there was 22.9-gallons or something like that, and they made him take it out and take it away. And the team fussed and fumed and did the work, and they put a 28-gallon tank back in. They never checked the one they replaced it with.”

Arguably the funniest stories of all came from David Pearson, not in a NASCAR race but when he was driving for Bud Moore in the Trans-Am road racing series in the late 1960s. “When I drove Bud’s carone time I had some tires with water or lead in them. I go through inspection with those tires and then turn around and switch them [with lighter tires] or punch a hole in and let the water out,” said Pearson. “And he had a gas tank at Riverside [California] that all the fuel wouldn’t come out of when they drained it. They had a thing up in it that would just let so much of it drain out. So the inspectors told Bud that he had to get all the fuel out of the tank before they came back. So he got a bunch of the guys on the team to stand around the car and pee on the ground so it looked like they had drained all the fuel out.”

The Trans-Am series was also where one of Smokey Yunick’s most infamous cars surfaced, this one a 1968 Chevrolet Camaro. “While Number 13 may look like a ’68 Camaro, it has most certainly been ‘massaged,’” noted Hot Rod magazine in a 1996 retrospective. “Acid-dipped body parts abound, the front sheet metal drooped, all four fenders were widened, the front subframe was Z’d to lower the car, the floor pan was moved up, the windshield was laid back and thinner safety glass was used throughout the car. The list of tweaks is endless. Smokey even pulled the drip rails in closer to the body! … The engine was fitted with a pressurized, quick connection that allowed the driver to quickly add oil to the engine from the interior during pit stops. Because the driver was an active participant during pit stops in the cockpit, a cable-ratchet mechanism from a military helicopter was used to release the shoulder harness so the driver could perform his necessary tasks.”

Another popular “innovation” of the day—although admitted hardly as exotic as some of Yunick’s tweaks—was lead, or more specifically how the heavy metal was used. In an effort to make cars lighter in race trim, crew chiefs over the years would make replica car products out of lead and replace them with the real articles after the car went through inspection.

“I've seen everything from lead radios to lead watercoolers. Everybody's tried to cheat on weight. Weight used to be a big thing,” said Richard Childress, who began racing in the 1960s as one of the so-called “independents,” small-budget, small-resource teams who had little chance of beating the well-funded teams like Petty’s. “There's so many different stories you could tell. There was a team one time that was running lead inside the wheels on the right side. This was when we had the weight situation. Those tires and wheels would each weigh about 50 pounds extra. And to watch those guys pick those things up and come back around the car with ’em on the first pit stop was pretty amazing. That was the slowest pit stop of the day for those guys.”

Latford said he saw teams make race weight by filling their tires with water and then changing them during early pit stops. Like Childress, he also saw plenty of lead parts, too. “A lot of guys used to put water in their tires before they rolled across the scales to give ’em weight. Then after they went over ’em, they'd change tires,” Latford said. “A team was caught with a radio in their car that looked like a regular radio, but it was made of solid lead. They used to put Thermos bottles in the cars and fill ’em with mercury, before they figured out how dangerous it could be.”

In fact, the lead trick was one that stayed in fashion for several decades. In a 1988 interview with NASCAR Winston Cup Scene’s Deb Williams, NASCAR Competition Director Dick Beaty showed off a virtual gallery of confiscated lead parts, including a replica of a fuel filter that weighed 60 to 70 pounds. Another was an oil tank full of lead.

“That thing must weigh 200 pounds,” Beaty told the racing publication. “When the cars were weighed only once, that was placed where the oil tank would be located, complete with lines running to it. As soon as the car was weighed, the lead-filled oil tank would be removed and the true oil tank placed in the car.” Beaty said he had also caught teams using lead goggle holders and, in one instance, a lead helmet, which sat in the car while it was weighed and was exchanged after the inspection.

“I had a helmet one time that had lead in it. I’ve still got it,” Pearson admitted. “You’d just switch helmets. That thing must have weighed 50 pounds. You just left your helmet in the car when they weighed it, then wore another one in the race.”

Then there was the ever-popular buckshot method of lightening one’s car, a method that saw occasional use from the late 1950s until the early 1990s. “I remember people coming in a shop near mine in Spartanburg [South Carolina] and buying a thousand pounds of gun shot,” said Jack Smith. “They’d take them and put them in bags and put them in the car right inside the quarter panel or in the doors. They’d have a lever up under the dash or on the side looking like a door handle, connected to a knife that would get the bags open. Underneath the bags would be holes, and the gun shot would roll out on the track. First thing you know, other cars would hit the fence because the lead shots were going out and getting in the racing groove.”

Smith professed admiration for the creativity of Junior Johnson. “Junior had one of the best things I ever seen. Somebody on his team brought a two-gallon water jug. Somebody in Tennessee had shown him something, a liquid metal of some sort. It wasn’t mercury; it was something heavier than mercury. They filled that jug up and put it in the car. They’d weigh the car. Right before the race this old boy would put that one up and put a real water jug in there. It’d lighten the thing 200 pounds. Everybody had a water jug in their car. Man, you take that much weight off, it’s a lot.”

As flagrant as this all seems today, at the time nobody made too much of a deal about other guys cheating, as long as it didn’t get too far out of hand.

“This has always gone on,” said Bob Moore. “The whole thinking to the deal was, even at the beginning when they came up with the first set of rules, these are the rules, but we understand you may go beyond these rules. We'll let you go beyond them to a certain point, then we're going to cut your hand off. The driver's ability could make up a lot of difference. And that was part of what made the beginning more creative, rambunctious, interesting. You never knew from week to week who was playing a game, who was cheating here, who was cheating there. You'd learn what this guy was doing and then you did it. The idea was, you try to be the first and let them catch you.”

“The cheating, as we used to call it, was fun. It was a little bit like outrunning the police with a V-8. It was fun. It didn't hurt anybody,” said Robert Yates. The son of a Baptist minister in North Carolina, Yates worked his way up from a gofer at Holman-Moody in the early 1960s to the owner of a two-car Winston Cup team led by 1999 Champion Dale Jarrett. “We used to have a deal where you couldn't close off your grille. Banjo Matthews was great at getting a grille small. We finally learned that the more you tape them off the faster they would go. So we put this plastic door screen back in behind there. Joe Gazaway, he would start looking in the grille. It was his job to inspect the grille and make sure you didn't have any kind of blockage in it. One time we put a water bottle with a pump on it and a nozzle so when he stuck his head down in there we shot him right between the eyes. It was that kind of a fun deal.”

“I think the reason for the creativity was what you'd call shade-tree engineering, where people actually worked on their own cars pretty much,” said Martinsville Speedway’s Dick Thompson. “I know the Wood Brothers used to do a lot of experimentation themselves and were way ahead of a lot of people. Sometimes you'd see another mechanic walk over to the car and start to get down on his hands and knees and start to look under the car, and they would just say in a very quiet voice but very menacing, ‘Don't look under there.’

“In those days, when a team brought cars to the racetrack, each car was pretty much individual,” Thompson continued. “They're kind of cookie cutters today. Everybody's using the same roll cage, the same this and that.

“Basically, everybody doing their own engineering was saying, ‘Lets see what I can get away with,’” said Thompson. “They were pushing the limit. NASCAR really had to watch things. Even after you went through inspection, they had some tricks up their sleeve. There were times when the so-called independents bought a factory car and they would sit down and [review the hidden features of the cars] with the previous owners. There would be switches on that car they had no idea what they went to.”

Many times, those switches would be used to operate hydraulic pumps that would lower the car on the track and raise it before inspection. “Jim Hurtubise, at Riverside one time, they were using lowering devices on the car, little microcranks,” said Latford. “He got in the car at the start-finish line and was getting ready to start the car. You used to have starter buttons. He put his hand up. The switch was down here, and the car started to fall.”

Latford saw plenty of other tricks, too. “There was the old thing of putting wood or charcoal in the springs before they'd go out to qualify. And of course, the first bump you hit, the charcoal or wood would fragment, and there'd be splinters down on the apron of the first turn, but you couldn't prove where it came from, so there was nothing you could do,” he said. “The other trick was freezing the shocks at the desired height. And after it pushed out in line and sat there, it would thaw, the car would settle and away they go.”

Bud Moore used a similar trick. “We had pieces of plastic that we’d stick underneath the springs to hold the car up,” he said. “We’d take stones and stick them underneath the springs in the front and let them down real easy. The rocks would hold the springs up through inspection. Then when you had the first bump the springs would crush the rocks and let the car drop.”

According to Martinsville’s Thompson, the acknowledged master of chicanery in those days was Junior Johnson, a man who grew up in the hardscrabble country of Wilkes County, North Carolina, and had served time in a federal prison for running moonshine. Johnson, whose rugged persona and hard-ass driving style would later earn him icon status as the subject of Tom Wolfe’s magazine profile, “The Last American Hero,” knew every trick in the book.

And he had a very fundamental attitude about breaking the rules, one he explained in an interview with the Orlando Sentinel’s Juliet Macur in 1998. “With the rules in those days, it was easy to cheat,” said Johnson. “You just worked on what NASCAR didn’t check. If they didn’t check your gas tank, you had a bigger gas tank. If they didn’t check your engine, you had a bigger engine.”

Of course, Johnson would bend the rules even on the parts that NASCAR did check. “I think the funniest thing I ever saw, I was watching a race at Bristol one time in the late 1960s, watching Junior Johnson drive, and I had my binoculars on Junior,” remembered Thompson. “It seemed like when he'd come out of the pits, going down the backstretch, the car would drop down. But every time he'd come in to make a pit stop, NASCAR would run out, stick that measuring stick under his car, and it was totally legal. As he went out, then, the car would start lowering. It turned out later on that he had hydraulics in there, and he could lower the front end.”

“The cheating, being innovative, Junior was noted for it,” Latford added. “He didn't break the rules; he just found things that were not covered by the rules. He'd find a space between the lines, so to speak, and do things that weren't covered. Then they'd come up with another rule to cover it, and he'd have to go do something else.”

Well, maybe that isn’t exactly accurate, because Johnson might be best known for building a car that was blatantly illegal, so completely beyond the spirit of the rules, let alone the letter of the law, that he earned himself a permanent spot alongside Smokey Yunick in the NASCAR scofflaws’ hall of fame.

The year was 1966, the place the old Atlanta Raceway. NASCAR was in the midst of one of its darkest eras, thanks to a battle of wills between Big Bill France and the Big Three automakers in Detroit, who were locked in a rapidly escalating horsepower war and were trying to bring ever-more-radical power plants to stock-car racing.

A year earlier, Chrysler had launched a NASCAR boycott that lasted about half a season, after France banned the automaker’s omnipotent 426 hemi engine because it was far more powerful than any rival production engine from Ford or General Motors. Without defending champion Richard Petty and the other top Plymouth and Dodge drivers of the day, the 1965 season had been a disaster for track owners and fans alike. Yet history would repeat itself—sort of—in 1966, when Ford teams sat on the sidelines as the year began. The second boycott was again caused by an engine ban and again sidelined the defending champion. This time, though, it was Ford’s overhead-cam 427-cubic-inch engine that was banned and 1965 titleholder Ned Jarrett on the sidelines.

Eventually a compromise of sorts was reached between France and one of Ford’s top factory teams. Star racer Fred Lorenzen, a driver with movie star good looks and charm to burn, was slated to return the blue oval brand to action August 7 at Atlanta in a car owned and prepared by Johnson, who broke ranks with Ford, apparently due to concessions he received from France over how his car would be prepared.

The car in question, along with Smokey Yunick’s black-and-gold Chevrolet Chevelle, which competed in the same race, was the most outrageous, bodacious, and flagrantly illegal car to ever compete in a NASCAR event. Dubbed the “Yellow Banana,” Johnson’s 1966 Ford Galaxie had its top chopped three to five inches—depending on whose estimate one believes—and its windshield was laid back at least 20 degrees. Its nose nearly touched the ground, and its rear quarter panels were swept upward to produce downforce, a modification that made the supposedly straight Galaxie sheet metal curve more like a banana.

Just how bogus was the banana? Thirty years later, Speedworld journalist Matt McLaughlin would say that the Yellow Banana looked about as much like a stock Ford Galaxie as his granny looked like Heather Locklear. In point of fact, it looked better suited to compete as an NHRA (National Hot Rod Association) funny car than it did as a NASCAR “stock car.”

“They literally had to lift Lorenzen up and slide him into the driver's seat,” remembers Bud Moore, who covered the race for the Charlotte Observer. “There was no way he could climb in it normally because the roof was slanted. And the front windshield was also sloped at an angle. The left side of the car was down about three inches lower than the right side of the car. Because Ford was struggling to stay in the sport, NASCAR basically turned their back on this deal and said, ‘This is fine.’”

Not that Yunick’s black-and-gold No. 13 Chevelle was any more legal, given that it was built to roughly 7/8 scale relative to its stock counterpart and carried an oversized engine, among a laundry list of infractions. Among the other “innovations” on Yunick’s car that weekend were a built-in roof spoiler, offset frame and removed drip rails on the roof.

Amazingly, both cars sailed through tech inspection, much to the outrage of Cotton Owens, who owned the Dodge that points leader David Pearson was driving that weekend. “The Chrysler guys went berserk when they saw the cars Johnson and Yunick slid through tech inspection,” Moore said. “Cotton decided that one of the advantages of Lorenzen's car was that it was sitting so much lower than everybody else's. So what Cotton did, he fixed up Pearson's car where the whole car would literally drop about three inches. And NASCAR figured it out on Sunday morning, so they went to Cotton and said, ‘OK, you cannot let Pearson use this device.’

“The four springs would compress, and the car would drop. Well, NASCAR said he couldn’t use those springs. You've got to use regular springs. Well Cotton refused to do it, so he pulls the car out of the race. In that same race, Curtis Turner was driving for Smokey, who decided his engine was going to be about 20 cubic inches more than anybody else's. But the weird thing is, Turner is leading most of the race, and he blows up, so they never catch Smokey's car. Lorenzen crashes and Cotton pulled his car out. There was so much cheatin' going on that weekend, it was fun covering it, because every day it was a new deal.”

One of France’s most dramatic uses or misuses of power, two flagrantly illegal cars were allowed to compete in order to appease auto execs in Detroit eager to get Ford and Chevrolet racing again and the Atlanta track owners, who wanted all three automakers competing to revive attendance, which had sagged badly in 1965–66. The Yellow Banana would never race again, because the factory Ford teams soon returned, the fans were appeased, and France had no reason to look the other way for the good of the sport. The Atlanta race in 1966 would forever represent the high-water mark—or low-water mark, depending on your point of view—for cheating, innovating, creative engineering, whatever one cares to call it. When the teams arrived at Daytona in 1967, NASCAR was waiting with its first body templates.

The teams had some new tricks of their own. Ford, which had a serious horsepower disadvantage, had been secretly using its wind tunnel in Michigan to smooth out the contours of its Fairlane race cars. “We didn’t call it cheating, we called it ‘competition tuning,’” said Ford engineer Charlie Gray, who oversaw the automakers stock car efforts in the 1960s. “I guess some people claim I’m the reason why they have templates. We didn’t have any horsepower. We had the 427-wedge engine, and we were running against the hemi Dodge. We had to find some way to run competitively. We used to go in and spend 24 hours at a time in the wind tunnel. Nobody knew that. Nobody knew about wind tunnels at that time. They [NASCAR] claimed that some of the things on our automobiles were a little bit different than stock. Well, we didn’t think so. Anyhow, they [NASCAR] came with the templates at Daytona in 1967.

“In 1965 and ’66, especially ’66, the cars that ran at Daytona were very droop-snooped. They looked like anteaters. You couldn’t run templates on those things. But in ’67 we were into it pretty hot and heavy with our Fairlanes, so NASCAR came with the templates. For some reason our Fairlanes, in 1967 at Daytona, the rain gutters [along the roof] ‘fell off’ before they got to the racetrack. I can’t figure how that happened. Lin Kuchler [of NASCAR] came to me and told me about it. When the next race came around, all the rain gutters were back on. That’s just an example of something somebody found that worked. But things like that were usually corrected by the next race.”

The 1967 Daytona 500 ultimately would be captured by Mario Andretti, but only because of a late-race engine failure in David Pearson’s hot-rod Dodge, which had been carefully “engineered” by Cotton Owens to lower its center of gravity and dramatically improve handling.

“In 1967 (for the Daytona 500), I moved the floorboards up inside the car three inches, just pulled the top and all down around it and welded it back together,” Owens said. “It no sooner hit off my trailer than everybody was under it. Richard Petty had his whole crew under it. I took the body of the car and dropped it over the chassis three inches lower than it would have been. Looking at it from the outside it looked like any other stock automobile. But if you got your measurement from the top to the floor you saw it. I called NASCAR about it before I built it, and they said anything was OK as long as what went under the car was in good workmanship. That was the ruling. We cut that thing up, lowered the roll bars, moved the floor up in it, and welded it back together. I took it as low as I could without it being too obvious. I still met the ground clearance requirements, but I got the roof of my car down. The advantage was getting the car lower through the air. It was the fastest thing there. Something happened with the engine with less than a hundred miles to go or we would have won.”

Cheating, Chapter 3, Part 1

2011-04-29T05:38:00.000-07:00

The cheating as we used to call it was fun. It was a little bit like outrunning the police with a V-8. It was fun. It didn't hurt anybody. —Robert Yates

To hear veteran racers tell it, clichéd as it sounds, the 1960s really were a simpler time for NASCAR mechanics and crew chiefs. With only a skeletal rule book and inspection process to deal with, car builders were given wide latitude in how they prepared their race cars. And they used it.

France had gradually conceded that his notion of running strictly stock cars was impossible. As NASCAR slowly evolved from half-mile dirt tracks to ever-larger paved tracks and the Big Three automakers engaged in a horsepower war to build faster cars, race speeds increased tremendously, which forced teams to structurally reinforce their cars for safety’s sake.

Race teams discovered quite by accident that if they beefed up suspensions and chassis for safety, the cars had less chassis flex and deformation at speed, which meant they handled better. And if they tinkered with the dimensions of the chassis and body, there were additional incremental performance benefits to be gained.

“It was a lot more of an individual sport a long time ago when it first started,” remembered seven-time Winston Cup champion Richard Petty. “When it first started it was strictly stock cars, then somebody said, ‘Why don’t we put bigger springs in it?’ or bigger shocks or bigger tires, whatever it was. Then somebody said, ‘You know, if we cut this window here, cut this fender.’ There were no templates, so we’d just do it. Make the cars longer, shorter, narrower, higher, sideways, whatever it was. We used to run with no spoilers, so that was something that they [NASCAR] didn’t have to check. They didn’t have any templates. They checked the weight of the car and the height of the car and that was about it. Used to be we come down here, in an hour you used to do inspections. If you wasn’t just really, really cheating bad you were OK.”

“Inspections were very simple,” added reporter Bob Moore of the Charlotte Observer. “They would look at the body. There was no such thing as a template. The engine size was checked for cubic inches. The body was looked at, so your fenders weren't too low in this part or that part. But again it was all visual, eyeballing it. There was a stick that was run under the car to make sure you weren't too low. There was a certain height you had to be, and there was a measurement for that. It was pretty basic. There was no science to it, but most of the inspectors had a fair amount of mechanical knowledge, so if a spring was wrong or a carburetor was offset or whatever, you’d have to fix it.

“In the ’50s and early ’60s, the whole idea was there was a lot less written down. There was a lot more gray area then than there is now. And the whole ability of a crew chief, or a mechanic—because in the ’50s and early ’60s, there was no such thing as a crew chief—was, how far in the gray area can you go to outrun your opponent?” Moore said. “Even in the early ’60s, when Norris Friel was NASCAR’s technical director, he'd say, ‘OK these are the things that you have to do, these are the things we're going to check. Now we know you may go beyond this area, so watch it. We may even let you go beyond the area, but if you get too far or too big an advantage, we're going to take it away.’”

The atmosphere, while competitive certainly, was far more collegial and less cutthroat. Creativity was a staple of the stock-car racing experience.

“Part of the enjoyment was, how far can people go? How innovative can you get? There's always been people caught cheating. In some cases you get more than a slap on the wrist. But a lot of times, it’s just a slap on the wrist,” said Moore. “As long as you didn't go too far, you got away with it. You just kind of turned your backs. But if the guy you’re competing against thinks you're getting away with too much, he'll go to the officials and say, ‘This guy is half a second faster than everybody. There's got to be a reason why.’”

Petty advocated a philosophy he called “cheat neat,” which meant trick up your car, but not so blatantly as to draw the ire of NASCAR officials. “The big deal was cheat neat, you know what I mean?” Petty said. “Or cheat on 15 things and do two or three things that’s very obvious. NASCAR’d catch them, and they was happy as June bugs. You got through with what you wanted to get through with.”

Petty was one of several masters of experimentation in the 1960s, along with fellow NASCAR legends like Leonard Wood, Smokey Yunick, and Junior Johnson. And experimentation was the keyword of the day. Making stock cars go fast in those days was much more of a hit-or-miss process and much less scientific than it is today.

There were no computers or digital equipment to test with. When drivers arrived at Daytona for the first time in February 1959, for example, they were shocked to learn that cars ran around the mammoth 2.5-mile track faster together than they did alone. And no wonder the racers were surprised: They were used to banging fenders on half-mile dirt tracks at 60 mph, not running 140 mph around a superspeedway. They’d never been exposed to drafting or how to use it to their advantage.

But they figured it out quickly. “When we started running Daytona, that was the beginning of really trying to streamline for wind resistance,” said former owner/driver Cotton Owens. “We didn't know anything when we went to Daytona in 1959. No one knew you could go out there and draft faster with two cars than with one until we actually did it in the race. I set fast qualifying time at 143 miles an hour, but that was absolutely a stock automobile, with a stock engine. Even at that speed, my car would actually raise the front wheels off the ground going in the corners. We didn't know how to keep it down. Of course, we learned. Dropping the front end down, raising the rear end. Went back in 1960, we were already dropping the front ends on them. Just learned from trying it. Somebody showed up with a car all propped up in the rear and ran fast, and it was on then. Everybody copied it.”

And they tried other tricks as well. “Everybody was doing different things,” recalled driver David Pearson, Richard Petty’s main rival. “I remember the Pettys came to Daytona in 1960 or ’61 and Lee had a car with a vinyl top on it. Looked like a golf ball. They said a golf ball will go through the air good, so that should. Even back then people were trying different things with aerodynamics. You didn’t know as much then because they were just starting superspeedways. I heard all my life that the lighter a car is the better it is, and naturally the lower it is the better the air will go over it. If air went under the car, it would pick it up. At places like Daytona when we first started there, we’d find out that the car would be tight coming off the corner. What it was doing was picking the front end up with air getting under it. So they started lowering the front end. It was a lot of experimenting, seeing what would work, learning about it.”

“In February 1960, I went to Daytona. I’d go down the backstretch in my ’60 Pontiac and spin the wheels,” said Jack Smith. “I told the mechanics, and they said the car wasn’t streamlined enough, that all I was doing was running up against a wall and pushing the wall. Then two years later Ford Motor Company realized they could not run their cars through the air. Ford hired [chassis builder] Banjo Matthews. Banjo took the car and cut the floor pan out of it, lowered the car about four inches, changed the contour of the windshield. Then they found out that Ford would run. The word got out quick, and pretty soon Banjo had orders to build more race cars than he could do. He was the first one I ever knew that cut down or streamlined the cars. This was ’62 or ’63 at Daytona.”

Some of the teams had particularly inspired ways to get the noses of the cars down, which was vital for success at Daytona, as well as other new tracks that were built in the 1960s at Charlotte, Atlanta, Michigan and Rockingham, high-speed facilities that were inexorably replacing the old, slow dirt tracks.

“Joe Gazaway, [a NASCAR inspector and brother of chief inspector Bill Gazaway] came over once when we were down at Daytona in the mid-‘60s. I think we were getting ready to qualify,” said Bud Moore. “The Wood brothers had their car there. They had put the tarp over it. Leonard had some turnbuckles under the hood. He’d get under there and pull those turnbuckles and pull the front end closer to the ground and make it run faster. Joe happened to see his feet sticking out from under there. He picked the tarp up and smiled. He said, ‘Lenny, what do you think you’re doing?’ That was the biggest laugh.”

“In 1962 or ’63 you began realizing that dropping the top of the grille a little bit lowered everything on the front end,” recalled Wood. “All that stuff was figured out pretty early. Ford used to have a stack of shims under the radiator cradle, about an inch or so. It was really easy to take that stack of shims out and drop the nose an inch. It didn't change much. There wasn't a whole lot of that drooping the nose anyway. If you drooped it too much, you could visually tell it.”

“Leonard made a lot of stuff with his hands,” said Pearson. “He’d take the parking light areas and bend them in a little, just for aerodynamics. I got on to him one time when I was driving for Holman-Moody. His car was behind me, and I told him the front bumper looked like a nail coming at me the way he had it pointed right in the center. They would do things like that. Anything to get the air to flow a little better.”

The Chrysler contingent, led by the Pettys and Owens, had their own tricks, unique to the torsion-bar front suspension that Dodges and Plymouths used. “Once it became obvious that getting the car low was a good thing at Daytona, people started working on it. They dropped the sheet metal down on the nose, lowering it any way they could and still get by,” said Owens. “On the Chryslers, on the lower control arm, you had an adjusting screw. It went up into another arm that held the car up through the torsion bar. We had some [wooden spacers] that would bust when you went in the corner and would automatically drop the front end a full inch. Then when we couldn't get away with that we started machining the bolts and putting little Allen screws in them to let them fall down so far. On the rear they had an anchor back there. We'd slot those bolts to where it could come down so far just from the pressure of the car being on the track. It would automatically lower. It would hold them up long enough to get through inspection. You could just about jump up and down on the front end yourself, and it would automatically come down. The first little bump it got on the track would lower it. It would mean the difference of an inch or an inch and a half, and at Daytona that was a second or a second and a half on the track.”

Owens also borrowed a popular trick from drag racers of the day, swapping the heavy sheet-metal fenders and hoods for lightweight aluminum, which also helped handling. “We got away with that for a little bit,” he admitted. “Then the first wreck where it was actually seen that it was used, they [NASCAR] outlawed it. It was better because it was lighter. You could take all the sheet metal off the front end and put aluminum up there. You couldn't tell the difference in it, from aluminum to sheet metal. You painted it just like it was sheet metal. Front fenders, hood, bumpers. We were always busting the right front tire. So we got a lot of weight off it. That's where it really helped. It put more weight to the rear of the car.”

“Everybody was going wide open trying to change aerodynamics,” agreed Junior Johnson. “That simply came about because they had found about all the horsepower they could find. They had to go somewhere else. The easiest horsepower you ever found in your life is in the body.”

On the smaller tracks, fertile minds were also at work in the early 1960s. “Rex White ran short tracks with his car all lowered to where it was only about two inches off the ground on the left side and about six or seven inches on the right side,” said Owens. “Everybody saw him get around those tracks real good, so they started copying it. That brought on what we called the idiot stick. NASCAR used that to measure ground clearance under the car and wouldn't let you get any lower than that stick. They slid it underneath the car. That's how they measured them for height until, I guess, the ’70s, when they started measuring it from the roof.”

“Anybody could fudge the rules, but what you wanted to do was come up with something that was in the limits but was very beneficial to you,” said car owner Leonard Wood of how the teams worked in the 1960s. “Come up with something that nobody else has even though it's legal. Then it depends on how big a secret you wanted to keep. You didn't tell anybody anything. If somebody let you know something, you might help them. You'd tell him enough to pacify him but not everything that made it go fast. And that's what he'd do to you. If you were running a Ford and so did Bud [Moore] and Junior [Johnson], each one wants to look good. You weren't out there to make Bud or Junior look good. They were your competitors, too. You wanted to beat them as bad as anybody. You could share a little of this or that, but you never told him how to really make it go.”

... to be continued.

Cheating, From The Beginning

2011-04-27T07:23:00.000-07:00

Editor’s Note: In 1999, I began work on a book called “Cheating: The Bad Things Good NASCAR Racers Do In Pursuit Of Speed.”

It was published by David Bull Publishing (www.bullpublishing.com) in 2002, and revised in 2005. I had a tremendous amount of fun with the book and over the next couple of weeks, I’ll post a few chapters. I hope you enjoy reading these.

The following text is as it appeared in the original book. If you are so inclined, you can follow this blog and receive automatic updates. But enough of me. Now, here’s the text:

“If you really look at it, in the first race, they disqualified the first winner. It started right off the bat. Someone had an idea: “Hey, I can get an edge with this.” That still continues today.” —Dick Thompson

William Henry Getty France had plenty of reasons to smile on the morning of June 19, 1949. His fledgling National Association for Stock Car Automobile Racing was about to host the very first race in its new “Strictly Stock” series, which France predicted would capture the imagination of race fans hungry for action in post–World War II America.

The first NASCAR Strictly Stock race was a key victory for the former Washington, D.C., gas station mechanic that everyone in the loose-knit racing fraternity knew as “Big Bill.” The crowd gathered at the dusty three-quarter-mile Charlotte Speedway proved beyond a doubt that fans were interested in watching honest-to-God stock cars race: Hudsons and Kaisers and Lincolns and Fords that regular folks drove, not the fancy open-wheelers at Indianapolis or the bastardized “Modifieds” that looked like they’d been wrecked and rebuilt even before the race started.

And the cars literally were stock cars. There were no tube frames or aerodynamic sheet metal, no exotic racing fuel or slick, high-grip tires. The cars raced at Charlotte were vehicles that drivers had purchased at their local Lincoln or Ford or Hudson dealership and raced as they were, with only the most rudimentary safety modifications. Unlike today, when race cars are rolling sponsor billboards, the first Strictly Stock cars carried crude, hand-painted numbers and the driver’s name and little else. In the few rare cases where cars had sponsors, the sponsor was usually a gas station or a car dealership in the driver’s hometown. There were no uniforms or million-dollar transporters back then, either. For the most part, drivers wore T-shirts and blue jeans and were regular guys out to have some fun on a Sunday afternoon.

“When they said Strictly Stock, that wasn’t just the name of the division, that was the rule as well,” said historian Bob Latford, who began working at stock-car races in 1946 and later served as public relations director for Charlotte and Atlanta Motor Speedways. “The only thing you could do was beef up the right-front hub, because all the tracks were dirt then and the wheels took a lot of abuse, bouncing around. The tracks were not well manicured. The wheels, right fronts especially, were subject to breaking. And they let ’em do a little there. That was all you could do. Engines had to be essentially stock. Most of the cars still had their headlights in ’em. They taped over those. Driver's doors, they took a leather belt, a dog collar, something like that, and strapped the door shut. For seat belts, some of ’em just used a piece of rope to tie themselves in.” Strictly stock it was.

And that was precisely what the fans wanted to see, as witnessed by the Charlotte turnout. The number of people attending that first Strictly Stock race, like much of NASCAR's history, is shrouded in controversy and myth. The announced attendance was 23,000, though some estimates placed it as low as 13,000 people. Still, attracting even 13,000 people was a huge triumph, especially at a time when racing was in its infancy and Charlotte was smack in the middle of nowhere.

Just as important to France, the first Strictly Stock race was proof that he had established a leadership position in the war for the heart and soul of racing in the Southeast. Now he was ready to turn his attention to promoting the battles on the track.

For most of the 1930s and 1940s, automobile racing had been chaotic and disorganized at best and outright criminal at worst. Dozens of sanctioning bodies had come and gone, each of which seemed to carry some tortured-sounding acronym like USCRA or NARL or, worst of all, SCARS.

In fact, one of France’s earliest rivals was O. Bruton Smith, who grew up poor in rural North Carolina but would go on to form an empire of automobile dealerships and then a host of racetracks. Smith's National Stock Car Racing Association, or NSCRA, was one of France's competitors, though not for long.

The many acronym-bearing sanctioning bodies were just as confusing to race fans then as the plethora of dot-coms in the late 1990s. Nobody knew who the real stars were, nor what constituted a true championship series or a national champion driver. France knew that by organizing the racing community, he could end the confusion and put his rivals out of business. That’s why he convened a meeting of 22 men on December 14, 1947, in the Ebony Room of the Streamline Motel in Daytona Beach, Florida.

The men, described in a 1998 interview by attendee Sam Packard as a mixture of “Yankees, Southerners, and bootleggers,” sought to organize and better the sport for the interests of all involved. Promoters would be held accountable for race purses, and NASCAR would come up with rules for competitors and enforce them.

“We are all interested in one thing,” France told the group. “That is improving present conditions. The answer lies in our group here today to do it.” And so they did. Legendary mechanic Red Vogt was credited with coming up with NASCAR as the group’s name, and well-known racer E. G. “Cannonball” Baker was named the first commissioner. Big Bill France, however, was the real center of power for the organization. It would need it.

Shady dealings were commonplace in racing. Local race promoters often would fail to deliver on promised prize money to the drivers. It was not unusual to see post-race events end in fisticuffs or much worse.

And many of the drivers weren’t any better. While today cities like Charlotte and Atlanta and regions like Upstate South Carolina are testaments to the economic prosperity and boom times that Sun Belt chambers of commerce love to tout, half a century ago the Southeastern United States was still trying to recover from the ruinous effects of losing the Civil War. Put bluntly, the Southeast at that time was dirt poor in most places. Economic options were few: farming, usually tobacco or cotton, or working in the mills for little more than a subsistence wage.

Of course, there was one other option, and many of the South’s best and brightest pursued it with ferocious abandon: moonshining. A lot more money was to be made selling corn liquor cooked in a back-yard still than there was toiling away trying to raise crops or busting your ass in the mills.

Not that bottling and selling moonshine was without its hazards, mind you. Federal agents from what is now known as the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms hunted for the stills and the men and women who ran them. Getting caught meant going to jail and going to jail meant your family had no source of income.

Out of necessity, moonshine runners learned to hop up their cars and drive them on the ragged edge. Their livelihood—indeed their very survival—depended on their ability to outwit and outdrive the dreaded federal agents known as “revenuers.”

“It was a game of honor,” said Latford. “Most of the revenuers knew who the bootleggers were. It was a matter of pride to try and catch ’em. And an equal matter of pride to try and outrun ’em. And a lot of it was argument between bootleggers: ‘My hauler will outrun your hauler.’ And they’d get together and get a grader or a bulldozer or tractor to cut out a little circle in a corn field or a tobacco field or a cotton field and go out there on weekends and race and bet with each other, sometimes for pretty good money.”

The smartest of the ’shine runners would take tame, stock-appearing Ford coupes and replace the underpowered “flathead” motors under the hood with high-compression, overhead-valve Cadillac engines, the most powerful of the day. Then they would beef up the chassis with stiff springs so that it wouldn't sag under the load of a couple hundred gallons of corn liquor. “You didn't want to draw attention to it going down the road, but you wanted the ability to get away if they came after you,” Latford said. “And you have to remember, they were running a lot heavier because of the liquid they were carrying than the pursuers were.”

What the moonshine runners wanted was a car that looked completely stock to the untrained eye, but was the fastest car in the state in the wee hours of the morning. And what the feds lived for was catching these guys and running them down. It was exactly the kind of war of minds that crew chiefs and NASCAR inspectors would play out again and again in later eras.

And the moonshine runners were very, very good at what they did. Brothers Tim, Bob, and Fontello “Fonty” Flock from North Georgia were three well-known whiskey haulers of the late 1940s. And a guy from Wilkes County, North Carolina, named Junior Johnson would later make a name for himself, too.

France knew all about the whiskey running and the tricked-up cars and the wild men who drove them. And he set about organizing and controlling them. While NASCAR would sanction 52 races in 1948, its first full year in operation, the Strictly Stock division, which would eventually evolve into the Winston Cup Series over the next quarter-century, wouldn’t get its start until Charlotte in June 1949. But when it did, it launched with a bang.

“Stock-car racing has boomed beyond anyone’s wildest dreams, and I feel that we are in for another big year,” France said in 1948. But even Big Bill didn’t know how big. The first Strictly Stock race in Charlotte would give him a pretty good indication. And it would also give NASCAR its first controversy and the first of many unsuccessful challenges to France’s authority.

• • •

In truth, nobody knew exactly what to expect at the first Strictly Stock race, and it showed. Parking and traffic were nightmares, just as they typically are at modern-day Winston Cup races. The concession stands sold out of food and drink.

“There were fans here at 6 a.m. that day,” said David Allison, the son of track owner Carl Allison, in a 1998 interview with NASCAR Winston Cup Scene correspondent Mike Hembree. “People were trying to get in everywhere. We had people climbing trees to see. Daddy would crank up a chain saw and go over there. He wouldn’t actually cut the trees down, but they would come out of them anyway. They never dreamed that many people would come to the first race.” But they did, for one reason: They wanted to see their local heroes race stock cars, the very same kinds they drove.

And of course, the whole point of France’s Strictly Stock series was just as the name implies: Cars were to be raced exactly as they had come off the showroom floor. The only exception was that racers were allowed to put a steel plate between the front wheels and brake drums to keep the wheels from stripping their studs and lug nuts and coming off the cars. That was it. Everything else had to be stock.

And that’s how most of them raced on that hot, dusty day in Charlotte. There was Lee Petty from up near Greensboro in the northern part of the state, who had come down in an enormous and brand-new Buick Roadmaster sedan, which he would roll over and destroy in the race.

Buck Baker drove a Kaiser at Charlotte, and Bob Flock raced in a Hudson, while brother Tim somehow managed to borrow a brand-new Oldsmobile 88 with less than 1,000 miles on it from newlyweds Buddy and Betty Elliott of Hickory, North Carolina.

At the end of 200 laps, there was a lot of torn up machinery and dashed hopes. Crossing the finish line first was Glenn Dunnaway of Gastonia, North Carolina, about 25 miles southwest of Charlotte. Dunnaway, who had come to the race without a car to compete in, had hooked up with bootlegger Hubert Westmoreland, who installed him behind the wheel of his 1947 Ford coupe. His margin of victory was three laps.

But before Dunnaway could claim the $2,000 first-prize check, a small fortune in those days, NASCAR chief technical inspector Al Crisler disqualified him for having illegal “bootlegger springs” on the rear of the Westmoreland-owned Ford. The heavy-duty leaf springs helped distribute the weight better, which in turn improved handling. “They basically flip-flopped the springs and beefed up the rear end of the car. It was an old bootlegger trick, of course,” said Latford. “A lot of the guys building the cars had built a lot of bootlegger cars.”

Not everyone felt that Dunnaway should have been disqualified. “I think that was the worst injustice that I ever saw NASCAR do anybody,” veteran racer Jack Smith said in his final interview, given just weeks before he died of heart failure at age 65 in October 2001. “The night before the race they had tripped that car with whiskey on it. It had two pieces welded on the back of the frame so the axle would go down to there [limiting suspension travel and how low the car would drop with a load of moonshine]. If anything, it would have had to hurt him.” But Crisler deemed it illegal, and Big Bill France agreed.

Dunnaway’s disqualification turned the race win over to Jim Roper, who had driven nonstop all the way from Halstead, Kansas, a distance of more than 1,000 miles, in a 1948 Lincoln. He had seen the race promoted in the syndicated comic strip “Smilin’ Jack.”

Roper’s engine was torn down in post-race inspection, and he had to get a replacement motor from nearby Mecklenburg Motors in order to drive the race-winning car back to Kansas.

Westmoreland, meanwhile, was incensed. He filed suit against NASCAR in Mecklenburg County Court, in North Carolina, asking for $5,000 in damages and saying he and Dunnaway were unfairly robbed of the victory. But the suit was subsequently thrown out and actually worked to France's advantage, because as Latford put it, a court of law decided “that he [France] could make and administer the rules for the organization.” This was a crucial victory, given the fledgling nature of the sanctioning body and the outlaw mindset of many of its participants.

The scenario would be repeated often over NASCAR’s illustrious history: A huge crowd witnessed a race steeped in controversy that would be talked about for days to come. A competitor would be caught cheating and be punished, and NASCAR’s authority would be challenged, unsuccessfully. It's a theme that would be repeated over and over again as stock-car racing grew. Such twists and turns and rumors and innuendo would help fuel the growth of the sport over the next half century and beyond.

“If you really look at it, in the first race, they disqualified the first winner,” said Dick Thompson, the longtime public relations director for Martinsville Speedway. “It started right off the bat. Someone had an idea: ‘Hey, I can get an edge with this.’ That still continues today.”

“There's always been people caught cheating,” agreed Bob Moore, a veteran motorsports journalist who began covering stock-car racing for the Charlotte Observer in 1962. “A lot of times, the punishment was just a slap on the wrist. In some cases, like Dunnaway's, you get more than a slap on the wrist.”

And the man slapping the wrists would only reinforce his authority in the 1950s, while those wanting to flout the law were just starting to get warmed up. After just one season, NASCAR founder Bill France changed the name of his “Strictly Stock” series to Grand National, a name purportedly lifted from an English horseracing event to make the series seem a little classier. But whatever the name, stock-car racing was still a pretty crude sport to say the least, and its first major stab at the big time proved as controversial as the first Strictly Stock race did.

When Darlington Raceway opened in 1950, it was billed as the sport’s first superspeedway, an egg-shaped track 1.3 miles long and designed for high speeds, at least by the standards of the day. At a time when most races were run on small, grimy dirt tracks, Darlington was viewed as the first truly modern, purpose-built stock-car racing track.

Historians point to the track’s Labor Day weekend opening for the very first Southern 500 as the birth of a new generation of tracks. But those who were there remember it as both rustic and a place where rules were liberally bent and sometimes broken.

Inspections were conducted before qualifying and away from the track, making it laughably easy to sidestep the rules.

“We hauled the car from Spartanburg [South Carolina], went to the racetrack first and signed in,” recalled “Little” Bud Moore, a Congressional Medal of Honor winner who participated in the D-Day invasion in World War II and later won 63 races and three NASCAR championships as a car owner. “Then they took so many cars up there to inspection, then sent another bunch. Inspection was done before there was any practice. We were down there about a week going through inspection and getting all that stuff done before there was anything done at the track.”

“They pulled the heads on the engine. Checked the compression. Checked the engine pretty thorough. Went through it pretty good. It had to be pretty stock. The only thing we were allowed to change on the chassis were the shock absorbers. We used heavy-duty shocks. Had heavy-duty hubs [on the axles].”

According to Bud Moore, it was a far cry from the high-tech scrutiny today’s Winston Cup cars go through. “The inspection station was about two or three miles up the road, north from the racetrack. We drove the car up there. It went through inspection. And you drove it back to the racetrack,” he said. “It was a concrete block building—a farm equipment building. They sold farm equipment. A pretty good-sized place. They moved all that out, and that’s where they did the inspections. They didn’t have any place in the infield of the track. No garage. No buildings. Didn’t even have too good a rest room as far as that goes.”

“They didn’t have a man to follow you over there,” remembered Jack Smith, who won 21 NASCAR races in a driving career that spanned the years from 1949 to 1964. “There were people that left that garage [after inspection] and drove the car on the highway and it didn’t run good and they would stop and put another engine in it and go to the racetrack.”

Although some racers took liberties with their engines, the winner figured out that the real secret to going fast was in the tires. “Johnny Mantz won the race in a Plymouth. We were in a Mercury,” Bud Moore said. “Mantz won on Indy-type tires, Ward Riversides. Everybody else was running street-type tires. Sunday morning just before the race started they come out and put those tires on Mantz’s car. He ran the whole race and never changed tires. I changed so many tires with a four-way lug wrench. Red Byron was driving a Cadillac for Red Vogt. They said they used 75 tires. We did go out in the infield and jack people’s cars up and use their wheels and tires. Nobody realized [completing the distance] was going to take that many tires.”

After the race, the second through fifth place finishers, Fireball Roberts, Red Byron, Bill Rexford and Chuck Mahoney, respectively, all protested the legality of Mantz’s car, claiming it carried a bogus camshaft, shocks, and springs. But NASCAR President Bill France refused to have the car torn down after the race, because he was one of the four men who owned it. As if that wasn’t bizarre enough, one of his co-owners was Hubert Westmoreland, the bootlegger and owner of Glenn Dunnaway’s disqualified race-winning car from the first Strictly Stock race a year earlier.

NASCAR tech inspector Henry Underhill asked France to inspect Mantz’s car after the race, but was told he could only look at it if he tore down the other 74 cars in the field first, which he obviously lacked the manpower and time to do. Underhill was so incensed he quit NASCAR shortly thereafter. It was neither the first nor last time that France was accused of manipulating the sport in his favor, and it’s hard to claim that the events of the day were anywhere near fair. But France made the rules and again his will prevailed, no matter how much it angered and disgusted the other racers. France held all the power; the others could only hold their tongues.

Still, some on hand that day learned a thing or two, both about how France ran things and how to race. Mechanic and car owner Smokey Yunick was one of the quick studies.

“In 1955 Smokey went up to Firestone in Akron and wanted to go through the junk pile,” remembered Lowe’s Motor Speedway President Humpy Wheeler, who previously had been the tire company’s racing representative in 1964. “Firestone always had a pile of tires that had been tried somewhere and didn’t work. Smokey picked out four Indy-car tires that were harder compound, that were being discarded because they just were too hard. That’s what he put on the ’55 Chevrolet that Herb Thomas won the Southern 500 [at Darlington] in. Went 500 miles without a tire change. Was that cheating? No, it wasn’t at the time, because the NASCAR tire rule was very loose.”

Smith, meanwhile, had discovered some tire tricks of his own in the late 1940s and early 1950s. “People found out they could take tires, put them out in the sun, put them in an oven, soften the tires and put them on the left side or get a tire recapping company to do it,” he said. “At the Peach Bowl speedway in Atlanta, I found out that Jones Tire Company was a recapping company. I could get him to recap the tires for the left side and put [on] a certain compound and heat it to a certain temperature. It was just like day-and-night difference in how it handled. People always accused me of cheating on the motors. We didn’t have to cheat on the motors. All we had to do was get the car to handling. Any way you could get tires heated to a certain temperature and then bring them out and cool them off, that made a difference. You could even use a kitchen-type oven.”

Smith also saw firsthand how his competitors would try to get a good look at what he was doing. “Lee Petty. You could be sitting down beside your car. Here he’d come and lay down and start talking to you,” Smith said. “And he’d be looking up under that car all the time he was talking to you. If you wrecked or something, he was going to come to see how bad it was. It wasn’t that he was worried about you. He was looking for things on your car.”

Others were trying similarly crude experiments in other areas of their cars, trying to make them go faster. Junior Johnson said he got his first taste of rudimentary aerodynamic engineering in the early 1950s with his whiskey haulers.

“I think it came from back when I was fooling with moonshine,” he said of his eventual mastery of aerodynamics. “I messed around with cars, took the windshield wipers off. We used to bet money and see who had the fastest car on the highway. I could do a lot of stuff and pick up 15 to 20 miles per hour. You know a lot of cars had a big old hole where the headlights were? I'd flesh that out and stop it off. Just taking the wipers off would give you four or five miles per hour. Various things like that. Taking mirrors off. Once you pick up on that, you start seeing what makes a car not aerodynamic. Any time you help the aerodynamics of the car, you help the handling.”

Humpy Wheeler, meanwhile, was looking for some help of his own in unlikely places, as he briefly and ultimately unsuccessfully pursued a driving career in the hardscrabble Southeast in the early 1950s. What he discovered was, to say the least, unorthodox.

“It seemed like the higher you got in racing the more sophisticated the cheating became. Years ago when I was trying to race—I was a teenager—I took this old Ford flathead down to Cowpens [South Carolina] Speedway, which on Friday night was hallowed ground in the Carolinas,” Wheeler recalled. “It was what we called outlaw racing then. This was in the ’50s. The best flathead racers in the South seemed like they would end up at Cowpens Speedway on Saturday night. The equipment was fairly simple. We all ran Mercury block engines. You were only allowed one Stromberg carburetor with one barrel. So everybody was always trying to monkey with that carburetor, but there wasn’t much to it.

“There was one guy down there, though, his name was Black Cat, and he ran an appliance-white ’34 Ford. He seemed to get more out of carburetors than anybody. So I wanted to buy a carburetor from this guy. He said, ‘Let’s go over to my house.’ He didn’t live far from the track. We went over to his house. It was a trailer. We went in there, and he went to the refrigerator and opened the door. It was full of Stromberg carburetors. They were cold. I paid the five extra dollars for one and put it on my car. And it ran better. What did he do to those carburetors? I don’t know. He was very serious about the refrigerator, though.”

Wheeler saw his share of fuel additives of questionable legality, potions designed to boost horsepower through more efficient combustion, a staple trick of cheaters throughout history. “There was a guy named Sweeney Prosser who sold something called ‘Sweeney Prosser’s Nitro X.’ He sold it in five-gallon cans. It was a white can, but he had great graphics on the front. This was back in the ’50s when graphics hadn’t really come into racing big time,” Wheeler said. “As soon as you saw that can, you had to buy it. It worked very well. Most people were running Amoco white gas then. What did he have in that fuel? Whatever he had, no one ever figured out. It did make the car run better. You could feel it in the car. When he died, so did the formula and the fuel. I never saw it again.”

Even early in the sport’s history, creativity mattered. And the further along the sport grew, the more creativity became a factor.

Best Damn Garage In Town Burns Down

2011-04-26T15:37:00.000-07:00

In remembrance of "The Best Damn Garage In Town" burning down, I thought I'd share this excerpt from my book, "Cheating: The Bad Things Good NASCAR Racers Do In Pursuit Of Speed."

Like all truly great American heroes, Smokey Yunick was someone you couldn’t invent, a man whose accomplishments dwarf even his formidable, larger-than-life mystique. In the annals of NASCAR history, he stands firmly where legend and fact collide, leaving onlookers to judge his impact for themselves.

A war hero who combined the brains of an engineer with a penchant for hard living and bacchanalian excess, Yunick was one of the most outspoken characters in NASCAR’s history. He was by turns brilliant, profane, controversial, outrageous and charming, a man who loved to stir things up and despised authority figures. He was one of the best and most honored mechanics in the history of stock-car racing and a pioneer in creative rules interpretation, a man who, along with Junior Johnson, reigned as an outlaw genius, rebel, and perpetual thorn in Bill France’s side.

“Smokey was the worst or best, I’m not sure what you’d call it,” said Ray Fox, who drove stock cars in the 1950s and was later a car owner and a NASCAR official. “He was always trying to get away with something. I think Smokey had the idea [that] if you could have four things wrong and get one through, that was good.”

In the half century of NASCAR’s existence, Yunick stories have become the sanctioning body’s equivalent of urban legends, wild tales some claim are gospel truth, while others dismiss them as apocryphal.

In short, he was an American original, someone the likes of whom we’ve not seen before nor will ever again. One hundred years from now, it’s easy to imagine his ghost still walking through the Winston Cup garage, dressed in his trademark flattop Stetson and white overalls bearing a simple logo that reads “Best Damn Garage in Town.”

* * *

Henry “Smokey” Yunick was born in Tennessee in 1923 and grew up in the outskirts of Philadelphia, where he dropped out of school in the 10th grade to support his mother and sister.

According to NASCAR historian Gene Granger, Yunick took up motorcycle racing in the late 1930s and got into aviation at about the same time. Both racing and flying would prove to be lifelong passions for Yunick. In fact, Yunick’s nickname came from his early racing days, when his motorcycle began spewing smoke and the track announcer forgot his name and simply started calling him “Smokey.”

When World War II broke out, Yunick became a B-17 pilot in the Army Air Corps, a stint that like many parts of his life would combine equal measures of achievement and controversy.

In a 1992 interview for American Racing Classics, Yunick recounted his first misadventure with the armed forces. “I went to the state fair in Memphis while I was stationed at Dyersburg [Tennessee],” he said. “I got drunk and came back for high-altitude formation. While I was up around 30,000 feet my appendix burst, but I didn’t know what it was. I knew I needed to get on the ground in a hurry. After [the co-pilot] tried to land it two or three times and he couldn’t, I came to long enough to get it on the ground. If I hadn’t, we would all have been dead.”

He recovered and became a highly decorated pilot, flying 52 bombing missions in Africa, Europe, Indochina, Burma, the Philippines, and Okinawa. He was wounded once and shot down over Poland on another occasion.

“I was in every World War II battle from Africa to Japan, every single one,” Yunick said, though he conceded that maybe he wasn’t quite suited to military life. “I was kind of a bad boy. I did about the same there as I did in NASCAR.”

And a bad boy he was once he got back home from the war. Frustrated by the cold weather during a brief stint as a mechanic in southern New Jersey, Yunick hooked up his house trailer to his car and headed for warmer weather, following a remarkably similar path to NASCAR founder Bill France.

Yunick, like France, ended up in Daytona Beach, Florida, where each opened his own business: France a gas station and Yunick a repair shop known as “The Best Damn Garage in Town.” Rivals in the auto-repair business, the men would soon butt heads in the racing world as well. It was a turbulent era and a time when Florida was known more as a rural frontier than a tourist mecca.

“If in 1947, I killed a guy in Daytona, unless he had five eyewitnesses, they wouldn't have bothered me,” said Yunick, whose father-in-law was a district attorney in the area for a time. “I would have never even been arrested, ’cause I was wired in politically. They liked racers, and anything they could do for you they would.

“If a cop caught me in Georgia speeding and I could get away from him, I would never pay the damn speeding ticket and you could send all the telegrams and everything you want to Florida to get me extradited, and they'd just laugh about it, tear it up, and throw it away.”

The heady days of the late 1940s and 1950s weren’t quite as all-American as some historians would have you believe. According to Yunick, the racers raced hard and lived harder, partying with groupies he called “fence bunnies.”

“As a rule, fence bunnies had a car, and they would circle our hotel like Indians circling a wagon train," Yunick said in an interview with reporter Juliet Macur of the Orlando Sentinel. “It wasn't uncommon for 10 or 15 couples to have sex in one room. If AIDS was around back then, we'd all be dead right now. … I'm not proud of what I did back then, but if a woman looked good, we didn't really abide by the Ten Commandments.”

On the track, Yunick was as brilliant as he was wild off it. With Yunick preparing the cars, Herb Thomas won NASCAR Grand National (now Winston Cup) championships in 1951 and 1953, in addition to finishing runner-up twice. With Yunick as his mechanic and car builder, Thomas won 39 races over four years.

General Motors hired Yunick away in 1955 to help develop the legendary Chevrolet small-block V-8, an engine still in production today, albeit in a much modified form.

In the mid-1950s, Yunick began competing as an owner/crew chief in a limited schedule of NASCAR Grand National races. His most notable success came at Daytona, where he won four of the first eight major stock-car races at the famed speedway after it opened in February 1959. Fireball Roberts was the winning driver for three of those four races, including the 1962 Daytona 500. Yunick also dabbled successfully in open-wheel racing, winning the Indy 500 in 1960, when he served as Jim Rathmann’s mechanic.

But Yunick’s legend was built around his creative rules interpretation. He didn’t just stretch the rule book, he bent it, broke it, and threw it out the window. And not only did he not like France, he had no use for NASCAR’s chief technical inspectors, Norris Friel, Bill Gazaway, or Dick Beaty.

“Gazaway and his brother ran the inspections. The very best thing you could say for the both of them was they were first-class gas station attendants. I mean you're stretching it there,” Yunick said. “Bill Gazaway was the chief inspector. If he had any claim to fame of any kind, it's that he was the finest reader of comic books there was in the United States. He had every issue of Superman and Spiderman and all that. To get in good with him, we used to go over there and get the latest comic books and throw them on his desk. He didn't know his ass from a hole in the ground.

“What was Friel's claim to fame? The best Model T mechanic in Washington, D.C. What was Dick Beaty's claim to fame? Dick Beaty was the best go-fer and odd-job guy that Eastern Airlines ever had in Charlotte. Not hardly a doctor in thermodynamics or anything, you know what I'm saying,” said Yunick. “The people they chose to be inspectors were not qualified. And nobody who was qualified would have took the job because it didn't pay enough.”

Yunick was equally blunt about how he stretched the rules. In fact, he claimed to have run an illegal supercharger for several years in the late 1950s, one of his most successful periods as a racer. “As far as cheating goes, they'll never stop it. There will always be some guy that'll think of something that's a little smarter than the average cat, but the reason there ain't any more of it on a big scale is that the only way it can be done successfully, only one person can know about it. And if there's only one person to know about it, like I was running supercharged Pontiacs and nobody knew about it. Nobody who worked for me knew it, had no idea that the engine was supercharged,” Yunick said.

“And that's the only way you could get away with it. But what happened is it about goddamn killed me working day and night. I had to work on it when the other guys went home. Well, they didn't go home until one or two in the morning. Then I would start on building the stuff to supercharge the engines.

“The only reason the world never knew about it was I decided to stop doing it. I figured I'd used up all the good luck I had and got by with it for a couple of years, and figured, well, sooner or later somebody's going to figure out what happened. So I abandoned it before I ever got caught,” he said. “I made it to run off the flywheel and pressure plate. It's easy to make the pressure plate the compressor wheel, and it was inside a housing. It was easy to close it, and with urethane it was easy to get it down to a minimum size and so on. I'm not going to describe the whole thing to you, but it really was no big deal. It was something I thought about for years and years.”

It’s hard to imagine that Yunick actually ran this device without detection for a period of years. The purpose of a supercharger is to dramatically compress the flow of air through an engine, thereby sharply boosting horsepower.

Even hidden in a bellhousing and run off a flywheel, the supercharger would have to have some way to direct air flow through the engine’s intake system, something that surely should have been detectable to inspectors or, more likely, other competitors.

On the other hand, Yunick was so creative with other parts of the car that it’s impossible to completely dismiss the story. His fellow competitors, for example, said Yunick was one of the first mechanics to really understand the relationship between the shape of a car’s body and the effects of wind resistance at high speed.

Aerodynamics, in fact, were probably his true to claim to fame on the scofflaw front. “Smokey was so far ahead of all of us in the aerodynamic downforce part of it. He could take a car and cut it all to pieces and work on it,” said his contemporary Bud Moore. “There’s no way we could have done some of the stuff he did.”

“Smokey was real good. He did all kinds of stuff. He was smart,” agreed David Pearson, the man who trails only Richard Petty in career NASCAR victories. “He had a little spoiler put on top of it [his car] to keep air from getting down on it. You could see it, but you had to look at it close. It was back there at the rear window on the roof.”

“You’d have to say Smokey Yunick was the best at the pre-1960 period. A lot of his was more innovation maybe than cheating. He knew where the gaps in the rules were, particularly as they related to engines,” said Humpy Wheeler. “People used to say that Smokey couldn’t make a car handle. Well, he could. The reason he got the handling rap was that his cars were going in the corners so much faster than everybody else. And it took a certain type of driver to drive for him because it was pretty intimidating. You couldn’t come in and say, ‘I don’t have enough power.’”

“Some of the great [aerodynamic] innovations in those regards came from Smokey,” said NASCAR historian Bob Latford. “Smokey was … running about a 15/16-scale car, just downsized so it made a smaller hole through the wind and therefore would be quicker. He used to take a half-inch out here and a quarter-inch out there and the car looks about the same until it's parked right next to another one that's actual [size].”

Like many of his peers, Yunick took umbrage at the term “cheating” even many years after his retirement.

“If you go back to 1950, you had the whole goddamn car to so-called be creative with. All right, now we've had 50 years of racing, 50 years of refining it, which are the collective efforts of all the smart people in the United States. And now the things that I would get disqualified for cheating are absolutely legal today,” said Yunick.

“The cheating thing is just like the law business. It depends on who's in power, the Democrats or the Republicans, and what part of the 19th or 20th or 21st century it is, because the laws are more and more abused the further we go. The lawyers are learning ways to circumvent the rules that we had yesterday. The same thing's happening in races.

“Ninety percent of the so-called cheating that was innovated, it wasn't cheating,” Yunick said, citing as an example a Chevrolet he entered at the Daytona 500 in 1968. “There was no rule on how big the gas line could be. Everyone else ran a 5/8-inch gas line. That was adequate to supply the race engine with gas, no question about it. I chose to run a two-inch gas line, which was obviously much too big, but it was 11 feet long and it held five gallons of gas. Nobody ever [specified size]. A week after the race, the gas line couldn't be over a half-inch in diameter. The day that I did it, it was not illegal. That's how most all these innovations—so-called cheating—was not cheating the day it was done.”

Still, he remained resolutely unconvinced that innovating can ever be effectively controlled by NASCAR. “They will find out there is no way to police creativity. No way in hell. There's always some guy who comes along like Ray Evernham that's smarter than the average cat, and he's going to figure out a way to get around it,” said Yunick. “The difference between Gary Nelson's ability to think and Ray Evernham's — well, probably there's not a lot of difference in their IQs, but Evernham concentrates on engines and certain areas with a lot of expensive, very educated help. For 60 hours a week, he's studying new stuff to beat the rules. Gary Nelson is spending 50 hours a week trying to enforce the rules that were made yesterday. They're not even in the same game.

“The first inspector NASCAR ever had that even had a clue on what was going on is the guy they got now [Gary Nelson]. He's quite knowledgeable and should certainly be capable of doing a good job. But one of the problems is, and it's a very specific problem that will never go away, is that if he had, say four good assistants that are very knowledgeable and so forth, they're up against 100 mechanics factory-educated to like the third level, almost like doctors, you know what I mean?”

In their heydays, Yunick and Gazaway butted heads on many occasions, most notably at the 1968 Daytona 500, when Yunick was purported to have driven his race car away from inspection after NASCAR officials had removed the fuel tank.

The truth of what happened, to this day, remains somewhat shrouded in mystery, if only because Yunick has told and retold the story several different ways. But this much seems certain: Curtis Turner won the pole for the 1967 Daytona 500 in one of Yunick’s Chevrolets, at a time when General Motors was not officially in racing, but rivals Ford and Chrysler were.

The pole victory for the unsponsored Chevrolet infuriated Ford and Chrysler, which at the time were pouring millions of dollars into racing, while GM’s factory efforts had been curtailed.

“Smokey had been out of NASCAR for some period of time. He was primarily at Indianapolis, winning the race in 1960 with Jim Rathmann. He came back to Daytona in 1967,” recalled Wheeler, who was there when it happened. “This was at the absolute height of the Ford-Chrysler factory wars, also between Firestone and Goodyear. In ’65 and ’66, Ford and Chrysler had boycotted, each one year. In ’67 at Daytona they all were back. Chrysler had the mighty hemi, Ford had the 427 engine that was so good. Of course, there were no Chevrolets, hadn’t been for some time, at least none of consequence on the big tracks. Smokey shows up with a ’67 Chevrolet Chevelle with Curtis Turner driving. It was two renegades coming into Daytona, neither could care less about what anybody thought of them. All of a sudden, the first time I saw the car, I thought, the car is awful small. The Chevelle, an intermediate-sized production car, was smaller than the full-size Ford Galaxie and the Dodges and Plymouths that were running. But Smokey’s car didn’t look like it was as big as the Chevelles I’d seen.

“In practice it didn’t really do much. Here comes pole day, and he wins the pole. This would be like a Peugeot coming in and winning the pole today in a stock-car race. It was such a shock. It was so embarrassing to the factory teams. I have never seen longer faces in my life at a racetrack, other than when somebody’s killed, than at Daytona that day. NASCAR scrambled all around trying to find out who did what to whom, how did that damn thing get on the pole? It comes time for the qualifying races. Curtis on the pole and they drop the flag. He developed a mysterious smoke coming out of the car on the first lap. I guess Smokey said it was a blown engine or a leaky oil line. I suspect that he didn’t want to show his hand. He knew that NASCAR was after him big time. The car didn’t win the race, but probably in the history of stock-car racing there was never a bigger upset than what happened that day.”

Ironically, because of rampant aerodynamic massaging by teams in 1965 and 1966, NASCAR brought templates to Daytona for the first time in 1967. These ran lengthwise from the car’s hood to trunk and fit over the roof to make sure the trunk/roof/hood line was identical to production models.

Yunick found an obvious loophole: NASCAR didn’t measure how wide the car was, so he narrowed it. A narrower car pushes less air and, all other things being equal, it will be faster than a wider car.

“What did Smokey do with the car? He just made a small Chevelle out of it and took advantage of something nobody paid much attention to in those days, and that was aerodynamics,’ said Wheeler. “It was less to move through the air. He had the fabulous ability to get more horsepower out of an engine than anybody else on Earth could. So the combination was earth shattering. As a matter of fact, that car was held in such high esteem as the ultimate cheater that it was sold for way up in the six figures at a collector car auction in Phoenix a couple of years ago. Somehow or other it miraculously showed up. Smokey verified to me that that was the Daytona car. It would be interesting to get that car and find out what size it really was.”

Under pressure from France, Yunick agreed not to run the car for the pole in 1968, but would instead attempt to be the fastest second-round qualifier, which would still earn him prize money from a contingency sponsor. Yunick claims he cut the deal with France, which, in effect, would guarantee either Ford or Chrysler the pole for the season’s most important race.

But the trouble started when Yunick showed up at tech inspection with his black-and-gold No. 13 Chevrolet Chevelle, which was now driven by Johnny Rutherford.

“That had a rubber fuel cell in it which was the legitimate size. They had it out about four times. It's a deal that had nothing to do with gas tanks. It had to do with Chrysler and Ford Motor Company telling France there wasn't going to be no unsponsored General Motors car sitting on the pole was what it was all about. So how do you want to approach that?” Yunick said at Charlotte in October 2000.

“The real story is a very complex story that had to do with politics and nothing to do with gas tanks. See, the year before that, I was an unsponsored car and it was a GM car. And it came out of nowhere and sat on the pole by about 4 miles per hour, OK? Which, apparently, they took as an embarrassment, Ford and Chrysler. General Motors still hadn't come back in the thing in ’68. And so the deal still went: There won't be a GM car on the pole. That's what happened. There's a lot more to the story. The car never ran. Nobody knows whether it would have sat on the pole or not. And in June, Firestone wanted to do a tire test at Daytona and they hired me to do it. Five days before the tire test, when NASCAR discovered that Firestone was going to use my car for the tire test, they banned it. They said, ‘You can't do no tire test here, either.’ That was it.”

Well, most of it anyway. There was an angry confrontation in tech inspection.

“We had the gas tank checked, and we were in inspection. They checked me and thought I had a secret gas tank someplace. Then they said, ‘You gotta go back to the chief inspector.’ He had a list of 11 things that had to be fixed before the car could run. Item number one was replace homemade frame with stock frame. Now, you've got an hour and a half left, then you've got 10 more things.

“So, I said, 'Well, you've got about 10 minutes to decide if you're really serious about this thing, because 10 minutes from now, if you don't come over and tell me the car was passed in inspection, I'm leaving.’ They never came over.

“And then when I went to leave, I wanted to drive the car out and I wanted to put gas in it. And the inspector said, ‘You can't move this car, ’cause we're not done inspecting it.’

“I said, ‘Don't make any difference, I'm leaving.’ Well, I wasn't having any luck with him, so I knocked him on his ass, went and got in the car, and let my boys tow me back, and then I decided to go round the track one time with the car. Then I had that big rope on it and I thought, no that won't work, I'm liable to run over that damn thing. So we just took it home. That's all there was to it.”

Except, of course, for the fact that the black-and-gold Chevrolet had a two-inch, 11-foot-long fuel line that held five gallons of gas, a feature that would be outlawed a week later.

“Smokey was a genius in his time. He was as good as anybody was during his time,” said Charlie Gray, a retired engineer who was Ford Motor Company’s program coordinator for stock-car racing from the early 1960s through 1970. “He was a great power in his day. He certainly made his mark, and he deserved every bit of the recognition he got.”

“Smokey was an extremely talented, highly educated mechanic,” agreed car owner Leonard Wood, co-owner of the legendary Wood Brothers racing team. “He used a lot of common sense and was innovative.”

* * *

But for all his technical brilliance, the fiery Yunick had a hard time coping with the politics of automobile racing and the politics of the automobile manufacturers. And that led to his retirement from NASCAR in 1971.

“The politics were a big part of it. When we got going in the 1950s, [France] in his head wanted to keep the cars absolutely stock, which was totally impossible for safety reasons, not speed reasons. That's how the cheating got started, to keep from getting killed.”

The weakest link in the 1950s stock car was the front-end spindle, which held on the wheel assembly and connected it to the steering and suspension. As speeds began to increase, the g forces and loads on the spindles increased, too. Eventually the spindles would fail, and the result would be wrecks, sometimes with catastrophic results. “He forced us to cheat in the beginning to make heavier spindles,” Yunick said of France’s attempt to keep the cars strictly stock. “The factories at that time, they would make a bigger [spindle] for you.”

Yunick knew that France held all the cards and there was little anyone could do, least of all a renegade car owner who openly voiced his displeasure with NASCAR’s boss.

“If he wanted to disqualify the car, he could. It was his outfit, and nobody made me run in the thing, so if he abused what I thought was his power, I figured, well, it's his outfit, and if I can't handle the heat, I need to go somewhere else,” Yunick explained.

“I ran the Ford Torino Talladega [a limited production model] in 1970 at Daytona, and they forced me to run a Ford that was four inches higher than the other ones. They knew where the cheating was going on and they watched everybody else and they caught everything on mine, and you could see my car was sitting that much higher up in the air.

“I said, ‘Well, you only get to do that one time.’ And I told them before the race I said, ‘You make me race this way, this'll be the last time I ever race in the South.’

“He [France] said, ‘Ah, you'll be back.’

“I said, ‘If you don't think I'm gone, you count the days till I get back.’ And I said, ‘If I see you first, I'll get on the other side of the street, and if you see me, you get the fuck on the other side of the street. You want to know what time of day it is, it'll cost you 100 bucks. That's the way he left it. When I left, Junior Johnson was the next one that got my place, and they worked his ass off till they run him off. You can only take that so long.”

Yunick never again would compete as a car owner or mechanic at a NASCAR race. Although he frequently showed up at races in the years ahead, he battled bone cancer and a host of other ailments and was absent from the scene for most of the 2000 season, until showing up at Charlotte in October for the UAW-GM Quality 500.

“I was diagnosed with everything but pregnancy,” Yunick said with a raspy laugh as he sat in the infield media center at Charlotte in October 2000. “Finally, about a month ago, I took all the medicine there was and threw it in the trash can, told the doctor, ‘I'm done with this shit. If I'm going to die, I'm going to die. Don't even talk to me about it anymore.’ I picked up horsepower, about 70 percent. I feel 100 percent better. I came away from wheelchairs, those things you push, canes. Now I'm walking by myself—all that in 20 days.

“I just went up and down. I didn't know what was happening. I was so weak I couldn't do nothing. I really didn't want to live because I couldn't do nothing. I'm starting to get back in the ball game. I may be going to drop dead because I won't take the medicine, but I ain't taking no more. If I'm going to die, let's get it over with. I'm headed for 78 now, and I've had enough of everything, with no regrets. I had a good life.”

And just as he refused to obey authority in the military or NASCAR, Yunick wasn’t about to take a doctor’s word on how to live. He lived his entire life on his own terms and vowed to finish it the same way. He died May 9, 2001.

“I think he was years ahead of his time in some of the aerodynamic things,” said Barry Dodson. “One of the Chevelles he had is up in Richard Childress's museum now, and every time I go over there I take time to look at that car. I think how could anybody have that mind and that ingenuity 20 years before anybody else, before we had the use of the wind tunnels and all the data that we have from the manufacturers? He was way, way ahead of his time.”