Another Cheating Escapade

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

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

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

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

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

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 ...