Yahoo Autos These Are The Wildest Cheats, Tricks And Gimmicks In NASCAR History
The NASCAR Cup Series was founded on the belief that fudging rules and laws was the best way to find success, and that mindset translated from the pre-NASCAR bootlegging days all the way through to today. It’s tradition to exploit the gray areas in the rulebook to come up with something faster and wilder than ever before. Today, we’re celebrating that history by looking back at some of the wildest cheats, gimmicks, tricks, and hacks ever seen in NASCAR.
The Yellow Banana
Junior Johnson is easily one of the most notorious cheaters in NASCAR history, but one of my favorites was his “Yellow Banana.” That was the nickname given to the heavily modified 1966 Ford Galaxie raced at Atlanta Motor Speedway. If you look at the car, you can see it has a distinct wiggly shape; the front fenders slope downward, the tail was raised, the roofline was lowered and the side windows were narrowed to the point that driver Fred Lorenzen could barely squeeze into the cockpit. The car very obviously defied the spirit of NASCAR’s regulations, but the series allowed it to race anyway. Lorenzen made it all the way to the lead of the race before he crashed out on lap 139. The car never raced again.
Smokey Yunick’s “7/8 Scale” Chevelle
Another icon of the stock car cheating game is ol’ Smokey Yunick. He was one of those people who had a massively creative brain, one that could look at a NASCAR rulebook, find all of the loopholes and then design a car around it.
This car, a 1967 Chevrolet Chevelle, was so stunningly quick that NASCAR officials knew something was up. Because Yunick has become something of a race-car folk hero, you’ve probably heard that this Chevelle was actually built so that it was a 7/8 scale model of the real thing — and because there were no Chevys competing in NASCAR that year, it was hard to spot.
Sadly, that’s not quite true; the Chevelle is the proper size, but it did feature a ton of other modifications that made it special. The front bumper was set back to improve aerodynamics, the glass was replaced by the much lighter Lexan, and the frame rails were allegedly designed to be an auxiliary fuel tank. NASCAR inspected the car before it ever got a chance to race, and it failed tech.
Yunick’s Gas Line Gas Tank
There’s another great Yunick story out there, too: when he inspected the rulebook, he noticed that there were rules dictating the size of a stock car’s fuel tank, but not its fuel line. It was the perfect loophole that allowed Yunick to design an 11-foot fuel line that was about two inches in diameter. That way, the fuel line itself could hold plenty of extra gas, and the car would have to make fewer pit stops.
Michael Waltrip’s Jet Fuel
At the 2007 Daytona 500, Michael Waltrip was found to have added jet fuel to his car. Basically, officials discovered an “illegal substance” in the intake manifold, then found that it would burn hotter than regular gasoline, thus allowing Waltrip’s No. 55 Toyota to make more horsepower. All three cars on the Michael Waltrip Racing team were penalized, and the team’s crew chief and director were thrown out of the race.
Richard Petty’s Wax Cylinders And Wonky Tires
After the 1983 Miller High Life 500 at Charlotte Motor Speedway, Richard Petty was fined $35,000 and docked 104 points for two neat cheats he used in an attempt to get closer to his 200th win. According to Greg Fielden in Forty Years of Stock Car Racing, brother Maurice Petty confessed that he wedged wax into the engine cylinders; the cylinders would appear to be the proper size when going through tech, but as the engine heated up, the wax would melt, and power could increase. The only reason anyone found out about those cylinders was because an official had noticed that the left-side tires were just a little too big.
Richard Petty’s Textured Roof
At the 1968 Daytona 500, Richard Petty debuted a special textured roof. Rumors spread that the roof was made of vinyl; instead, the roof was covered in textured black paint. There were plenty of pockets in the roof that were supposed to catch air and move it along more efficiently. There are some questions about the legitimacy of the story; some believe it was Petty’s way of covering up the fact that the car’s sheet metal had been acid dipped to lighten it. During the race, the roof began to separate from the rest of the car.
Carl Long’s Too-Long Engine
Carl Long remains the NASCAR driver to have received the biggest fine in the sport’s history. During the All-Star race in 2009, inspectors discovered that Long’s engine was 0.17 cubic inches too big to compete; NASCAR called an over-sized engine one of the most egregious rules violations and suspended Long for a record 12 weeks (which was later reduced to eight weeks) and fined his crew chief Charles Swing $200,000. It was a massive fine for anyone, but especially for a low-budget team.
