Twisting The Rules

Competitors are forced to abide by rules, and they must listen to the officials who try to put on a safe and competitive event. However, that doesn’t stop drivers and team members from trying to sneak something past them to gain an edge.

“There’s not a team out there that doesn’t want to be lower, lighter, and faster,” says Kevin Triplett, director of operations for NASCAR. “The old saying goes that the guy who finishes second is the first loser, so there’s a lot of pressure in this sport. Then again, the amount of cheating just isn’t quite as widespread as a lot of people might think.”

Needing An Edge

Teams and drivers are constantly trying to push the envelope, trying to find an edge in that so-called gray area where rules can at least be bent if not broken. “That’s the way to win because you’ve got to go to the maximum on everything,” says Steve “Red” Cloninger, technical director of the NASCAR Goody’s Dash Series. “If they go over the maximum, then we’ve got a problem.”

Wayne Auton, NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series director, says teams aren’t trying to beat the officials as much as they are trying to beat their fellow racers.

“The position of NASCAR is we want the fields as even as we can,” Auton says. “The teams are always going to look for the gray areas in the rule book.”

And cheating’s nothing new. According to Steve Adams, one of two race directors for the USAR Hooters ProCup Series, even the winner of the first NASCAR race held in Charlotte (June 19, 1949) was disqualified in post-race inspection because he had modified his car. “So his Strictly Stock car wasn’t exactly Strictly Stock. People bending the rules has been around as long as there’s been racing, and it’s always going to be like that because people want to beat one another. Creative stuff has been going on forever.”

The Joke’s On You

What teams will do to win can be downright comical. Barry Wray, the NASCAR crew chief steward at Concord (North Carolina) Motorsport Park, recalls a night at Hickory (North Carolina) Motor Speedway when a racer filled his drink bottle full of lead. “What he’d done was he had a sports bottle that should have been filled with water, but what was funny about it was he put it on the far right-hand side of the car, which was a dead giveaway because there was no way the guy could reach over and pick it up.

“That thing was filled up with buckshot lead and I bet it weighed 25 pounds. He was putting the weight on the right side of the car so it would help out with the weight distribution. It was just so funny because when I reached in his car to pick it up, it was so heavy I had to use two hands to pick the thing up.” Wray says while teams can be creative, so too can officials like Cloninger, who later used the buckshot lead to reload his gun.

Cloninger has seen a lot of crazy things in his years of being around racing, including a Street Stock race at Hickory where officials had to tear down the top-five cars. “By the time all was said and done, the fifth-place car ended up winning the race. That was a pretty good one. The first four guys argued about it with us for just a little bit, but not too much.”

Sometimes, teams like to have a little fun at the expense of the inspectors. “Yeah, a team pulled this one on me more as a practical joke than anything because they knew I hated snakes,” Auton says. “We were getting ready to inspect the truck and I went down to check the carburetor, and the team was behind my back where I couldn’t see them and they were laughing because they had put a play snake there that looked just like a copperhead. It ended up costing that team a little bit of money because I threw the carburetor and took off running.”

Air It Out

As far as what areas teams will look for to gain a competitive advantage, it boils down to this: If it’s on a race car, then a team is going to try to stretch the rule to the absolute limit as it pertains to that particular part. “I’ve seen lead shot in the framerails and in the cool box that’s supposed to be used to blow cold air onto the driver,” Cloninger says. “Of course there are always drivers and teams who are going to try to mess with their tires and the height of their cars; that’s probably the most common thing we catch. Plus, our teams are a little more creative when it comes to lowering their cars when we race at tracks like Daytona.”

Inspectors say teams often try to find ways to get more air into the carburetor, the easiest way to gain a little extra horsepower. “The cheapest horsepower you can find is getting clean air into the carburetor,” Wray says. “What you’ll find is teams trying to cheat up the airbox. They’ll taper it down and cut it short at the opening of the grille so air can come up and over the shroud of the car.

“Some guys, instead of putting flat crush panels where the front firewall is at, they’ll round the crush panels off so where the air comes into the wheel area it creates an air disturbance. That disturbance of air will help you up around the breather of the carburetor. The way the rules are written in our Late Model Stock division, all the air that comes through the front of the car has to come from the radiator itself. So if a guy gets caught doing that, what he was trying to do was gain a little more horsepower.”

Teams often look to stretch the limits on the body of their car. Wray says he always looks at the length of the nose of the car to make sure it is wider than the outer tread of the tires. “From the Late Model Stocks to Winston Cup, no part of the car can extend out past the sidewall of the tire,” Wray says. “When you’re standing behind a car, the right and left side of the car is supposed to look exactly the same. If you’re standing directly behind a car and you can see a decal on the quarter-panel on one side but not the other, that’s a dead giveaway. If you’re going to cheat like that, you definitely don’t want to add a lot of decals to it so the officials can see it.”

Some of the top NASCAR drivers have been guilty of trying to gain an unfair advantage during their short-track days. Adams recalls a night when he was the chief steward at Hickory and former Busch Series driver Mike Dillon was getting ready to qualify for a Late Model race. “Everybody would get ready to qualify by taking some bite out of the car or messing with the stagger. I was sitting in the tower, and I remember Mike was using adjustable struts for the nose (body work) so he could widen it out or narrow it up when he needed to.”

Adams also has a story on Andy Houston, a native of Hickory who grew up racing at his hometown track before racing in the Busch Series, Truck Series and Winston Cup Series. “We caught Andy with a 25-pound clipboard in his car one night,” Adams says. “It was just a little old clipboard, but the thing was filled full of lead. When his team was going across the scales, they’d take the clipboard and write down the weight, then put the clipboard on the top of the car. After that was done, they’d put the clipboard on the inside of the car on the right-hand side.”

Exploring The Gray Areas

Inspectors know what to look for because most were previously on race teams themselves and may have tried such creativity. “Ninety percent of the officials came from a racing background and that makes a very big difference, because they know the cars and what to look for,” Cloninger says. “If you get a new guy in there without that experience, it’s going to take several years to train him to where he can really do his job.”

Wells says one of the most comical parts of catching a team cheating is simply watching the actions of the crew members to see if they’re acting nervous or suspicious. “Some of the different things they’ve tried to do before is simply amazing,” Wells says. “One of the biggest giveaways is when the team members are walking around the car before it gets passed through inspection and they’re acting real sly. You can sit and talk to the teams and drivers and they act like they’re your best friends. They will look you right in the eye and lie to you in a heartbeat.

“There are teams and crew chiefs that are going to take the gray area of the rule book just as much as they can because it’s a matter of how you interpret the rule as to whether it’s legal or illegal. If you catch a team and they don’t put up a big fuss or fight about the part or piece in question, that’s really kind of humorous. A lot of people will get defensive and jump up and down and holler, but then again there are a lot of guys who will admit that you caught them and they’ll go ahead and make their car like it’s supposed to be. More often than not, though, that guy you just caught is already thinking about the next gray area he can find to work in.”

As Adams says, “If you turn your back on some of these guys for just a second, they’ll try to sneak something by on you.”