Back in 1961, two friends of mine purchased identical ( in appearence ) black, 348cu.in.,three-speed '61 Chevy Impalas. The difference was that one was a 280 hp and the other was a 350hp. On occaision, they would arrange a race with the 280hp car, and then tell the opponent they were going to stop for gas or some other bogus excuse. They would then go home and get the 350hp car. The only visual difference was one car had a deck arial and the other didn't. No one ever picked up on that though.....good thing! Also, they couldn't let anyone too close to hear the solid lifters of the "special-super turbo-thrust" 350. The original "280 car" is pictured.
Not exactlly 'cheating' per se, but back in 1969, a buddy of mine ordered a brand new '69 425hp/427 4-speed Biscayne. When he took delivery of the car, the first thing he did was remove the 427 marker light bezels from the front fenders and replace them with 6-cyl pieces. Since he wanted the car for street racing, (why the hell else would anyone order a stripped down, zero-option Biscayne sedan with a 426 hp 427 and a 4 speed!<LOL>) he had tried to order it with 4.88 rear gears, but probably for warrenty reasons, GM wouldn't build a 427 Biscayne with anything lower than 4.11s in 69. Undaunted, he drove the car for a few weeks with the 4.11's in it and then found a set of junk and very obviously worn out Chevy 12-bolt 4.88 gears at swapmeet for $25. Of course the worn out gears howled like a banshee when he installed them, but no problem. He simply took his still less than a month old, 900 mile Biscayne back to the dealership and complained that rearend was noisy and demanded they fix it on warrenty. When the dealership mechanic pulled the cover off the rearend, it was obvious to him that the gears were defective because - go figure - they had totally worn out in less than 900 miles!! The mechanic simply verified the ratio - 4.88 to 1 - and ordered in a brand new set of 4.88's to replace them with! Sweet deal! <LOL> mart ===================================================
This from the other way around... We have a engine builder here in Massillon who has quite a following inspite of the small amount of time one of his engines actually lasts. The guys is mostly into circle track cars but has roped a few drag racers too. Sometimes you get lucky and sometimes you don't at this place. This is one of those guys who sells $35 Summit carb spacers with one of his stickers on it for $200. Nothing is built in house it's bought out of catalog and slapped together but with a top end price tag. I wouldn't take this guy a lawn mower to work on to be nice about it... A current customer of my friend's chassis shop has lost two engines before making the 60 foot mark on the first run but some how this guy keeps going back and plunking down more cash. Just the same the guy goes on for hours about great how this or that is including his engine builder. Just the same he can't come up with specs such as a primary tube size length, collecter tube pairing overlap etc. for the headers to be built...We have nicely suggested trying someone else but he won't hear of it, so I guess we are going for number three here soon. Even though He's having a full on moly chassis strut 4-link modern door slammer built I'm quite tempted to run him, if blows up on the line whats it matter how fast it could be... Mentioning this to another friend who built my 289, he got a good laugh and started digging up pictures of won races, and trophies from running against this guy. I guess one of his customers in the past had set out to beat one of the cars the local rip off shop backed one season. My friends customer was talking to his buddy while sitting on the tailgate of his beat up truck over looking the car they had on a old open trailer. It started with this local engine builder and his backed driver walking up and dogging this guy out of the blue for having a low buck rig/car and a stock appearing iron 355 with a factory looking intake, in a late model class where the self proclaimed "big boys" were running aluminum headed 383's with big name parts on up to the minute cars, hauled with new lettered trucks and trailers. They actually told him he should come back when the slower cars were running. The car's owner thanked them for the tip, but insisted he was here for one reason and that was to beat their asses one way or another. This ended the conversation in a hurry, and the race ended with the little 355 car in 1st that night to the surprise of many. Not only that but as much as the effort was originally just for fun of racing after the mouth running they got it became a concentrated effort to attend as many races as possible just to out place these guys with this exact engine with nothing more than oil changes and tuning. Its rare thing now but the guy with all the bucks in and running on the edge of the rules doesn't always beat experience and a good combination...
An old guy in Illinois drag races and there was a rumor going around about him cheating. You see, he used to have jerry curls that ,discustingly enough, dripped. Well the rumor was, he would take some of his "jerry curl juice" and rub it on his tires to get better traction. I don't know the truth about this but it was a funny story.
There is a fellow over here that used to be, and still is kind of, a force to be reckoned with on the race track. Seems when he was drag racing he always got a hole shot on his opponent. Well everybody finally protested his car and they found that he had set his hair pins to block the timing lights at the starting line which allowed him to leave early with out red lighting.
Speedy Bill has flatty in his collection where the guy hid an extra carb under the intake. I don't know how it could work but the guy kept beating him at the strip. When the car or engine came up for sale Speedy bought it. Tore it down and found the carb under the intake. It was a updraft type setup! It was shown in one of the issues of Street Rodder back a few months back. I saw it at his museum next to his Speedway Business. If you can't beat um, buy um, I guess!
My teammate hid weights in the front of the sled in the 72 games and we got disqualified. Cool runnings, Mon!
After a pony stock race at Cajon, the top four cars were asked to pull thier clutches. My legal clutch was at my shop, a couple of blocks from the track. While my crew pulled the race clutch, I snuck out of the pits and got the legal clutch from my back room. When I got back to the track, I hid between two trailers with the legal clutch and a torch, since the clutch was ice cold. I warmed it up and then took it to tech, where the inspector, after looking very hard at the swirl marks on the clutch disk from the torch flame, OK'd us. Whew, the beer tasted especially good that night Tony
My most recent car runs a used chevrolet factory car light aluminum flywheel painted to look like steel and weighted to work with his engine.
This may not be exactly cheating, but the guys I suckered thought I was. I got ragged for driving "my boyfriends" Chevelle (a 68 SS396). I asked them if they were interested in racing my boyfriends "PICK-UP". You should have seen the look on thier faces when Mike showed up in his low twelve second running 69 El Camino!!! Carrie Carrie
my ex GF started taking Argentinean tango lesson about a year ago, she started coming home and telling me about this great young dancer guy...oh wrong kind of cheating
Petty was the master rule bender in his day. That car with the vinyl top also had all sorts of other stuff in it too! Gary Nelson was basically in charge of "rule bending" at Petty Racing, then he became the Chief Inspector for Winston Cup. That was basically the same as turning the fox loose in the hen house! After he took over, you saw guys getting busted for cheating all the time, and for things you would NEVER imagine! Smokey drove his Chevy with the gas tank out all the way back to his shop in Daytona, a couple miles from the track. He also made a car that was 7/8 scale to race NASCAR. Officals could never fihure out how he was cheating till a full-sized competitors car was parked next to it! Ahh, the GOOD OLD DAYS!! Before all this SANITIZED, POLITICALLTY CORRECT BS THAT NASCAR has become! It makes me SICK!!!
I ran a dirt late model that had a valve stem attached to the front hoop. When people asked about it, I told them it was to fill the cage with helium to make the car lighter... They just walked away shaking their heads, afraid to ask or look at anything else...Like the illegal tires/wheels, the Holley carb, etc...
When Gary Nelson went to work for Nascar one of the team owners was quoted as saying "that oughta take care of half the cheating right there"
After NASCAR brought in a compression ratio limit, Larry Widmer built a motor that used oil pressure to change the compression ratio. Spinning the motor on the starter, the compression ratio checked legal. Fire the motor, and at race speeds, the compression ratio was significantly higher.
Some places, it is legal to use ice, to cool the intake manifold. They wrongly assumed, that all ice was made from water. Some people have used "ice" made from NOS, to gain an advantage. The ice melts, turning back into NOS, right near the carb. You can buy nozzles, that fit CO2 bottles, for making Dry Ice. Not too hard to hook one to a NOS bottle.
I was at Smokey yunicks Garage sale his wife had in fall of 2001 & spring 2002, very cool and innovative stuff all over the place, was in one of the rooms that had boxes & boxes of pistons on the shelve, on the bottom shelve was about 5 or 6 aluminum muncie cases, guy grabs one to pull it off the shelve, to look at it, shelve was about 6 inches from the floor, pulls it off the shelve, hits the floor, "Bonk", i'm like WTF, guy starts laughing, he says, check this out, we look inside the case, the bottom of the case was filled with lead, this case bare, weighed 60 to 70pounds easy!LOL!!! I guess it helped the car get off the corners better, we got a good laugh off of that, was some really cool stuff there. Best Damn Garage in Town!
Regarding the comment on Glidden crashing and covering up his intake, yes he did that. Took off his jacket as soon as he got out of the car and carefully covered the intake. It is on one of the Diamond P drag racing tapes. If I'm remembering correctly he had just installed a funny car style cage in his car prior to the race where he wrecked it.
Raced mini stocks at sagus they had a 1 lb per cc rule we had to put the cc on the hood i ran a 2300 but put 2000 on the hood and rold it on the scales the guy at the scales didnt tec cars he just checked the weight roled thru the tec and left the hood on the roof no one ever caught it
Back when I was crewing on a "limited" late model they changed the rule to exclude wieght jacks, which we had. We were told we'd have to weld them up. We loaded the car up and went back to the shop and proceeded to lay down the perfect bead,,,,, of black rtv. Let it skin off and headed back to the track, passed with flying colors. After it had fully dried turning the jack bolts popped the "weld" off the threads and we were able to adjust the bias without getting caught.
If I remember right, Glidden was the first to make and use split Holley Dominator carbs, which were not against the rules, but not yet common knowledge as they are today.
I've read about 2 stories in the past.........first was just after Bob Glidden's son was caught with nitrous in his P/S car and I think he was booted, soon after, Bob told NHRA that he has nitrous in my car...."Find it"....they didn't. There was also a nitrous manufacturer that said he designed systems for several P/S teams and at that time they said one of the customers was the only father/son P/S team at that time.........meaning Warren and Kurt Johnson.
Racers hiding extra tanks in there cars deserve to be caught, An old racin buddy that ran stocks at LIONS would always get the jump on everybody. It happened so often that M/T would throw fits and constantly tear him down looking for hidden tanks and lines but never would find any. My buddy would just laff his ass off to infuriate Mickey more. After each round my buddy would make jet changes on both primary and secondary side-- close everthing up and the last thing he did was to fill the float bowls up, Primarys got gas but the secondarys got filled with a "HOT MIX"(as he would say). Went to the line on the primarys--at the green he would mash the pedal and the secondarys would dump giving him the jump. By the time he got back the secondarys would be filled with gas.
The Jalopy Journal
