Racing Around the Rules - How to win.... The Unfair Advantage

No thank you all for coming what a great crowd and thank you for attending the unfair advantage we're gonna learn about racing around the rules so you are about to hear some great stories most of them will be true you're also going to get a peek behind the curtain of what really goes on and finding a way to win and you'll get that from our expert panel and our guests and I really want to thank them they are quite an experienced panel especially for this topic and pick some of the winningest men in motorsports five possible rural stretchers one sheriff those had to help these guys understand that the rules are written in black and white and many of the panelists continued to see many shades of gray they said 50 shades of gray long before the moon man like this are sometimes called cheaters people accuse them of not reading the rulebook I know that's not true these men are innovators many of the rules in auto racing had to be rewritten due to our guess maybe a couple because your host I'm doesn't knowing that in the group I've got to lay out a few clear guidelines and notice I said guidelines not rules cuz I said rules of what just doesn't matter anyway so like any deposition that you have to go and testify we must be sworn in and so we will use the crew chiefs Bible yeah the victim smokey good all right raise your left hand and repeat after me I do solemnly swear to try not to swear while telling these stories and will tell the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth or at least the truth the way I believe it okay where's my assistant Eddie so my own answer to Vanna White Eddie let's let's show them that carburetor now you can see that's a pretty stock Holley carburetor and as you look at it really nothing going on there but as they started to restrict the carburation the air going into the manifold Eddie let's show what happens when you actually tighten down the bolt for the air cleaner oh my goodness the center pops up and it draws more air in there I can't believe that thing was broken that cleanly so and if you if you didn't have a carburetor that was possibly broken maybe underneath of those carburetors especially in a Hemi hero they restricted them and still do I'll use a restrictor type plate by restricting the size of the holes now it used to be that you were allowed to bring your own restrictor plate and they even inspect it like a carburetor and they put a bore gauge through there and it couldn't be any bigger than such-and-such so you'd put your plate on and that would restrict your motor except if you really didn't want to restrict your motor that much and you plate look normal anyone you put that plate down on the manifold and you did what would you do oh yeah pretty amazing how that stuff works those hammies were pretty quick back in the day Kevin you and I talked about restoring cars and finding things and maybe you can talk a little bit about some of those pieces on that panel that you may know something about please hold up the red bottom as long as we're talking about laughing gas well that bottle says it's a fire suppression system model and it was actually hidden in a car by some brothers that kind of like cowboy guys and we had a bobble like that hidden in a car in case Marc's company found it of course we just say it's a fire extinguisher because I think you can zero in on and see it's a phoenix fire system bottle then it was filled with laughing gas but what we did is we signaled the nitrous through the radio button and these brothers didn't really like to talk on the radio much but for some reason we kept hearing click click-click maybe the first practice daddy and Gaius came in and he said you guys are cheating no one's ever passed me to 935 as fast as they just fast me whoever they were anyway we never got caught for it and we actually never won a race with it either and Jim you I believe you said it was a Porsche with a correct wheelbase but yeah in reference to the body it wasn't the correct position I didn't see anywhere in the rulebook that said where the wheelbase had to be remember that when I'm so first started racing the Porsches they came over and they were built to FIA regulations so they were homologated cars and that wheelbase was this and so on and so forth well mark can verify this when we raced we raced against basically NASCAR's al Hilbert's cars were tube chassis cars with Chevy fiberglass bodies and and so on so it dawned on me that the the biggest problem with the rear engine Porsche and it was a rear engine not a mid-engine was that when you turned in the front end didn't bite and it didn't turn and then when you got on the throttle and it swatted down then all the weight was behind the rear axle and the car came around not yet so it was awful car to drive but it was very reliable and won the long-distance races so when we got the car I took one look at it and I read the rule books very carefully and I said well look it it seems to me that the wheelbase is X and that's all it needs to be so we raced the car and with Alvin's help we built some pretty good engines and we went on and we won a lot of races and that was I think 76 and and people were amazed that the Porsche which was underpowered to the Chevy's was winning races and I sold that car at the end of the season it disappeared for about 15 years I get a call from a guy 15 18 years later he says I've got your old RSR Carrera that you want all the races within 76 and I'm restoring it but I've got a problem I said what problem would that be and he said well I bought all the fiberglass that they ran out those doggone things and the wheels don't fit in the holes and was that the same car that you did a little creative grinding now Alvin was deeply involved in that your name came up quite a few times in these conversations I just yeah but back back to the wheels in the in the fender wells we also moved the driver forward oil tank forward and everything else got some weight on the front axle the car turned and when I'd accelerated accelerated a lot better so I said to him have you ever heard of a fiberglass company called MIPCOM they make aftermarket parts for Porsches call them I think they can round up some fenders for you they were our sponsor he did call him they did send him the stuff he put him on and I saw the car at the Laguna Seca historic races a few years ago and asked the guy did you ever get the wheel straightened out on this thing and he says oh yeah just works great you know their fenders are a lot better than the factory fenders that we were the deficit to the american-made cars and Mark and I had a conversation behind the curtain here before we came out and he said you know we knew everything that was going on as long as the racing was good we looked the other way which brings me to a point when I first raised my first and race we when I drove the Beverly Hills Porsche Audi Carrera RSR which was by Bill carcass was a new career or isar I read that it was legal the way it was and it was FIA rules so you couldn't really change it so I went to the first race and we were a joke so I walked up to John Bishop he doesn't know me my first impression I said mr. Bishop the it occurs to me that probably some of these cars aren't exactly to the rules to the FIA spec was there right and I said yeah I mean we're a joke and he said well maybe you could just tune up your driving a little bit I said okay but what about these cars that don't appear to be they don't have the front bumper from Porsche they have this big thing that goes all the way down to the ground and everything so on so I said well what are we gonna do and he said what are you gonna do and he smiled and he walked away we came back four races later with all the hot stuff on our car and I want the race and he walked up and he says buzz looks like he'd been doing a little work and I smiled and I walked away [Applause] you know you wanna speak up China in a little bit yeah so first I'll say everything that at least Kevin and Gemma said is absolutely true okay so we're trying in sports car racing you have completely different kinds of cars trying to compete and put on a good show and be entertaining to the public so maybe the term creative interpretation and understanding that that's what it was was kind of the model that sports car racing has had it was innovative we wanted people to do stuff I mean Howard knows and Roger knows we didn't have a 935 we had 12 different versions of a 935 okay we didn't have an R SR we had five or six versions of that so as much as Jim said the rules at that time were a box but the box was pretty liberal inside and it gave teams and racers an opportunity to be creative and you know there's a whole list of stuff in front of me of other stuff they haven't mentioned that we knew about but don't you read some of that over the years like when we got to the turbocharged cars you know there's some cool things there but you know dumping freon into the intercooler when you needed a little extra power was a good thing to do qualifying you see them big scoops on the roof of the 962 you fill that up with dry ice for qualifying that works really well and it was it wasn't cheating it was just people trying different stuff and then eventually particularly in the 80s with gtp as the technology grew fuel itself became a problem because some of the fuels that were used in some of the certain brands that were quite dominant near the end of the era were pretty volatile and it was extremely difficult and amps at least really didn't have ability of policing that we could take the samples but the stuff evaporated so quickly by the time you got it to a lab it wasn't what it was when it was in the car so we kind of that's what led to the 90s I'll okay everybody we're all using the same gas that was the simple solution but that went on and we knew we were on the wrong side of the fence and got had many times by some of the fuels because of the way the cars were running they had to have a very special type of fuel hi turbo boost tremendous heat normal stuff you buy down at the Sunoco station okay so that kind of stuff when we with v8s and the Kelly America challenge we had some old classic NASCAR tricks where you had P eights built with different sized bores opposite cylinders so the engine was balanced put into a car where the frame would only allow you in check the one that they wanted you to check which was it was the small one which at that time wasn't illegal but the rule said the car was determined weight wise by its displacement so if you measured the little one and multiply it by eight it was legal but if you had the four big ones it wasn't legal anymore I heard a story then I want to ask you if this is true that when you are running the skull bandit yep had a rear spoiler right oh here we go so I'm told I told you I wouldn't ask you about did I know that I figured you didn't know about it because you would have had it on that table I still AM behalf of Asheville no I didn't know you had but they had a rule where they finally started regulating the angle of the rear spawn and we went down to the test at Daytona we were terrible we weren't running very good there are motor program was a little bit off and we had stayed competitive by doing other things getting the car down doing some things to kind of circumvent the height rules now they've got all this stuff they're checking after qualifying after races so you have to be a certain height the spoiler has to be a certain angle and so I've sit on an airplane flying back to the test thinking for just some way that we could come up with to make that spoiler go down right so in my mind I figured it out how to pin JIT on the back of the deck lid you know we just cut a slot in the deck lid we stuck the blade through that through it it was a nose 'mobile at the time and so they used to make you in nascar that made you run the stock liner so it had a big cavity in there so there was a lot of room to put something to actuate that that spore I never could quite get the in my mind I looked over every mcmaster-carr catalog we could find trying to find some kind of actuator couldn't find one this is before the Internet so you couldn't just get on Google and search it but so finally I took my wife's car it was one of those mobile factory courtesy cars that they loaned us and I took it to the grocery store one evening and I popped the deck lid to put the groceries in the trunk and then when I shut the trunk you guys remember these cars they had a little thing to pull the deck lid down in here or you know pull it down the ceiling so I put the deck lid down walk get in the car wait I drove straight to the shop and we had already me and another guy had already in the back room made the hinge for the spoiler and we we backed the car in the shop pulled that little motor out of there and it was perfect I mean it had a little limit switch I mean it was about this big kid in there perfect and so we got it all done and it was just so cool to watch it work you know so now I've got to get permission from my owner to be able to run it right I mean I can't just show up down there with this thing Gary Nelson was the new serious director and it was his first race I mean is his first day on the job right they don't apartment a qualifying so I had to get permission from Leo to be able to try to run this thing and he said well he said let me see it on the car and all that I said okay so I put it on the car we had it all sitting in the shop I said okay here it is if you can find it we won't run it and you know it's on there he searched all over that thing could not find it anywhere looking for wires looking for stuff could not see it so I just reached in the car and there's a radio box that said on the tunnel that we used to put the radio into and just a little aluminum box I had a switch on the front of that radio put another one on it push it down and they went spoiler went down just like flaps on an airplane he said okay you can run if I'm telling you I was so nervous I mean this is you know racing in the gray areas one thing but this is out now chief this this Gary Nelson the series director is one check-in the angle with an angle finder so he checks it and it's a tenth of a degree too much because I had I made sure I had it enough you know that if we'd have to adjust he's making me push it down and I'm like Kip on and finally he goes he said Andy you're the only one doing that you know couldn't bump it so finally I hit it hard enough that he was satisfied and say takes off you know for his laughing if you're you know for maybe what they told her the pit road at the exit comes really close to the track in the triangle so I'm standing right there too at the exit I've got my stopwatch gonna gonna clock the run here he goes by and I look and that spoiler is like straight back Elson and I'm till I look he was looking at the next car I couldn't get that thing off the car quick enough I'm telling you and Jeff showed up with and they wouldn't even let you take it home asking him some questions [Music] it was first car that we put real soft springs in the front and stiff Springs in the back and a great big sway bar and because we raised a floor pan and everything it created a tremendous amount of downforce well we said you know we're gonna go ahead and run this car let's run it in the Winston we used to run that as because it wasn't a points race and we'll see if this thing really works as good as we think well it worked so good at the end of the race it but you know a Jeff Gordon was running lap times about a second quicker than the field and NASCAR didn't like that much and by the time we got to the you know you go through all this celebration and whatnot in the cars an inspection and and you know we're doing the champagne cheers and whatever we get to we get to the inspection Bay and Buster and the big ol inspector says mr. France wants to see you I thought he wanted congratulate him you know yeah you know bill now we were friends and so you go up there in the truck and I go up there sit down and this is in the day there's no cell phones and stuff they parked that truck in it that he had that I can still see it that beige push-button phone right there you need to pick up that phone right there and call your boss and tell him that car is illegal and I said no no no sir it's it's built 100% by the rules we've got with your inspectors every step of the way it he goes it won't be tomorrow so I had to call mr. Hendrick from that phone that's a day oh hey Rick how's bill once talked to you [Music]

Channel: HRN

Views: 1,005,883

Rating: 4.8687978 out of 5

Keywords: how to make your race car faster, how to cheat motorsport, 911, 935

Id: hfq7-1ePW-M

Length: 19min 23sec (1163 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 23 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Rillist]

"Rule are for the interpretation of the wise, and the obedience of the foolish."

[u/Fat_Kid_Hot_4_U]

My left ear enjoyed this video

[u/MagneticGray]

This is well worth the watch. Great post OP.

[u/therealsumy]

I haven’t felt as innocently joyful watching this since i was a kid waiting on Santa. Thanks for sharing OP.

[u/Awkward_Bowler]

This was actually really fascinating. I'm surprised it got so little traction on here.

[u/[deleted]]

It is a good way to look at life.

[u/juneya04]

I really enjoyed this video. Thanks for sharing

[u/Difficult-Helicopter]

This was very good, thank you for posting!

[u/machine_monkey]

The exchange with Bill France at the end had me actually laughing out loud. Definitely worth my time, thanks OP.