The greatest CHEATS in racing history

he claimed that half of the nascar rule book in the 70s was because of him [Music] [Applause] [Music] i love race cars i love vintage race cars i love modern race cars and the racing is great and the great races are great and the great race car drivers are great but what i really appreciate about race cars is the cheating i love the cheating one of the greatest cheaters of all time i mean interpreter of the rules of all time was smokey eunuch smokey eunuch was a like poster boy for nascar he went over all the rules and back then the rules from nascar were relatively thin he said that if it's not in the rulebook that means he can do it like if you didn't put it in here it's allowed and he tried all kinds of crazy stuff over the years but it culminated in his most famous car that actually never raced 1968 chevy chevelle that chevelle i came in close proximity to in all its materials and everything because bruce kampa with mark mantanos and a few other people they owned it and it came through the shop and it went to a museum and and briefly i got to see it and lay hands on it and i never forgot it my head was like oh this is amazing i want to see if all the rumors are true now here are the rumors here's smokey told these stories a bunch of times he's got a great autobiography i'd recommend reading it's like three volumes long the man could talk and even he told the story differently each time but they had been developing the chevys and he'd been doing all kinds of little tricky things to him and this car was kind of his masterpiece and he built it just for the daytona 500. he kept it completely under wraps and it's the legend of it was that it was 7 8 scale of a regular chevelle and that's not actually true it was a regular chevelle he wasn't going to reduce the size of a car but he did all kinds of cool things to it one the chassis itself never stipulated where the chassis had to be in the car so we moved the chassis back and over to one side like everything the driver the whole center line of the car changed underneath the body to get better weight distribution for the turns of daytona then they never really stipulated how the floor was supposed to be these cars never had belly pans like prototypes and things like that but that belly pan works aerodynamically cleans up the air moving under the car so he dropped the floor down a few inches so it surrounded the exhaust in all of the lines and essentially made a flat floor car out of it he took the front bumper narrowed it capped it on the end so the air was perfectly moving around it then he lengthened the bottom of it to turn it into an air dam then he took the back of the roof and just curved it up just a little bit so the air would flow up and over into the rear spoiler and this famous story goes that he brought the car to inspection and they go they take it apart and one of the inspections is to see how much fuel is in the gas tank now he had already cheated with this before he was famous for putting a basketball in a fuel tank so you brought say i don't know what the exact size was but say you could have 26 gallons he'd make a 28 gallon tank put a basketball in it and they would measure how much fluid came out and it would be 26 gallons and then he would deflate the basketball take it out and have an extra two gallons in there so there you drop the tank a lot of rules in nascar in fact he claimed that half of the nascar rule book in the 70s was because of him and i wouldn't be surprised so they dropped the tank and the story goes that they're like you have 10 or you have nine violations we have 10 violations with your car and we got to get those fixed and he screams that's nonsense and gets in the car and goes make that 11 fires the car up and drives away without a fuel tank in it and drives all the way back to his shop in daytona beach and it's one of my favorite ridiculous stories now nobody seems to remember this actually happening smokey says it did smokey says it didn't the truth behind that story is they never stipulated how big the fuel line could be so the fuel line on smokey's chevelle was 11 feet long and two inches big and could hold in itself a couple gallons of fuel another story i heard i'm not sure was ever confirmed was that he knew that the car would be scrutinized everything he got was scrutinized so he made another chevelle a stock street chevelle with all the small adjustments he had made and parked it in the parking lot and he made a template for his car and they now make a template is pretty standard on nascar you fit the template over the profile of the car it's legal if anything sticks out of the template it's illegal and smokey's another reason for these rules and smokey's like i made a template and he fits it over the race car see and they're like well how do we know that's a real chevelle template he goes well let's go out in the parking lot and find a chevelle and conveniently right up front there's a chevelle park there and they take it on and they put it over the top of it and it fits perfectly because it's the predetermined car that he made now i don't have confirmation of that either but that's another great cheating story but penske really good cheaters i mean finders of the unfair advantage because they had mark donahue racing for them and mark donahue is a absolute hero of mine because he was not only a brilliant racer but also an engineer like his cars wouldn't have done what they did without his exact input in engineering and hard work so he got brought onto penske penske was doing trans am in the late 60s trans am cars are pony cars like mustangs and camaros and javelins and so forth and they're relatively stock for formation and they they have to technically use off-the-shelf parts so that that car you see racing on the weekend is the car you can buy on monday is the idea race on sunday buy on monday so they're looking for ways to make them lighter faster whatever so their camaro they dipped in acid the whole car they put the whole car in a tank of acid which burnt away the steel and they had a special equation like it would be this amount of time you would take it out and neutralize it and it would shave hundreds of pounds off these cars because these aren't chassis cars these are unibody cars so the whole unibody goes in there and the steel is so thin that they have to build essentially a roll cage in it strong enough to hold the car together like in erasing situations the transfer of loads from corner to corner go through the body but the body would have collapsed so they built a roll cage and people were like that is a massive roll cage and they're like we just want to be safe we want mark to be safe and the story goes that when the technical guys came up and put his clipboard on the roof and went to get it leaned against the roof and the roof just goes like it is paper thin and uh he's like what's going on with that like but i don't know that's um that's unfortunate must be the sun what caused it what could possibly have happened and they caught on to it and they supposedly at that race went to a local dealer and got another camaro and swapped it out but that dipped car supposedly was then moved around with different numbers so they wouldn't know which car was the acid dipped car and penske had this fantastic clean-cut image his cars were always gorgeous like he was one of the first team owners who the car had to be perfectly painted everything's clean everybody's clean it was like a professional organization which led that kind of process led to the amazing you know organization he owns today that kind of attention to detail but he was cheater and donahue helped him every step of the way because after that year uh i think it was 68 or 69 so in 70 he they start racing javelins and they need to find the unfair advantage in the javelin now i got to put my hands on this javelin because it was it's the one bruce canapa drives now and it is a fantastic car bruce drives the snot out of it and if you ever get a chance to watch trans am historic racing i highly recommend it those guys all know each other and if you want a show of shows of these cars duking it out it is fantastic and the noises are great but that javelin has a few tricks up its sleeve one like i said earlier they had to use factory parts in them and not really tell you whose factory it had to come from so at that time the porsche 917 was going to be the dominant car in 1970 in endurance racing so penske was like hmm you know i could use some bigger front brakes for my javelin go grab some porsche brakes take them to an amc dealer have them put an amc part number on it and sell it to me across the counter i now have amc brakes that look mysteriously like 917 brakes puts them on the javelin other thing they would do in trans am would be the pit stops and they would change their brakes during the race because they're heavy cars you imagine changing hot brakes brake pads and in the heat of it and it would take minutes so they got another brake booster so a brake booster in a car is there to give vacuum advantage when you push on the brake show power brakes there's vacuum helping your foot push the brakes well they got a second brake booster and they put it inside the car it's kind of in the foot well it's a factory part not technically doing a factory job because what it was for was when he came into the pit stops and stopped he'd pull a lever that vacuum would work in reverse and suck the brake pads away from the rotor so all they need to do up is go dink dink dink brakes are on gone so instead of a few minutes it was seconds they could change the brakes on this car unfair advantage illegal not technically my favorite thing they did was they kind of messed with how they fueled these cars now up to that point you had jugs of fuel and stick in the fuel and you waited and put it in and it took a little bit of time and these cars used a lot of fuel they had big fuel tanks so it would take time to fuel them up well they were like didn't want to wait around that long so at one race there is an enormous fuel tank this big sunoco fuel tank and it's sitting like five feet off the ground it's got a hose that goes to the back of the car and they hook up the hose and open the thing and the gravity kind of pushes it in the fuel tank and this is during like practice and the other teams are like what is that and it didn't really go that fast and they're like okay so they didn't raise a stink and they're like watching and is it legal there's nothing in the rules that you can't do it okay next morning comes and the fuel tank is now 20-25 feet in the air now physics dictates every foot that goes in the air increases the pressure on the fuel by like a huge quotient so they come in they hook this thing up they flip a switch and with about three and a half seconds there's 30 gallons in the car it goes donahue says in his book the card just goes boom like boom gas is in click bam and he's gone and then our team's like like come on really really and of course it was it was only used a few times and it was made illegal because of the danger of it blowing over the wind or whatever else but here's this amazing advantage they just kind of cooked up out of nowhere at every level from the extremely rich to the extremely poor racer everybody's looking for that unfair advantage and i guess that's life really we're all looking for the unfair advantage we're all looking for that little moment where we can kind of sneak through and get a little bit more but it's always more fun when that's happening at 200 miles an hour homeowners insurance may just seem like some boring thing that you have to have to get a mortgage but it can be a surprising way to actually save a lot of money policy genius is your advocate to do that they shop your policy and your insurance needs amongst all the major carriers and find you the best deal in fact every time it 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Channel: VINwiki

Views: 1,263,860

Rating: 4.9183836 out of 5

Keywords: cheating, auto racing, cars, smokey yunick, roger penske, donahue, mark, vinwiki, car stories, john ficarra, cheaters, strategy, rules, NASCAR, stock car, trans am, penske, amelia island, vintage, SVRA, monterey historics

Id: EC5KYwxvqjs

Length: 12min 56sec (776 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 09 2020