Your Cheatin' Heart 

"It's the first we've seen of anything this exotic," NASCAR President Mike Helton said with a straight face. But the only thing "exotic" was that Stewart's team's attempts at cheating were so blatant. Everyone knows cheating among stock car teams should be a lot more subtle than that. Still, there are appearances to keep up and big-money sponsors pouring in the kind of money the sport's oldtimers could have only dreamed about.

So when Helton stood before 43 Winston Cup drivers, their crew chiefs and assorted car owners in the garage at Dover International Speedway, on the morning of June 2 last year, he was angry. Helton, a no-b.s. grizzly bear of a man on his best days, had reason to be upset. Not even one-third of the way into the 2002 season, three of the 12 Winston Cup races to date ended with the winning car failing post-race inspection. It happened to Matt Kenseth in Texas, Dale Earnhardt Jr. in Atlanta and, a week before Dover, when Mark Martin broke a two-year winless streak at Charlotte. In all three cases, the cars were judged to be too low, and the team owners were fined after the race. Jack Roush, who owns the cars driven by Kenseth and Martin, was socked with a $50,000 fine after Charlotte.

But even a $50,000 fine is a small price to pay for a victory. In Martin's case, for example, his winnings in Charlotte were $1,280,033, making $50,000 appear to be tip money. Helton knew he had to do something, and do it fast. The form and methods may be different, the intent is not. "We seem to have a rash of cars after the race is over that cannot meet the minimum height," Helton said during the drivers' meeting at Dover. "So far, we have chosen only to use a fine as a reaction. I just want to make sure that everybody understood there are other options NASCAR can use if it keeps going this way."

Helton had a variety of weapons at his disposal. He could fine the teams larger sums of money, penalize them points or finishing positions, or even suspend an entire team. But what Helton won't do and can't do, is ever stop racers from doing what comes naturally, and that's breaking the rules.

It happened way back in 1949, when Glenn Dunnaway was disqualified for using illegal "bootlegger" rear springs at the first-ever NASCAR Showroom Stock race, the precursor of today's Winston Cup Series. It kept happening in the 1950s and 60s and continues to this day.

"Someone always will figure out how to get around the rules, even though we try to make them as clear as possible," NASCAR Chairman Bill France Jr. once said. "Lawyers and accountants have been doing that with the tax code for years."

What Helton and NASCAR managing director of competition Gary Nelson have done in the last decade is make it a whole lot tougher to get away with, expanding the Winston Cup rulebook from the size of a pamphlet to a novella, and sharply increasing the number of inspectors on the job, as well as their training and education.

"It Was Fun"

It wasn't always this way, of course. When NASCAR was a small regional racing series in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, there was a little bit more humor in the cat-and-mouse game between racers and inspectors. Racing was less a business and far more collegial.

"It was a lot more of an individual sport a long time ago when it first started," remembered seven-time Winston Cup champion Richard Petty. "When it first started it was strictly stock cars, then somebody said, "Why don't we put bigger springs in it?' or bigger shocks or bigger tires, whatever it was. Then somebody said, "You know, if we cut this window here, cut this fender.' There were no templates, so we'd just do it. Make the cars longer, shorter, narrower, higher, sideways, whatever it was. We used to run with no spoilers, so that was something that they [NASCAR] didn't have to check. They didn't have any templates. They checked the weight of the car and the height of the car and that was about it. Used to be we came down here, in an hour you used to do inspections. If you wasn't just really, really cheating bad you were OK."

Petty advocated a philosophy he called "cheat neat," which loosely translated meant break the rules but don't be too flagrant about it. "The big deal was cheat neat, you know what I mean?" Petty said. "Or cheat on 15 things and do two or three things that's very obvious. NASCAR'd catch them, and they was happy as June bugs. You got through with what you wanted to get through with."

"The cheating, as we used to call it, was fun. It was a little bit like outrunning the police with a V-8. It was fun. It didn't hurt anybody," added Robert Yates, the son of a Baptist minister in North Carolina who worked his way up from a gofer at Holman-Moody in the early 1960s to the owner of a two-car Winston Cup team led by 1999 Champion Dale Jarrett. "We used to have a deal where you couldn't close off your grille. [Car builder] Banjo Matthews was great at getting a grille small. We finally learned that the more you tape them off the faster they would go. So we put this plastic door screen back in behind there. [NASCAR inspector] Joe Gazaway, he would start looking in the grille. It was his job to inspect the grille and make sure you didn't have any kind of blockage in it. One time we put a water bottle with a pump on it and a nozzle so when he stuck his head down in there we shot him right between the eyes. It was that kind of a fun deal."

Aerodynamics, weight, engine displacement and tires were among the areas teams got creative with. After the mammoth 2.5-mile Daytona International Speedway opened in 1959, it didn't take long for teams to figure out that the less air their cars pushed, the faster they would go.

"Once it became obvious that getting the car low was a good thing at Daytona, people started working on it. They dropped the sheet metal down on the nose, lowering it any way they could and still get by," said former driver, owner and car builder Cotton Owens. "On the Chryslers, on the lower control arm, you had an adjusting screw. It went up into another arm that held the car up through the torsion bar. We had some [wooden spacers] that would bust when you went in the corner and would automatically drop the front end a full inch. Then when we couldn't get away with that we started machining the bolts and putting little Allen screws in them to let them fall down so far. On the rear they had an anchor back there. We'd slot those bolts to where it could come down so far just from the pressure of the car being on the track. It would automatically lower. It would hold them up long enough to get through inspection. You could just about jump up and down on the front end yourself, and it would automatically come down. The first little bump it got on the track would lower it. It would mean the difference of an inch or an inch and a half, and at Daytona that was a second or a second and a half on the track."

"In 1962 or "63 you began realizing that dropping the top of the grille a little bit lowered everything on the front end," recalled Leonard Wood, co-owner of one of Ford's top teams. "All that stuff was figured out pretty early. Ford used to have a stack of shims under the radiator cradle, about an inch or so. It was really easy to take that stack of shims out and drop the nose an inch. It didn't change much. There wasn't a whole lot of that drooping the nose anyway. If you drooped it too much, you could visually tell it."

And when they weren't messing with the aerodynamics, the teams were trying to hold more gas or take off excess weight.

"[NASCAR] checked the fuel cells pretty closely. Couldn't hold but 22 gallons," said Bud Moore, a Congressional Medal of Honor winner and car owner for more than half a century. "We all had a little gimmick going. Some of them had gas in the roll bars. Some had it here, some had it there. I did mine a little different. When we went through inspection, they checked the fuel cell and sealed it all up. I waited until a certain time and stuck an air hose in it and blew that jewel up and made it bigger. They never took the fuel cell back out of it after they checked it. I just put the air hose to it. Blow the cell container, stretch it. I'd get a gallon, gallon and a half, sometimes two more gallons in it."

The Pettys had their own tricks to cram more fuel in the car. "We'd come here to Daytona. We always had the end garage stall," said Barry Dodson, who worked as a crewman for Petty Enterprises in the 1970s and went on to become crew chief for Rusty Wallace's 1989 Winston Cup Championship team. "I'd hide in the trunk and open up the fuel cell to where it held two more gallons than it was supposed to. I'd tap on the quarter panel, and they'd open up the trunk and get me out."

Historian Bob Latford recalled one fuel-related incident that involved one of NASCAR's most time-tested tricks: replacing an illegal part with one even more flagrantly illegal. "One time at Martinsville, Holman-Moody's car that Fred Lorenzen drove got caught," Latford said. "It was supposed to be a 22-gallon gas tank, and there was 22.9-gallons or something like that, and they made him take it out and take it away. And the team fussed and fumed and did the work, and they put a 28-gallon tank back in. They never checked the one they replaced it with."

Weight loss program
Weight was an easy area to fudge on, too, given that NASCAR used to only weigh the cars before the race and even then often used crude grain scales that were easy to manipulate.

"I had a helmet one time that had lead in it. I've still got it," said David Pearson, the man many regard as the greatest stock-car driver of all-time. "You'd just switch helmets. That thing must have weighed 50 pounds. You just left your helmet in the car when they weighed it, then wore another one in the race."

Car owner Junior Johnson was even more creative. "Junior had one of the best things I ever seen," said the late Jack Smith, who competed against Johnson in the 1950s and 60s. "Somebody on his team brought a two-gallon water jug. Somebody in Tennessee had shown him something, a liquid metal of some sort. It wasn't mercury; it was something heavier than mercury. They filled that jug up and put it in the car. They'd weigh the car. Right before the race this old boy would put that one up and put a real water jug in there. It'd lighten the thing 200 pounds. Everybody had a water jug in their car. Man, you take that much weight off, it's a lot."

Johnson, whose team is the only one in NASCAR history to win three consecutive championships, had other tricks at his disposal, especially during his glory years in the mid-1970s with Cale Yarborough.

"I know particularly at North Wilkesboro, when Cale would start the race, he'd be all over the racetrack until the first pit stop," said Dodson. "They'd take those four tires off, and the rest of the day that car was a rocket. Little did people know those four wheels had steel bands welded around them and they were poured with lead and they weighed a hundred pounds apiece. All of a sudden, he's 400 pounds light. They finally caught on to that when it took three crewmembers to get them over the wall. Junior always was a master at taking advantage of stuff like that."

And if you couldn't manipulate the weight of the car, there was room to tinker with the scales themselves. "We decided at Martinsville to run light was really a good deal. We figured out a way to beat the scales. In fact, we beat the scales a lot of places," said Yates. "Just knew how to drive the car on it right. You could beat the scales at every racetrack, I believe, except Charlotte. I even figured out a way of beating the Charlotte scales by putting a piece of tape under the left rear tire and timing it and turning my steering wheel a little bit so we could pitch the weight to the right side. I could beat every scale just a little bit just knowing how to drive the car on there. Finally, NASCAR put separate scales out for each of the four wheels to eliminate that."

"We used to have the old grain scales that we'd roll the cars across," Dodson recalled. "We didn't have the digital stuff you have today. If you were one of the last cars to be weighed, you could take a little magnet and hang it on the bottom of that car and change the reading on the scale by a hundred pounds."

Hire A Cheater To Catch Cheaters

Few people could touch Johnson's creativity. He learned about aerodynamics running whiskey on the hardscrabble back roads of Wilkes County, NC, and he figured out chassis setups by trial and error. "I think it came from back when I was fooling with moonshine," he said of his eventual mastery of aerodynamics. "I messed around with cars, took the windshield wipers off. We used to bet money and see who had the fastest car on the highway. I could do a lot of stuff and pick up 15 to 20 miles per hour. You know a lot of cars had a big old hole where the headlights were? I'd flesh that out and stop it off. Just taking the wipers off would give you four or five miles per hour. Various things like that. Taking mirrors off. Once you pick up on that, you start seeing what makes a car not aerodynamic. Any time you help the aerodynamics of the car, you help the handling."

Although not formally educated, Johnson figured out what the paid engineers knew about chassis setups. In general, the car would be fastest with its weight lower than higher. It would also be offset to the left as much as possible and back toward the center of the car rather than at the ends.

"In the late 1960s, I had cars that were offset, motors moved back in them, wheels that were moved forward or backward depending on where I was running. Many, many things that I was doing were an advantage. Moving the wheels underneath the car to the left, widening the car out. There were many things that would help a car handle better."

"In the early 70s [with Cale Yarborough driving] I did an Oldsmobile that I moved the wheels on, moved the motor back, moved everything to the left side. Moved the wheels further to the left side and to the front. It kept the front end down where it wouldn't lift up. It's a tremendous advantage to get the car down on the racetrack."

Yet for all Johnson's acknowledged genius, the man many believe was the most creative of all time was Gary Nelson, who was crew chief for Bobby Allison's 1983 championship season and later for driver Kyle Petty and car owner Felix Sabates prior to become Winston Cup Director in 1992. Hiring Nelson may have been the best thing NASCAR ever did to clean up the sport.

"If you've got a 7-Eleven that's been held up a dozen times and you can't catch that crook, maybe the best thing you could do is go hire a crook that's held up a 7-Eleven a lot," said Larry McReynolds, a veteran crew chief who now does NASCAR television commentary for Fox. "I'm not saying Gary is a crook. He was a very innovative thinker. He always was trying to figure out ways to get around the rules, to work hard in the gray area. And he always did a pretty good job at it."

"The first thing they did was they went out and got the biggest cheater they could find," said former driver Buddy Baker of Nelson's hiring by NASCAR. "Gary Nelson was a very, very sharp person." More importantly, "He knows how to catch these guys, and if they do enough, he'll get "em,"

"Gary spent probably 50 percent of his time trying to figure out how to circumvent the system and 50 percent of the time doing it the right way," said Sabates. "Gary was a genius with the bodies. He wasn't too good with the engines, because that wasn't his forte. Gary did a lot of creative things with our bodies. We showed up one time at Talladega with a car that was one-third Pontiac, one-third Oldsmobile and one-third Chevy. . . We went to Talladega and kicked everybody's butt until we got involved in a wreck and Kyle broke his leg."

During his tenure, Nelson has earned high marks from competitors for leveling the playing field and bringing fairness to the application and enforcement of rules, something noticeably lacking in the sport's early days.

"When I got involved 13 years ago, there was a lot more cheating going on," Felix Sabates told me before the 2001 Daytona 500. "Everybody broke the rules. They didn't bend them, they broke them. I think it's a lot fairer today. I think the competition is more fair. I think they [NASCAR] are more fair with the teams."

"They do inspections out in the open now. You don't have to take anybody's word for it," added Yates. "You can observe. That's probably why there are so many cars running within a foot of each other. A lot of that you have to attribute to the fairness of the rules and keeping everybody straight."

"I think in the 1960s, 70s and 80s probably every race that was won was won with something that wasn't quite right," agreed former crew chief Larry McReynolds, echoing an oft-heard sentiment. "Today almost every race that is won is won with straight stuff."

What Nelson hasn't changed -- nor will Helton or anyone else -- is the basic nature of racers to push the rules to the edge and beyond. "What we have is what we have," Nelson shrugged prior to the 2001 Daytona 500, when more than a dozen cars were caught in rules violations.

"We're not trying to gloss over anything. . . Racing is hard and there's always temptations, just like there's temptations in real life to break laws. But you try to understand that the majority of our garage follows the rules. There's only a few guys that try and take the shortcut and flat-out cheat. Life's the same way. If a convenience store has hundreds and thousands of customers, every once in a while, somebody tries to rob it. That's just a fact of life, and we deal with it in a way that we think discourages that kind of activity."

Just as they have from the beginning and likely always will.

Tom Jensen is the author of Cheating: The Bad Things Good NASCAR Winston Cup Racers Do In Pursuit Of Speed (David Bull Publishing).