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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."