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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."