Racing Shenanigans
Fast Cars Were Only the Beginning of the Trouble
Racers have always wanted to go faster.
That part is easy to understand.
Then somebody writes a rulebook, somebody else brings a measuring tape, two drivers decide they don’t particularly like each other and a promoter realizes the grandstands hold considerably more people when something outrageous might happen.
Now we have racing.
Pick Your Particular Variety of Trouble: Rulebook Games & Creative Cheating | Inspection Wars & Getting Caught | Rivalries, Payback & Track Games | Hustles, Promotion & Getting Paid | Showmen, Stunts & Spectacle | Factory Specials & Production Fiction | Mechanical Lunacy & Oddball Machines
The clever ones found speed in places the rules forgot to mention. The ambitious ones tried to get through inspection before anybody noticed. Drivers settled arguments with bumpers, starting-line games and the occasional disagreement that continued after everybody got out of the cars.
Promoters sold rivalries. Racers chased appearance money. Detroit built supposedly production automobiles that had somehow misplaced most of the production automobile. Meanwhile, another group of perfectly capable mechanics kept attaching engines to things that clearly had no business carrying them.
That’s Racing Shenanigans.
Not generic stories about racers being racers. These are specific people, specific machines and specific moments when somebody did something clever, questionable, spectacular, ridiculous or all four at once.
Sometimes they got away with it.
Sometimes the inspectors were waiting.
Either way, we got a story.
The rule said what it said. The interesting part was everything it forgot to mention.
Acid-dipped bodies, movable ballast, eleven feet of suspiciously useful fuel line, cars that were legal right up until they won and engineers who understood that the exact wording of a rule was considerably more important than what the officials probably meant.
This is the clever stuff—the trick itself is the story. Read the rule, find the hole and make everybody else wish they’d read it first.
↑ Back to the Top — Before Somebody Adds Another Paragraph
A clever trick is entertaining. Watching the inspectors slowly discover it is better.
Oversized engines, flexible bodywork, mystery intake substances, disappearing fuel capacity, nitrous bottles hidden where nitrous bottles were definitely not supposed to be and race cars that became less convincing every time somebody reached for another measuring tool.
The suspense here isn’t just what they did. It’s whether tech finds it, how long the explanation lasts and who gets to keep the trophy afterward.
↑ Back to the Top — Before Somebody Says Open the Hood Again
At some point the race stopped being entirely about the race.
Petty and Pearson. Earnhardt and Labonte. Kenseth and Logano. Arfons and Breedlove. Bigfoot and USA-1. Add boycotts, bumpers, starting-line games, grudges and the occasional driver who remembered an old favor several races longer than the other fellow hoped he would.
Sometimes the machinery is almost secondary. Two racers decide the argument has become personal and everybody else gets a very good seat.
↑ Back to the Top — Before Somebody Settles an Old Score
Going fast cost money. The smart racers figured out how to make somebody else help pay for it.
Snake versus Mongoose, Hot Wheels money, Jungle Jim’s traveling match-race operation and promoters such as Bill Doner understood something important: a race car could be more than a race car. It could be an attraction, an advertising campaign and a reason to buy a ticket.
Winning was useful. Filling the grandstands and getting another booking next weekend could be useful too.
↑ Back to the Top — Before the Promoter Counts the Gate
Somebody eventually noticed that the crowd enjoyed the ridiculous parts too.
Fire burnouts. Backup girls. Wheelstanders. Wild Bill standing through the windshield. Bigfoot flattening cars. Monster trucks doing backflips. Once racers discovered people would pay to watch machinery behave badly, there was very little incentive to become more sensible.
The stopwatch may have started the sport. Smoke, noise, fire and several wheels leaving the ground helped sell the tickets.
↑ Back to the Top — Before Somebody Adds Fire
Detroit built production cars. Then racing departments started using a considerably more flexible definition of production.
Z11 Impalas, Thunderbolts, lightweight Galaxies, Swiss Cheese Pontiacs, altered-wheelbase Mopars, Cobra Jet ambushes and factory combinations that technically came from the same companies building your neighbor’s sedan.
These weren’t backyard racers trying to fool Detroit.
Quite often, Detroit was helping.
↑ Back to the Top — Before Somebody Checks the Parts Book
Somewhere in racing history, somebody has probably tried putting the wrong engine in the wrong machine.
Chevrolet V8 motorcycles, jet-powered land-speed cars, rocket Funny Cars, turbine Indy cars, ten-foot monster-truck tires, wheelstanding tanks and school buses doing things school buses were never expected to do.
There is usually an engineering explanation.
That doesn’t necessarily make the original idea sound any more reasonable.
Bottom Line
Racing history isn’t just a list of winners.
It’s also the history of the people who found the loophole, fooled the inspector, remembered the grudge, sold the rivalry, packed the grandstands, convinced Detroit to build something ridiculous or looked at two pieces of machinery that had never belonged together and reached for a welder.
Some were brilliant.
Some got caught.
Some became legends largely because everybody in the grandstands went home saying the same thing:
You should have seen what they did.