Inspection Wars & Getting Caught
They Almost Got Away With It
A racing trick has two lives.
There is the part where somebody thinks of it.
Then there is the considerably more entertaining part where an inspector starts looking at it.
Pick Your Inspection Problem: Engine Displacement Games | Flexible Bodywork | Fuel Capacity Tricks | Mystery Intake Additive | Yellow Banana | Smokey’s Chevelle | Tire Bleeding | Daytona Nitrous
Racers have hidden cubic inches, fuel, nitrous, movable bodywork and enough questionable hardware to keep technical officials suspicious for generations. Some tricks lasted for races. Some lasted for years. Others survived right up until somebody noticed an odd hose, measured the wrong dimension or decided to take one more look after the checkered flag.
That is when the explanations began.
Inspection Wars is where clever engineering meets somebody carrying a clipboard who has seen this sort of thing before.
The trick alone isn’t enough for this bunch. These are the stories where the discovery is part of the fun: what they did, how officials found it and what happened when everybody stopped pretending the car was perfectly ordinary.
Petty Enterprises knew exactly how large the engine was. The interesting question was what NASCAR would measure.
Kevin Harvick’s Chevrolet had a very successful afternoon in Las Vegas. Post-race inspection was less cooperative.
Emanuel Zervakis won the race. Joe Weatherly suggested NASCAR might want to measure the fuel tank. Joe had his reasons.
Michael Waltrip Racing arrived at Daytona with a brand-new Toyota and left NASCAR inspectors wondering exactly what they had found inside the intake.
It was supposed to be a Ford Galaxie. From the right distance, with enough imagination, that argument became easier.
Smokey Yunick understood that passing NASCAR’s templates and resembling the showroom Chevelle were not necessarily the same engineering problem.
A race tire gains pressure as it gets hot. Somebody at Richard Childress Racing apparently became interested in giving that pressure somewhere to go.
Darrell Waltrip and A.J. Foyt suddenly had plenty of qualifying speed at Daytona. NASCAR became interested in where some of it might be hiding.
Bottom Line
The problem with a really clever race car is that success attracts attention.
Run in the middle of the pack and nobody may care.
Win the race, grab the pole or suddenly find a suspicious amount of speed and somebody from technical inspection starts walking your direction.
That is when oversized engines, unusual fuel capacity, flexible windows, hidden bottles and suspiciously creative bodywork stop being engineering projects and become conversations.
The racers kept finding new tricks.
The inspectors kept finding better places to look.
Neither side ever really won that war.
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