Rulebook Games & Creative Cheating
The Rule Said What It Said. The Rest Was Apparently Negotiable.
Racing rules are usually written for a perfectly sensible reason.
That is the first mistake.
The fellow writing the rule is thinking about what he wants the racers to do. The fellow building the race car is reading the exact words and looking for everything they forgot to mention.
There is a difference.
Pick Your Loophole: Acid-Dipped Bodies | Aero Loopholes | Ballast Tricks | Cooling-System Loopholes | Smokey’s Fuel Line | T-Rex | Porsche 917 Homologation
A minimum weight doesn’t necessarily say where every pound has to be all afternoon. A fuel-capacity rule may say plenty about the tank and absolutely nothing useful about the plumbing leading to it. A body can pass inspection sitting quietly in the garage and become considerably more interesting once 180-mile-per-hour air starts leaning on it.
Then there are the people who simply look at a perfectly ordinary engineering problem and find a solution nobody imagined would need its own rule.
That is where Rulebook Games begin.
These aren’t generic collections of cheating tricks. Each one has a car, a team and somebody clever enough to make the officials reconsider what they thought the rule meant.
Roger Penske and Mark Donohue discovered that factory sheet metal could remain factory sheet metal while becoming considerably less of it.
Jim Hall decided waiting for speed to create downforce was unnecessarily restrictive.
Minimum weight is simple until somebody starts asking exactly when the car has to weigh that much.
Harry Hyde’s Dodge needed cooling air. It just didn’t necessarily need all of it during a qualifying lap.
Smokey Yunick had a fuel tank of the proper size. The trip from the tank to the engine was another subject entirely.
Hendrick Motorsports built a Chevrolet that passed inspection, won the race and was then effectively told never to come back like that again.
The rules said Porsche had to build twenty-five cars. The inspectors eventually decided they would like to see all twenty-five of them.
Bottom Line
The best rulebook stories usually begin with somebody saying the same thing.
“You can’t do that.”
Then somebody else asks to see exactly where it says so.
That question has produced lighter cars, stranger plumbing, better aerodynamics, creative ballast, entire rows of Porsche 917s and more than a few hurried additions to racing regulations.
The officials wrote the rules.
The clever racers provided editing assistance.
↑ Back to the Top — Before Somebody Finds the Next Loophole