View Cheating Part Two
Cheating in NASCAR’s Past
Gregg Leary
Category:NASCAR -> Sprint Cup
Cheating goes back to the very first NASCAR Strictly Stock race in Charlotte in 1949 when the winning car of Glenn Dunnaway was DQ’d for “altered rear springs”…an old bootlegger’s trick.
Junior Johnson’s entry in the 1966 Atlanta race for Fred Lorenzen was a 1966 Ford Galaxie with the nicknames’s “Junior’s Joke,” “The Yellow Banana” and the “Magnifluxed Monster.” The front end sloped down, the roofline was lowered, windows narrowed and the rear deck lifted into the air… it almost looked like a Torino Talladega that was still a couple years in the future…far from “stock.” …but it PASSED inspection. Lee Roy Yarbrough’s car was failed due to blocks of wood in the front springs…and David Pearson’s car was rigged with a cable that would lower the car once the race had started…both of them were DQ’d.
Perhaps the most famous rule-bender was Smokey Yunick’s Chevelle that he had built for the 1968 Daytona 500…NASCAR had torn the car down, taken out the gas tank and found 9 major problems…legend says they gave Smokey the list…he glanced at the nine items and said, “Better make it TEN” and drove off in his car WITHOUT a gas tank. (Supposedly his fuel line alone held 5 gallons of gas.)
When NASCAR only weighed cars PRERACE…Junior Johnson supposedly had heavy rims on his first set of tires…to the tune of 100 extra pounds each…after the first pit stop the car weighed 400 pounds less.
DW’s “Bombs Away” with several hundred pounds of buckshot that was released from the frame rails during the race to lighten the car.
Chip Ganassi said, “I’ve got three drivers who would trade $25,000, 25 points and a suspension for a win. You want to stop cheating? Take the wins away.”