NASCAR Cheating...or Creativity?

NASCAR cheating has always been a big part of stock car racing. NASCAR makes the rules for all teams to follow in order to equalize the racing field to where all competing teams have a fair chance and no one has an edge or advantage over the other. This may sound good in theory, but not usually the way it works.

NASCAR teams will do anything to win a race, including cheat. The sanctioning body has taken steps to make sure its drivers play by the rules. But despite changes in technology, it doesn't always work.

NASCAR s infamous "Room of Doom." is the place where prerace inspection will continue until every rule infraction is discovered. The brightest minds in the garage study the cars. NASCAR inspectors measure, weigh, probe and prod the powerful race cars that will soon be turning laps at 200 mph.

This is the weekly routine that is a key part of NASCAR's evolution. If one team gets away with tweaking the rules, chances are other teams will incorporate those same innovations the next week Some call it NASCAR creativity. Some call it NASCAR cheating.

One former Winston Cup Champion told the story of how his team used to beat the odds by cheating. This particular driver had a lead racing helmet that the team hung in the car during inspection. As the cars were sitting on pit road preparing for the start of the race, a crew member would switch out the lead helmet with the driver’s regular helmet.

The same team has a system where they would add the required weight to their frame rails with lead BB’s that were designed to come out of the car when the inertia of the car in banked corners forced them out of holes drilled in the frame rails. The BB’s would fall harmlessly onto the track and roll into the infield grass. This may be why this particular driver won three Winston Cup Championships.

NASCAR cheating, as many of this sport’s prominent figures would agree, is the nature of the business. The rule makers are trying to keep the speeds under control, but the team owners and the sponsors want to see their cars win. With this conflict of interest most teams will attempt different forms of cheating to gain an edge at one time or another.

For NASCAR legend Junior Johnson, now retired from racing, speed was a necessity. With a load of moonshine in the trunk, it took a hot car to outrun the "revenuers." The evolution of racing from those roots was a logical progression that embodied both the need for speed and a healthy disrespect for authority. Not only is Johnson a legendary race driver, he's a six-time championship owner who was notorious for finding a way around a rule.

"A lot of us got into racing as a hobby," Johnson says. "You could do anything you wanted to do to the car. We had an open book and the money to spend on the cars."

Johnson and his buddies incorporated the same enhancements on the racetrack that they used to outrun the law. But soon the law was replaced by NASCAR, and Johnson did his best to exploit every grey area in the NASCAR association's rule book.

"I hunted them," he says. "I went after the parts they didn't have rules for, and once they made the rules, I went to work on the configurations. There's 900 different ways they could say `yes' or `no,' and I worked to find the way you could get `yes' out of them."

Teams must decide whether cheating is worth the risk, both monetarily and from the standpoint of image-conscious sponsors. Owners such as Joe Gibbs and Roger Penske--who is on the board of the International Speedway Corp., which owns a majority of the tracks NASCAR races on, have made it clear to their teams that cheating is grounds for immediate dismissal.

Throughout the history of racing, however, teams have searched for speed, and in the early days, the only meaningful rule was "Do whatever it takes...just don't get caught." Today, getting caught is a lot easier than it used to be.

As one team outsmarted the other competitors, the rules kept changing, changing, and changing. Over a period of 25 years, with NASCAR's ability to find what one team had done to beat the other guys, they'd either take the advantage away or make it legal, which eventually equalized the field…and that's where it is today.

If a team can't come up with its' own innovations, they steal them. One NASCAR insider estimates 20 to 25 percent of the people in the garage area on a race weekend are spies, either for other teams or manufacturers.

Technology is the main difference from days gone by. Now the rules are bent with lightweight materials and high-tech systems that use fiber optics.

Time and technology have taught teams to become smarter, and the teams have acquired more engineers and people with formal education. There are many intelligent members to each driving team nowadays.

As competitors, teams are constantly looking for ways to get around the rules and work in grey areas. There are times that some teams achieve that faster than others. And while some people will call it cheating, and others call it just being creative most fan’s, NASCAR analysts, and participants of the sport will agree that it is simply both…

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