rules were meant to be bent, sometimes broken
Smokey Yunick was the fellow that got that idea patented.... Smokey Yunick was famous for innovations to a race car.
He also changed the roof line & moved the body to better the weight distribution. NASCAR started making templates & gages to check body lines.
Smokey also had the Basketball Fuel Tank. The oversize tank has an inflatable ball in the tank. For checkout, the ball was inflated & only 22 gallons was able to be pumped into the tank. After checkout the ball was deflated & the extra gas pumped in.
Smokey the Cheater was a real innovator
http://digg.com/video/henry-smokey-yunick
Smokey, Holman and Moody, Richard Childress, a long and distinguished list of others! When they first brought out the templates some of the cars could danged near go through them, sideways. When they started measuring ride height small holes were drilled in shock absorbers and hardened steel pins or drill bits put in them. The car was legal until the hard bump leaving the apron!
A new mechanic was in a panic when they came to inspect the race car engine for a car I was on the pit crew of. When he saw me coming he almost ran to me. "Which cylinder do we P&G??" I had to laugh at his panic. "Any of them, we are legal." A year later with a new crew chief the car proudly sported the cubic inches on the hood, "302 CI
Sometimes !" As a former crew member I was welcome in the garage. I asked them how often they changed engines between the 302 and the 377 carrying weight for the 302. "Sometimes two, three times a week." No big deal, in a rush we could swap an engine in under thirty minutes. Some of the big track teams were getting fast enough that a rule was passed that the car had to have the same engine in it at the beginning and end of the race! I think Junior had it down to 22 minutes.
I might have badly bent a few rules but I never broke them on my own cars. Other people's cars, I had no such scruples. I considered the rulebook more of a general guideline.
Hu
