But in 1968, Smokey came back with another Chevelle much like the 1967 car, although he built this one himself. But engine problems cut its race short, and it was heavily damaged in a severe crash shortly thereafter. It easily took pole position for the 1967 Daytona 500 against well-funded factory teams from Ford and Chrysler. Chevy also undertook an exhaustive aerodynamic study of the Chevelle’s body on behalf of Yunick’s car. It had a reworked suspension and a roll cage that, tied to the stiff frame, made it effectively a tube-frame racer. The chassis used in 1967 had been custom-built by Chevrolet, which was then providing back-door support to certain racers, including Yunick. Instead, they were full-size vehicles with a multitude of subtle and clever modifications, some of which were not exactly by the book. So shrouded in folklore are these black-and-gold Chevys that people believed they were 7/8th scale models. But even by his stratospheric standards, Yunick’s NASCAR Chevrolet Chevelles of the late 1960s were something special. Stories of Yunick’s rule-bending are legion. The flat-hat-wearing, pipe-smoking Smokey Yunick is nothing short of a folk hero to motorsports tinkerers and fans of general impishness. If there were an Oscars for motorsports cheating, the statuette would be cast wearing a cut-down cowboy hat and smoking a pipe. The Enthusiast Network And the Smokey goes to. FIA President Max Mosley called the cheat “the most sophisticated I’ve ever seen in 30 years of motorsports.” Still, the Toyota team was banned from the WRC for one year. But the real genius of the contraption was that if inspectors tried to have a peek inside, the mere act of loosening the hose clamps that held it together would release tension on the springs and return the restrictor plate to a legal position. While the plate itself was legal, inspectors discovered that it was installed and tightened into place using a set of hidden springs (Belleville washers) that would push the restrictor plate 5 mm farther from the turbo than the rules mandated and allowed some air to enter the turbo without passing through the plate. That’s when a tech inspector discovered a hairline fracture in the Celica’s restrictor plate. It was a cheat so subtle and ingenious that it wasn’t identified until the penultimate race of the ’95 season. Toyota Team Europe engineers thought they found a way around the restrictor-plate regulation by finding a way around the restrictor plate. The streak ended with a resounding thud in 1995-a year in which the WRC mandated restrictor plates to limit air intake and slow the cars in the name of safety. Paperface Restrictor Plate-gate World Rally Championship, 1995.įor three consecutive years (1992-’94) the World Rally Championship (WRC) title went to Toyota Celica Turbo drivers Carlos Sainz, Juhan Kankkunen, and Didier Auriol. The cleverest ones are those that provided an advantage and went undiscovered- the ones that only a few people know about because they are the ones who thought it up. This story might be the six cleverest cheats in motorsports, but that’s not exactly true. LOVE RALLY? JOIN US AT OUR NEXT ROAD & TRACK EXPERIENCE, RALLY-U Was the cheat so ingenious, like the Toyota example below, that even those tasked with policing such things couldn’t help but acknowledge its brilliance? But even when someone is clearly breaking the rules, there are still shades of gray. Innovation is neither inherently moral nor immoral. The gray area between the lines of a rules book is where teams find an advantage over their less-clever adversaries. That’s because gray is somewhere between the light and the dark, between the legal and the outlawed. But to crew chiefs and technical directors there is no more beautiful color than gray. Drivers surely go for the black and white of the checkered flag, and fans prefer green flags to other color options. Racing sponsors might like the bright, easily identifiable colors that help sell their products.
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