Your favourite 'cheats' in motorsport

[MrKipling43]

What are your favourite cheats in motorsport?

I mean when teams manage to 'bend' the rules to their advantage - and let's not use this to lay into Ferrari again - I'm not referring to political bollacks, I mean engineers doing sneaky things to get a bit of 'ethically questionable' extra speed.

Things that got banned straight afterwards count.

Smokey Unich - an old US NASCAR team owner had some of the very best. One of my all time faves was a race during which his car was, mysteriously, able to run loads longer than anyone else's. The scrutineers called the car in for examination and could find nothing wrong or illegal with the tank, but it later transpired (after he drove the car all the way from Scrutineering back to his garage with no fuel tank) that he'd installed a 100 foot long fuel line, which was enough for about three gallons.

Another of his good ones was building a NASCAR that was exactly 7/8's scale. I think he got away with it for a while.

Oh yeah, and Toyota's 'variable' air restrictor was top drawer cheating. Regulation size when you were checking it, much less restrictive when it was covered up again - the Schrödinger's cat of motorsport!

My 'banned soon after' entry comes from the Isle of Man TT when some bright spark figured out that changing the fuel tank on a bike took A LOT less time than filling one up with petrol. Imagine chasing someone into the pits and seeing that happen ahead of you!

Edited by MrKipling43 on Sunday 15th June 19:12

[MrKipling43]

flemke said:

Not trying in the least to be disputatious, but wasn't the OP referring to examples of cheating that was always cheating, but the regulators decided after its discovery that they should clarify the regs? An example of this would be the flexi-floor.

I was kind of including things that were banned straight afterwards, but that were introduced by teams in a crafty fashion because they knew that whatever it was would be deemed illegal straight away.

Like the McLaren's fiddle brakes, or that TT tank swap thing I mentioned.

Nick_F said:

I rather like Nelson Piquet's alleged lightweight qualifying crash helmet.

That's brilliant!

Edited by MrKipling43 on Sunday 15th June 23:46

[MrKipling43]

sniff petrol said:

Red Firecracker said:

Mannginger said:

Can't say I understand what's going on with that Turbo picture though

Here ya go, here's a page explaining the ins and outs;

Toyota TTE's Illegal Turbo

It really was a work of art.

How did the FIA become aware of it then?

IIRC it was greed that got them busted. Instead of going for a 10 or 20bhp increase, they went for 50 - 70bhp (or whatever) and, on a stage with some long, fast sections they were an inexplicable amount faster than the rest of the cars. This lead to a far more thorough investigation and, ultimately, them being banned from the sport.

[MrKipling43]

zac510 said:

That would be a handy thing on a road car.. Probably too expensive for too small gain though.

Not really a great deal of point either: ABS makes the system pretty much redundant on a road car anyway and you'd have to be driving like a bit of loon to lock one wheel turning into a corner!

Having said that, it would be quite cool on something like a mental Caterham.

Edited by MrKipling43 on Saturday 12th July 18:45