If it's not written in the rulebook it's not cheating. Years ago I raced stock cars on asphalt. They said you had to run mufflers so I would gut the muffler and run a straight pipe through it. So the car had mufflers. but the rulebook didn't say they had to work you just had to have them. You couldn't use weight jacks in my class so I used water pump pulleys on top of the rear spring to adjust the wedge. They checked your car coming off the track after a race to see if it was leaking water out of the overflow and if it did you got last place money no matter where you finished. I ran a 400 small block Chevy that always boiled over coming off the track so I ran my overflow down the unused return fuel line so it dumped out where the old fuel tank used to be. I could go on and on but suffice to say that one year they rewrote the rule book three times that season because of me.

Vick's Vap-o-rub, or Mentholatum smeared on the inside of the air cleaner lids. Seen that mostly at restricitor plate tracks a number of years ago. Three brake lines coming from the right front wheel. One of them, actually containing the wire to the sensor for the traction control. Double floor under the fuel cell for either extra fuel line, or lead for more rear end weight. Starter motors hidden up above the LR weight jack to adjust during the race. An "accessory" switch that runs the electric motor that slides hidden lead in the crossmembers in the frame to slide weight from left to right, and back. Left for racing, right for going across the scales. Tip of the iceberg . . . and these are the old tricks . . .

Pretty pedestrian 1960s 1970s cheats. BTW Smokey's shop was only a couple of miles from the track so driving there was no big deal. Most of the cheats talked about here would be caught in a second today. The big thing today is aero advantages, like back windows that flex down, spoilers offset to one side and getting air out from under the car. At about 15,000 square inches of surface area looked at straight down on a cup car, reducing the air pressure by 1/4 lb. under the car equates to 3,750 lbs of down force.

"Tip of the iceberg" on cheating.....dirt modified: I went on a diet and lost 30 lbs, we used thin wheels on the right side, aluminum brake drum and weight jack bolts. inside the left frame rail was a 40 lb section of lead. used thin wall tubing on right wheel guard. All of these mods resulted in a 5% left side weight gain. Nitro in the radiator side tank, ran a Teflon "wire" to the intake and dashboard, turned it on by rotating the gauge. Tech did not like the wire running from the radiator....Cut the right front brake pad down, after a couple of laps it would glaze and not pull down the right front entering the turns. The back panel was suppose to seal off the air, ours looked that way but we had a second cross tube that hid a 3 inch wide gap. Asphalt limited late model: off set chassis, cut heads and block, cut out the plenum on the intake, cheater cam using a stock reground cam, left front shocks that were solid, never checked our welded rear end. vega torque converter to save weight. modified carburetors and distributors.......names ground off soft compound tires. running a full windshield and opening up the "fake" hood scoops, bending up the rear of the hood, rubber flap on package tray and flaps at the rear of the trunk all for areo advantage. 1975 to 1990

The big thing was lead radios. You have to have permission from an official to approach a car after inspection while on the grid. You just walk toward your car with the real radio, show it to an inspector as you walk by him, he nods his approval, you change the "radio." Then when you are done, you put up the window net, wave thanks to the inspector, then walk off in a direction away from the inspector with the lead radio. I know, I've done it. When I became an inspector working the scales, nobody got away with anything I did, or thought of trying. Fuel cells are taken to the R&D center, checked, then sealed. Used to be done at the race track, every race. These are old, everyone knows them, and procedures are in place to stop these exact things.