Famous rule benders aka innovators and cheaters !

[TCed]

Thought it would be of interest to have a thread regarding rule bending in racing be it bike, cars, boat.

I'd start with Jim Hall and his Chaparral 2J race car. This week in 1970: Chaparral 2J unveiled | Autoweek

[o1marc]

When I worked for NASCAR it was always cool to go into Dick Beatty's (rule enforcer) garage bay. He had displayed all the illegal stuff they had found in different cars. I could go on for hours of the innovative stuff these crew chiefs had come up with. One I thought was well thought out and not caught even though you could see it on the TV broadcast. Guy had 2 braces on the back window that dropped through a slot in the package tray. He had little electric motors connected to the braces. As he went down into the turns you could see the braces being pulled down about 1/2" and then raise back up as he hit the straightaway. This would take away downforce on the straights and create it in the turns. Nobody found it. I always liked when Darrel Waltrip got caught with a double firewall separating the truck from the cockpit. He had about 40' of larger steel braided fuel line hidden in there that gave him a fuel mileage advantage. Early on it was not uncommon to find helmets and rolls of duct tape on the roofs of the cars as they were weighed. They found these items made of lead and masked to look like the real deal.
Then there's Smokey Yunick, who was smart rule reader and taught me how to read between the lines of every rule. And so in my race career I used many of his techniques to gain a legal advantage that others were missing.

[kerosene]

this was purposeful cheat, ineteresting nevertheless
Cheatin?s Still Winnin?- The Story of Toyota Racing?s Best Cheat EVER | Crasstalk

[o1marc]

this was purposeful cheat, ineteresting nevertheless
Cheatin?s Still Winnin?- The Story of Toyota Racing?s Best Cheat EVER | Crasstalk

Interesting, I see that Toyota didn't want to play the game if they couldn't cheat so they quit.

[Mark Burton]

Road racer Geoff McMullan pulled off a spectacular win in the 2000 Lightweight TT on a bike committing the most brass-necked of frauds – his FZR400 was actually a 600. He was quickly disqualified after scrutineers discovered the oversized lump, but unfounded suspicions soon grew that he’d been campaigning the 600 in other races for which it was ineligible in the previous year. But it wasn’t like that, as Geoff told the TT website soon after: “Towards the end of 99 I blew my own bike up so I used an engine from a friend in England for the remainder of the season. It was going to cost £3000 to fix my engine, and it would have been hard to justify the money. This bike was a 400, which had been bored out with 600 pistons, but with a standard head, so where it was gaining in one sense it was losing in another”. So that’s alright then.
Verdict: guilty