"I'm trying to cheat." I thought you might be talking about drag racing....
Several years back, a heavily-backed NHRA Pro Stock team got caught with their pants down around their nitrous, errrr, I mean around their knees. A favorite saying of one of that team's owners was, "It's not cheating until you get caught."
Some of the stories I could tell about the Oxide brothers, Propylene and Nitrous, and their effects on enhancing the performance of an NHRA Pro Stocker... Some stories need to be left untold, although changing anyone's name would be a waste of time, since nobody was innocent. :wolf:
Twenty years ago this very weekend, we were at the NHRA World Finals. A pal from that area was running E/ED with inline, 6-cylinder Nissan motors and he hurt his last good piece. So, we shipped one of our V-6 motors to him, so he could run D/ED. We were looking at possibly switching to that class and figured we could learn a bit from the venture. After the second round, both cars were looking pretty smart and one of the NHRA tech guys came down on us like white on rice. The car we were running was a bit flaky and we had the fuel tank mounted ahead of the foot box. According to NHRA rules, from the point to where the fuel lines entered the footbox, to the point where they exited under the seat, they were enclosed inside an aluminum channel, that fastened to the floor with Dzus buttons. And I say lines, because we ran a Mallory fuel system that used a return line to dump excess fuel back to the tank. Someone didn't care for the way we seemed to be punching out competitors with both cars, so NHRA descended on us with evil in their eye. "Someone" felt there were too many fuel lines on our car, so we were either cooling the fuel (illegally), or we were introducing something to the fuel. The complaints on the other car were too numerous to mention, but they had both of us removing body panels and I had to expose all the fuel lines on our car. I found it rather interesting when that same "someone" won Comp at the U.S. Nationals, a year or two later. "Someone's" car suddenly picked up almost 3 tenths in the final round and was mysteriously allowed to bypass both the scales and fuel check on his way to the winner's circle. "Someone" had a very large and very well-known sponsor at the time, said sponsor spending trainloads of cash sponsoring cars in nearly every category.
There is an end to that story at Pomona. The second car took out the well-sponsored car and we ended up running him in the semis. We didn't want to cheapen a possible win by making him stay at the trailer, so we agreed to race. Some idiot :suicide: made a bad clutch call on our car and it shook itself out of the groove in 3rd gear. We figured all was not lost, because the second car was still fast enough to win the race. One of the slags on that team took it upon himself to take some air out of the rear tires (not understanding our V-6 stuff needed to spin the tires a touch to keep from tugging the motor too low). It meant a red light in the final and that was the day I was beat twice at the same race. I could go on to tell the story about the well-known Top Fuel chassis builder who had <cough, cough> "borrowed" a golf cart from the NHRA corral and had backed it all the way to our trailer after the race, to enjoy a few cold ones. He ended up backing around our trailer to leave, backed into a light pole, turned the cart on its side, dumping him and the widow of another chassis builder onto the ground, causing himself a massive head wound. But that story, complete with my being questioned by the Pomona PD is best left for another time. :angel:
