Engineers and crew chiefs are always on the lookout to gain an edge on the racetrack. And for them, the ultimate win is to bend the rules and get away with it. Something similar happened back in 1992, when Kyle Petty and Robin Pemberton managed to clinch a race win at Watkins Glen.
Petty’s crew chief at the time and former Vice President of NASCAR, Robin Pemberton, recalled how they managed to dupe the race officials. “So there’s no rule or no template on fascia. So I kept stacking this cardboard up and tape and widened the front end out, and we widened it out like four inches. They thought the car was narrow, they took a measurement and said, ‘No, the car is not too narrow, it’s good.'”
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The race ended after lap 46 during the rain, and Kyle Petty was leading at the time of the stoppage. But the No. 42 SABCO Racing Pontiac had something special up their sleeve, and Pemberton was the one who engineered the idea. He had widened the front fascia of the car by four inches by stacking cardboard and taping it together.
When the officials inspected the car, they found nothing wrong with it. It was one of the cases where the No. 42 team found a loophole in NASCAR’s rulebook and made the most of it. Kyle Petty didn’t know he had won the race and found out while he was giving an interview, waiting for the race to go back to green.
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“We run really good and I owe it all to Robin Pemberton and John Wilson and them guys. We had a great motor, if you could watch it on TV and watch the car run up the backstretch. All I had to do was keep it between the ditches the other times. We were lucky today,” Petty said in the post-race interview.
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Interestingly, the 1992 win was the one and only NASCAR Cup win for Kyle Petty at the Glen in his career. The duo of Pemberton and Petty would go on to win another race later that year at Rockingham and finish fifth in the championship standings. NASCAR as a sport has thrived on innovation without getting noticed by race officials.
During the 1976 Daytona 500, Michael Waltrip’s qualifying lap was disallowed after he was caught using nitrous oxide to boost horsepower. But his response after getting caught is exactly why crew chiefs and teams still try to play the cat-and-mouse game with race officials. “If you don’t cheat, you look like an idiot. If you do it and you don’t get caught, you look like a hero.”
Although bending the rules in the Next Gen era is tough, this doesn’t stop the teams and crews from trying their best to gain that extra edge on the racetrack.
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