Your fuel tank was only allowed to hold a certain amount of fuel because if you had more, you could go farther between pit stops, thereby covering more laps while the other drivers were stopped for gas.
He would temporarily meet the small tank regulations during inspection, but under race conditions, the ball would burst, allowing for more space in the tank, which would get filled up with more fuel than his competitors at the first pit stop.
I would assume that by some point, if one of his cars won, the officials just took the whole thing apart to find out what sort of bizarre loophole he'd found that met the letter of the requirements while totally violating the spirit. His antics weren't secret, even at the time he was working. He was just really good at it.
Nope ; Motorsport is always drivers' skills coupled with engineering ingenuity. It's always about "what can I come up with, which gives me an edge, and still somehow is within the rules?" I don't know anything about Nascar, but the history of Formula 1 is full of such little tricks as well. It's just easier to regulate "other sports" than it is to regulate sports that come coupled with a lot of technological involvement.
If sth gives you an edge for half a season until rules are adjusted, that might be enough to win a championship. It's a cat-and-mouse game, but it's also exciting, and important for the whole thrill of it.
Decades past Gordon Murray designed a fan quite literally sucking cars to the ground, which somehow was within regulations, because no one even considered something like that https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hb6DAmm7sZg In rally driving, they would sometimes come up with fake reasons for a start to be delayed, so they wouldn't have to drive in the front car's dust all the time. Audi entering with their 4-wheel car back in the days was only possible, because they pushed for a rule change and no one else really knew what was coming. Sometimes manufacturers straight up "cheated" (almost, sometimes for real) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lo4dGTrzr8 ; it's a thin line, but also what makes it exciting.
I would say that it's the hacker's / engineering ethos almost. What can I do within the framework? Whether it's building a bridge (to make it more stable while still following this brash design), a road car (how can I create something fun, with torque, sound, emotion, down force, power, but a nice shape, and still get a road legal car within environmental regulations), computer games (consider https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izxXGuVL21o ; computer games are full of hacks to get the most out of the hardware), even legal (how can we pay almost no taxes, while not being busted for tax avoidance?) ; not every ingenuity is necessarily good, but it will always be cat-and-mouse, that's the point of living.
This got meta quick ... and quite a more detailed answer than I anticipated. Sorry for that, hope I gave you a different perspective though.
> Decades past Gordon Murray designed a fan quite literally sucking cars to the ground
This reminds me of a similar story (and I'm having trouble finding a source now, perhaps it was the Lotus 78?), where the team bragged to the press about a new technology they had developed which reduced the losses in their differential, which explained their recent competitive advantage. On race day the pit crew even covered the part in rags as they ran to the back of the car to swap out the differential mid-race, lest their competitors catch a glimpse of this new technology.
Only there was no fancy differential technology. That was all a ruse to distract from the aerodynamic skirt they were using which literally sucked the car onto the track :)
Was watching the formula 1 series, and one team appeared to fully copy the body stylings of the mercedes team, and while it was technically legal, it was morally frowned on and a lot of other teams were pissed off.
People do, that's why the rules are changed after a while. Competitors are usually outraged. Fans are somewhat split. Rulemakers are annoyed, but don't retroactively change the rules.
No. You're free to abide by a conservative interpretation of the rules, it just means you'll literally never win against a team with a more creative interpretation. It's very much of a realm of "That which is not explicitly forbidden is permitted." And the range of "explicitly forbidden" tends to be based heavily on what the rules body feels offers too much advantage.
It's quite literally a major part of what makes the sport interesting. Yes, driver skill matters, but an exceedingly creative crew chief (see Smokey) is worth quite a bit more.
Some of it is certainly "cheating, good luck catching us." Some of the trick throttle body restrictor plates that look like a perfectly valid restrictor plate ("A hole of X diameter to restrict airflow to the engine so everyone has the same power") end up flowing a lot more are pretty clearly cheating - they're against both the letter and spirit of the rules, but you have to catch them, which is hard.
Others? It's literally just undefined areas. To borrow a few of Smokey's antics, sure, the car has to be based on a stock car you can buy - but does it have to be dimensionally identical, or can you get creative? He did things like create smoother windshield/frame junctions to reduce drag, extended the bumper down to improve aerodynamics, etc. Is that cheating, or is that just creative optimization within the rules? You were, at one point, allowed to use an alternative frame for the car. As worded, that doesn't prohibit a custom made frame with the drivetrain offset to one side for balance improvements for circle track duty... but is that actually cheating? It never said you couldn't.
One might reasonably assume that a fuel line routing would be "a more or less direct and protected path from the fuel tank to the engine." But, if you've not specified this, and someone stuffs the frame rails with a couple gallons worth of spiraled fuel line... the requirements specify fuel tank capacity. They don't specify fuel line length or capacity. So if you stuff a ton of the largest diameter fuel line you can get your hands on in just about every frame rail and it doesn't say you can't... well, is that cheating?
The rules have gotten more strict over time, but there are still plenty of creative ways to use the provided parts. A few years back, some team found some way to use the provided suspension components, within spec, to meet the ride height requirements at the start of the race, when it was measured. They were consistently lower than they ought to be at the end of the race, but they used the provided parts and met the requirements, as written, at the time they were racing. I believe the letter they got was essentially, "We can't figure out what you're doing, but stop it, and we're going to start checking ride height at the end of the race, here's the tolerances." They met every requirement provided, but found some way or another to get an advantage.
And that's just NASCAR. You get into F1 with "functionally unlimited budgets" and some of the engineering insanity that is entirely within the bounds of the rulebook, but is still wonderfully absurd...
Stuff like "You never said we had to race with the physical engine we qualified with, so our qualifying engine is run at the literal edge of holding together and we replace it before the race." I believe it was BMW that got around 1500hp out of a 1.5L motor (so 1000 HP/L), but the engine more or less came apart at the end of the qualifying laps.
Can you water cool your brakes? Well, OK, nothing against it. Whoops, did you water cool your brakes so much you're underweight during the race, but refill the tank before post-race weigh in? Well...
Far as I'm concerned, this is the sort of thing that makes racing interesting!
The same ethos added to pro cycling is pretty much considered cheating but I’d guess not in the inner chambers. Fair game as long as you pass the tests? Draw oxygenated blood out and put it back in halfway through a tour. Now that’s called blood doping. Rinse and repeat, for decades:
He would temporarily meet the small tank regulations during inspection, but under race conditions, the ball would burst, allowing for more space in the tank, which would get filled up with more fuel than his competitors at the first pit stop.