Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire SPEED WEEK @ DAYTONA

I have been involved with professional racing for over 50 years.
Your talking points are BS.
Most tracks have more grooves than ever. Progressive banking??? Most tracks last year they were running three wide for most of the race. That's exciting!
I know it is a sin to criticize the King but the fact is he padded his wins with Saturday night dirt track wins. Back then any NASCAR event counted as a win. He would haul his cup car out to some podunk track and beat up on locals. Pull out his bogus wins and he would barely be in the top five.
The cheating back then was rampant. That is why there was only a couple cars that had any chance of winning.
Case in point,
Bill Elliott's 1985 Winston 500 win at Talladega Superspeedway where he came back from being two laps down to win with a 1.72 seconds lead. There was no "lucky dog" or wave arounds back then. He was running over 1 second a lap faster than the fastest cars on the track.
As a engine builder and engineer I can tell you the only way someone could do that is to have a illegal car.
Sure, it was a exciting race to watch but it was cheating.
Junior Johnson laughs and brags about the ways he cheated.
Dale Inman is a little more tight lipped but he will give you a sheepish grin and say he doesn't know nothing.
Smokey Yunick was my mentor. Best damn cheater ever.
Herb Nab was very innovative.....
Bud Moore could really dance around the rules too.
The system was rigged back then. Big Bill France could be easily bought off. When one manufacturer would start winning the others would go to him and cry (and slip some money under the table) and the rules would change.
It is almost impossible to cheat now.
Joey Logano had his Richmond win taken away from him because of a rear suspension violation. The truck trailing arm spacer/pinion angle shim mating surfaces must be planar and must be in complete contact with corresponding mating surfaces at all points and at all times.
In Todd Gordon words,
“I’ll start with a short synopsis of what our rear suspension is made up of,” Gordon said. “Our rear suspension has two trailing arm. We call them truck arms because it’s much like out of a mid-60s Chevrolet truck. There’s two 51-inch long trailing arms and two I-beams that come back and bolt to the rear housing. Then there’s a bar we call the track bar that bolts from the chassis on the right to the left-side truck arm. That’s kind of the make-up of the rear suspension that our cars have.

“In order to set the pinion angle — and that’s part of what the ruling was, the pinion mating surfaces — there are pads on the rear end housing that are part of the bolting mechanism. There’s a U-bolt going down over the housing to bolt it together. Where that pad is and the truck arm is, we can put an angled shim in there to change where the drive shaft angle is coming to the rear end. We call that pinion angle.

“What NASCAR found is, the pinion shims and the mating surfaces have to be full contact at all the time. That’s what we violated. On the right-side truck arm at the back of the pinion shim, there was a 32nd of an inch gap. And the rule says it has to be in contact the whole time. It’s unfortunate, it’s not something I thought we’d have an issue with it but it’s part of the system we’ve got.”
So basically they lost a win because there was a 0.03125 gap between the right-side truck arm at the back of the pinion shim.
How many wins from the good ol days would have been thrown out because of such a minor infraction?
Do you think racing today would be better if Kyle Bush and Brad Keselowski were 3 laps ahead of the field with only 10 cars left on the track? That is how it was back in the day.
I have found that most of the people that complain about the racing not being as good as it was are not now or ever have been real fans of the sport or understand the sport.