This week’s column (9.5.2023) is the often discussed problem here of an owner accidentally pumping diesel into their gasoline car’s fuel tank. Interesting & informative. But one thing Ray mentions is a little confusing:
“The reason it took 50 miles to start sputtering and conking out is because you still had a good amount of gasoline in the pump, the fuel line and the fuel rail.”
Is there actually 50 miles worth of gasoline inside the fuel pump, fuel line, and fuel rail? I’d have guessed around 1-5 miles.
Here’s a different PM thread, seems to be unblocked here, item 2 is about SY, similar topic.
Article says 11 feet of 2 inch pipe hold 5 gallons. hmmm … I’m calculating an 11 foot long 2 inch ID hose would hold less than 2 gallons, must be some other holding area in SY’s car.
For those who can’t read it… Smokey Yunick was a racing legend known for his “creative” rules interpretations.
One such had him running yards and yards of nearly 2 inch fuel line through his NASCAR race car so he could get more total fuel into it when there was a limit to the gas tank’s size. He was also reported to have inserted an uninflated basketball into the tank, inflating it for inspection and deflating it for the race to gain a few extra gallons. More fuel = fewer stops during the race.
There are dozens and dozens more stories. Some true, some embellished and some outright falsehoods like the 7/8ths scale Chevelle he brought to the Daytona 500. It was full size but it was NOthing like a real Chevelle.
Yep, I remember hearing about the basketball, but not the extra fuel line. I’d be skeptical of that, it would be pretty hard to hide 2 inch tubing.
IIRC, Smokey or someone with similar motivations, dipped an entire race car body in acid to eat away some of the sheetmetal in order to reduce weight. What sticks in my mind is that he said that the body was so weak that if you leaned on it, that would make a dent in the metal.
That seems a little hard to believe, so this one might be one of those stories you cited as “embellished… or outright falsehoods”.
it wouldn’t surprise me if his best tricks remain well-kept secrets.
I have also heard that about the Elliott’s in the 85-87 seasons. Their car was legal where it needed to be, and scaled down everywhere else. Led to them breaking all of the NACAR speed records.
Completely legal, even in not within the “intention” of the rule book.
He wasn’t trying to hide the fuel line, there was no rule about fuel line size, only fuel tank size.
There’s the one about the engine that rotated backwards too, to help plant the car in the turns. It required a reverse rotation camshaft and all the gears in the drive train had to be reversed as well. After he won the race the inspectors wanted to take the camshaft and check it. He slammed it onto a metal workbench and broke it, saying they only needed two connected intake and exhaust lobes for their check, and they weren’t going to get the whole cam and substitute an illegal cam in its place. They took the piece and walked away grumbling, came back and said it passed their check.
IIRC didn’t he coil the fuel line around in the trunk that was two11 feet long, and held five gallons of gas worth extra fuel over the competition?..
He was an evil mastermind…
Yeah he was one of the reasons Nascar’s gray rules became black and white rules… lol
Smokey Yunick, owner of Daytona’s Best Damn Garage in Town, was a perpetual thorn in the side of NASCAR in general, and Bill France in particular. The self-taught engineer was a genius at aerodynamics, and his tricks to make a car’s body slip through the air were far ahead of his time. But Yunick was perhaps best known for interpreting what the rule book said—or, perhaps, didn’t say. For example: In 1968, he said NASCAR specified how big a fuel tank could be, but he noticed no one said how big the fuel line could be. Instead of a half-inch fuel line, Yunick created a two-inch fuel line that was 11 feet long, and held five gallons of gas. Cheating? Not really, since nowhere did it say you couldn’t do that.
The Chevelle was on display for awhile at the Museum of Speed in Portland Oregon, on a turn table with mirrors underneath, was one of the first cars you saw after walking in the door.
I heard that he built another Chevelle to the same scale (dimensions) but showroom stock looking and parked it out in the parking lot so when the Rules checker guys (can’t think of the proper word lol) went out to the parking lot that Chevelle was the 1st one they saw and checked the dimensions on it to verify Smokey’s was legal, only to learn later that he had made it also…
I wasn’t there so no prof either way, but it is a very cool story (fiction or nonfiction)… lol
Hard to judge overall length in the video but the show Dinners with Racers on Motor Trend visited the actual Chevelle and compared measurements to another Chevelle in the collection. This a screengrab of the tag on the end of Smoky’s fuel line that the owner shows them.
