Post by Kasey Kagawa

Cheating in professional sports has taken center stage recently, what with all the trials and scandals regarding professional athletes using more and more performance-enhancing substances. There never really has been much gray room when it comes to what athletes can do to themselves to get an edge, as it’s a simple matter of “if we find this stuff in your blood or your body, you’re toast”. The same is true for racing drivers, who are held to the highest standards of sobriety, as getting cocaine bugs at 200 MPH probably isn’t the best thing to have happen to you when you’ve got 10 or 20 other competitors trying to share the same track as you.

The cars, on the other hand, have long been a different story. It’s fairly difficult to hide the things that you’ve done to a human body, but cars are much harder to figure out. By their nature, race cars are complex things, and unless a racing series wants to completely stop innovation by restricting almost everything that can be done to a car, like in modern-day NASCAR, there’s always going to be a lot of leeway in what teams can do to their cars, and almost everything has been tried at some point or another, from coiling the fuel lines to increase the volume that sits inside the lines which allows the car to carry more fuel, to having four smaller front tires instead of two big ones to decrease the frontal surface area of the car, to the legendary Brabham BT46B fan car, pictured above, which circumvented rules against “movable aerodynamic devices” by claiming that the massive rear fan was to provide cooling for the engine instead of sucking the car onto the track.

It’s this kind of ingenuity that many race series are lacking these days, and it’s a sad thing to see, as the creativity of the designs that teams came up with in their attempts to circumvent, manipulate, or flat-out break the rules of the series is part of what made them so interesting to watch, not to mention providing the foundations for some of the technologies we see on our cars today. Here’s hoping that race designers take a page from some of these so-called “cheaters” and bring back the excitement of guessing what the teams will come up with next.

The 7/8-scale Corvette, and other stories [How To Spot A Psychopath]