Getting around NASCAR's gas guidelines
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- Опубликовано: 3 июл 2023
- From 'Jet Lag: The Game', Sam Denby, Adam Chase and Ben Doyle face a question about a funny fuel fiddle.
LATERAL is a weekly podcast about interesting questions and even more interesting answers, hosted by Tom Scott. For business enquiries, contestant appearances or question submissions, visit www.lateralcast.com
GUESTS:
Sam Denby: @Wendoverproductions, / wendoverpro
Adam Chase: / adamhchase
Ben Doyle: / thewheatgerm
HOST: Tom Scott.
QUESTION PRODUCER: David Bodycombe.
RECORDED AT: The Podcast Studios, Dublin.
EDITED BY: Julie Hassett.
GRAPHICS: Chris Hanel at Support Class. Assistant: Dillon Pentz.
MUSIC: Karl-Ola Kjellholm ('Private Detective'/'Agrumes', courtesy of epidemicsound.com).
FORMAT: Pad 26 Limited/Labyrinth Games Ltd.
EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS: David Bodycombe and Tom Scott.
© Pad 26 Limited (www.pad26.com) / Labyrinth Games Ltd. 2023. 
Развлечения
You missed the best bit of the story. The fuel tank was confiscated for inspection after the officials suspected he was up to something. He joked that they wouldn't find anything amiss... and then drove away using the fuel still in the line.
I came here to say the same thing! Glad someone set in the record straight.
What a legend 😁😁
I always heard that Smokey's car had been written up for a number of other issues, (let's say 12) and then with "no fuel in the car" (tank still in, just the fuel had been siphoned out of it to check fuel tank capacity), he said "make it 13" then started up and drove away.
I think this needs some clarification: it was the fuel line that gets petrol from the tank into the engine that Smokey made ridiculously long and wide, not the hose you fill up the tank with.
See, I thought it was the filler tube. I'm glad you clarified
@@DasGanon Allegedly when they caught him, he drove the car back to his garage from where they were inspecting the car without refitting the fuel tank.
@@DasGanon Yep, the story goes that they pulled him in for an inspection, dropped the tank and told him to move the car (normally of course you would just push it in that case), but caught him in the act when he just stepped in the car and drove off, the engine running on the fuel in the extra long fuel lines of course
Other antics include freezing the fuel so he can pump more in as it would expand in the tank (though a ban on that is fair as obviously you don't want fuel tanks going bang from overpressure), and putting a basketball inside the fuel tank that he could pump up or deflate, so he would pump it up for the inspection and they would measure the tank as being in spec for capacity, while in the race it would be deflated so they could put more fuel in
@@MysteriousFigure didn't he also use the frame rails to hold more fuel. Half the NASCAR rule book exists because of him.
@@6jonline Fuel in frame tubing was a dodge I thought of during the show. It's technically an 'extra tank' but it's also something that would easily be missed.
There's two versions of this that Smokey used. The first version was that he used a 2" diameter fuel line. When NASCAR spotted this and mandated the max diameter of the fuel line, Smokey installed a 60 foot long fuel line, coiled up under the seat.
4:00 fun fact: this is an actual tactic in NASCAR called Bump Drafting. The car behind will get a better slip stream (aerodynamics) off the car in front of it and will then bump the one in front of it to give them a boost. Usually teammates will do this as it gives both cars a speed advantage allowing them to advance up the track togeather.
Tom, you rock. The format of Lateral is perfect for enjoying the questions without the guests being to competitive and ruining the thought process portion. love it.
It has the charm of a classic British panel show.
I'd heard of both of these hacks, and it was still loads of fun listening to you guys working it out. The technical term is a fuel line that runs from tank to engine, and the standard size was 1/2 inch. But neither the length nor the diameter of the fuel line was regulated before the guy did this. There is one version of the story - possibly apocryphal - that after the end of this, NASCAR pulled the fuel tank out of the car to examine it, and the driver grinned, waved, and drove away in a car with no fuel tank!
Smokey did some insane rule bending stuff, he was the cause of 1/3 of the rules in that era
the fun part with that fact is that the scrutineers that day, found 10 other illegal systems and removed the fuel tank from the car and said to Smokey "we found 10 infrigdements", so Smokey jumped in his Nascar, started the engine, said "make that 11" and drove off to his workshop
1:30 "Is that interesting?"
My heart shattered but it was also so freakin funny.
5:21 Smokey also did that by chilling the fuel to just above its freezing temperature. As the race went on the fuel warmed up and expanded, essentially giving them more fuel. SpaceX uses the same trick to load more liquid Oxygen into the Falcon 9 rocket.
Smokey Yunick had many tricks, it is what he is famous for
If we're talking rockets, you can go even crazier. Many rockets (most famously, the Space Shuttle) use liquid hydrogen as their primary fuel, but the biggest problem with hydrogen is its hilariously low density. So what has been proposed (though I don't think anyone's ever actually done it) is to actually use hydrogen slush instead - the frozen hydrogen is somewhat denser, and you can have a decent amount of solid within the liquid while still being able to pump it, so you can get 15-20% more fuel in your fuel tank that way.
Every rocket (going to space) that uses liquid fuels uses liquid oxygen as one of the fuels. It's not a trick, it's a necessity of rocket engineering.
Chilling the fuel wouldn't make much difference. Gasoline does take slightly more volume at higher temperatures, but not much. Liquid water and liquid gasoline are nearly incompressible.
@comicus01 That's not actually true. (Though I can see why you think it - just about every famous rocket has used LOX.)
They all use an oxidizer, but there's plenty of other oxidizers that have been used. Historically, nitric acid has probably been more common than liquid oxygen, especially for military use (ICBMs and such), and there's even been some really crazy alternatives researched, like chlorine trifluoride, notable for its ability to start raging fires with almost literally anything (including most fire suppressants - water, asbestos, sand, and even literal ashes will burst into flames instantly with it).
@@comicus01 Cryogenic propellants are typically cooled down to just below their boiling points, which is 90.19 K (−182.96 °C; −297.33 °F) for LOx. When the rocket is fueled it contnuously boils off and has to be topped until the last seconds, this is why you can see venting before launch and why the umbilicals detach as the rocket leaves the pad. The Falcon 9 Full Thrust version uses LOx cooled to 66.5 K (−206.7 °C; 119.7 °R; −340.0 °F) and RP-1 cooled to 266.5 K (−6.6 °C; 479.7 °R; 20.0 °F) to increase the density of the propellants. But if they have to stop the countdown after the rocket is fueled they have to unload the rocket, they can't just top it as other rockets because they loose performance as the propellants warm up.
Gotta love the "we did something clever" with the fuel line and then on top of it the "we're blatantly cheating" with the basketball.
NASCAR up until about the mid-90s was basically just a game of how much chicanery can we cram into about 200 laps of racing.
Impressive, that so much chicanery was going on, despite NASCAR not having any chicanes....
The guy is a legend, this is but one of his many many antics
As soon as I read it was Smokey I knew it would be the fuel line trick. Adam actually got very very close with the fuel tank in the middle of the circuit theory, if only Tom had said "the correct part of your theory is the word 'hose'"
"fuel is pretty incompressible." "Fuel freezing," was actually also done in nascar, to fit more fuel in the same volume.
Smokey Yunick is legendary for this kind of thing, but if cleverly subverting rules and finding loopholes is your jam then Motorsport at large is an absolute goldmine for this stuff! Especially in the '60s and '70s, but even much later as well.
One F1 team once subverted the minimum weight regulations [lighter cars are quicker] by filling a "coolant tank" with water for pre-race scrutineering, then subtly emptying it around the track to make the car lighter than specified for the race itself. In 1995 Toyota designed a turbo system for its WRC car that could unnoticeably push the regulation air restrictor out of position during the installation process (the hose clamp actuated springy bellvile washers hidden inside an air hose), letting much more air into the turbo to supposedly add about 25% more horsepower. One could go on with more examples for hours...
"I noticed you're filling your car with a firehose..."
"uhmm... it's a... *regulation* firehose?"
It wasn't the hose you fill up the tank with, it was a fuel line that gets petrol from the tank into the engine.
I'm surprised Sam didn't get this considering the whole Ferarri engine scandal in F1 a few years ago (where one of the leading theories where that they had extra fuel hidden in pipes around the chassi that they could pump in to to increase the engine speed.
That's not what the Ferrari scandal was about. F1 has a limit of how quickly fuel can be fed into the engine, and it's believed that Ferrari found a way to trick the sensor used to monitor that flow rate.
@CWRules redbull had many theory's and tested them all and said they were most likely setting the fuel pump to pump more fuel during the very brief periods were the flow rate sensor wasn't reading (I think it measured at 20,000Hz or something
One of the F1 cheats was leaky seals in the engine which allowed oil to enter the pistons and burn to give a little extra performance.
1:08 i remember someone won Indy 500 by driving slow enough to require one less refuel stop but still fast enough to not lose that advantage.
This is only one I knew the answer to just from the video title. I heard about this from my dad when I was a kid and it stuck with me for some reason.
Nah, the basketball is cheating, the tank was bigger. The pipe though, that was clever
Exactly-there was no rule about the diameter or the length of the fuel line. Smokey held (quite correctly at the time, I think) that anything not banned was allowed. He also dabbled in Indycars at the time. Possibly his most famous was the "Reverse Torque Special", which had an engine that turned the opposite direction of other engines. It wasn't hugely successful, but the idea was that since you only turned left, an engine that turned clockwise (if you were looking at the front of the car) would cause the frame to twist slightly to the left, putting more weight (and therefore grip) into the left front tire.
While Smokey did some driving, he was more well-known as a mechanic, which is what led to all his innovations.
Ross Chastain and Smokey Yunick both get referenced on a Tom Scott podcast. Good start to the 4th.
Actually, driving slightly slower, or to not race the car as hard, is a strategy that race teams employ. Either to have less pits stops over all, or to avoid a late race pit stop that could ruin a driver's chance at winning the race.
0:35 In. If it's who I *think* it is he had a basketball in the tank for scrutineering (which was removed for the race) he also had long wide fuel lines.
There was an occasion his tank didn't pass scrutineering. The tank was removed and he had enough fuel in his lines to drive back to the pits 😂
Lol. Well I'm quite chuffed I'd already heard about that tale. Yay for Vinwiki
i cannot believe adam suggested compressing the fuel, my 1st thought was to how a diesel engine works (it goes boom boom when compressed search it up) also i love how how about half of current day rules of nascar are from smokey, love that dude
Smokey Yunick sounds like a name that would make Tom believe it came from a real Wikipedia article.
I knew this one, but Sam's idea of pushing combined with the idea of refueling... what would happen if a teammate who WAS taking pit stops refueled the car that was trying to win the way you refuel airplanes. For part of the race the helper car would drive in front of you, letting you draft off them (pretty standard), but a couple times a race it would pit, then when you came back around get in front of you and put hose out, they drive up and fuel. It peels off after it's refueled you. You don't make any pit stops, it makes a couple extras. The rest of the race it just helps you draft to save more fuel.
Or, you are drafting behind it, but in addition to the normal boost from drafting, it has powerful electromagnets to better pull you. It is geared really aggressively, for maximum top speed while drafting, making it great for bursts, but not great at low end acceleration. Basically, let's the field lap it to get up to speed, and you pull in behind it. It turns on the magnets and drags you around the track. (You could do the reverse, with pushing, but that would require both cars to have magnets... dragging you only need the frame of the car to be ferrous.) Maybe you hide some electric motors and and an induction charger so it can charge you while you are drafting?
Or maybe it's a secret weapon. Lots of times the second place car will draft behind the leader to save fuel and to slingshot around it at the end of the race- but you have a magnet... it gets behind you to draft, and just when it's about to slingshot you throw on the magnet and it's stuck to your back bumper. You only need to mess with it for a few seconds on the very end. You turn off the magnet after the finish, making it hard for them to figure out their steering problem. (More practically, I wonder if you could have a flap that you could adjust from inside the car to dirty the air up for a car drafting you in the final moments of a race.)
Love Adam coming up with all his crazy hacks.
"NASCAR's just circles, don't at me." Says Sam 2 days after NASCAR races around the streets of Chicago's Grant Park.
I thought the tank might expand. The empty dimentions are following regulations, but if you put fuel in it it expands.
That's kind of what they did with the basketball.
it woudn't worked, to test the fuel size, they fill up the tank and mesure what comes out, the basket trick took 2-3 galons of fuel during the test, so they would mesure the correct size but then he remove it to have a fuel tank 2-3 galons bigger than legal
I was going to say they chilled the fuel close to freezing because cold fuel is more dense but this was a hilarious hack
Hooray for more video clips!
“Is that interesting?” So savage
This is the first time I got the answer from the getgo..never watched nascar, but heard the story on Vinwiki
this is the greatest crossover in youtube history
I was thinking about producing the fuel on board, so that you don't have an extra fuel tank, but a tank with a fluid which can be turned into fuel. I guess having a refinery onboard would not be very great in terms of weight, energy consumption and production speed . But using, idk, bio fuel, i.e. mixing some of the fuel up with ethanol (or similar, which does not count as fuel) and burn that.
That conversation was interesting. I was always thinking of my own solution to the question and with the hints I was getting closer to it like all participants. Greeting from Germany
Honestly my guess was "Was he driving in a car full of fuel sloshing around the cockpit
Like, there's no doors, so it's watertight in there
I cannot fully convey how incredibly terrible that'd be for his lungs. XD
Like James May's aquarium car but with fuel?
Absolutely, a fuel aquarium and he drives with a snorkel!
I mean, does the fuel have to be inside the tank after all?
And it was the good ole times, people were built differently XD
That's not hugely different from the modifications one guy made for the Cannonball Run (an unofficial and very illegal speed run spanning from New York to Redondo Beach, CA). Dude took all the seats except the driver's, filling all of the extra space with fuel tanks. He only had to refuel once in nearly 3000 miles.
Witnessed!
Wow this is the first one I think I knew from the get go :)
1:30 "Is that interesting?" "I thought it was kind of interesting."
Summary of this entire podcast.
“Fuel efficiency” and “tire care” are 2 of the most important concerns, of NASCAR… They loose a lap, every time they stop. These are 3-4 hour races… If you can stay on the lead lap, but do one less pit stop, you’ve lapped the field…
The moment I saw the title, I knew exactly what this would be about. What a crossover.
Sam's first answer deserved a mystery biscuits
Wasn't this in Days of Thunder? "There's nothing stock about a stock car racer" Edit: found it, "I'm gonna give you a fuel line that'll hold an extra gallon of gas"
I actually heard about the basketball before but didn't remember until he said it
That's the old days equivalent "the VW car is noticing it's being tested and therefore behaves more efficiently" levels of cheating
The weird part - as soon as I saw this title, I instantly thought of the basketball thing. I had read about it somewhere else, but I wasn't sure if it was the first hack or second hack.
As a Nascar fan, Tom Scott fan, and a Jetlag fan, I did not expect this crossover
Has nobody watched 'Days of Thunder'?
"I'm gonna give you a fuel line that'll hold an extra gallon of gas"
1:16
Sam, I have to @ you. I must do it.
From a F1 fan to another, I salute you!
I Never EVER expected my hometown to be mentioned in a Tom Scott video, but here we are 😂
I thought it was an extra fuel tank, as in theory, you're not increasing the size of the tank, but the number.
I think 'fuel tank size' is taken to be synonymous with 'total fuel storage capacity', so how many vessels you divide the fuel between is not pertinent here as adding another tank will add capacity. The subtle difference with the actual answer is that the pipe between the fuel tank and engine had its capacity increased and strictly speaking the fuel was no longer being stored once it had left the fuel tank so this modification technically did not add to the total fuel storage capacity (aka fuel tank size).
@@MrDannyDetail I guess I think think laterally enough to get the answers before the videos end 😂
I would wear a suit with pouches for holding more fuel and dump it in when no one was looking
i knew about the hose trick. but was also thinking a MONSTER-SIZED "fuel filter" would work as well.
I was thinking the fuel was colder, so more dense.
I’m at the start but i think I remember this story. The fuel line from the tank to the engine was extended and was like a 1in wide meaning he could store like 5 extra gallons or something
2 inch wide, 11 foot long pipe
Disappointed that this episode didn't have a Snack Zone :)
On a similar vein, the Trans Am series had Team Penske with a 20ft-tall fuelling rig that loaded the fuel into the car by sheer force of gravity. When that was banned, they created a 12ft rig that worked _even faster_ because it had a wider diameter hose, as well as a more efficient filler cap design.
Maybe Adam’s anecdote about buildings at his school named after NASCAR drivers is Half As Interesting?
I drive by the field where the Best Damn Garage in Town was located almost everyday.
Next up: the fuel pump has a 7.3 gallon housing.
An additional thing that was done by other teams was to use all sealed tubular framing and fill the chassis frame interior with fuel.
I love that my first guess was "he made the fuel lines ridiculously long" because I know that if I was in the podcast I'd have come up with something complicated and convoluted too lmao
Smokey also claimed to have dipped his car in acid to thin/ lighten it
They 100% did that.
Was he also inside the car and came out as a dang ol hippie tripping balls?
Penske did that in the '80s in Trans Am.
I thought it was going to be something like the tank walls being thinner, so it's the same size when measured but larger capacity
I was so sure it was the fuel chilling
Let's goooooooo. Love nascar. Love Tom Scott. Smokey Yunick is an icon.
I'd heard about this years ago and I'm not even a NASCAR fan. Widen and lengthen the fuel line and voila, more fuel capacity.
0:24 Ben is really interested…..
I though he might have put the fuel in the pipes for the roll cage.
If that wasn't obviously unsafe, he would've done it. However, crashes resulting in fires were bad enough in NASCAR at the time that only the most reckless drivers/owners would have done that. Drivers died a lot in NASCAR back then.
@@PassiveDestroyer Considering teams were caught making wooden roll cages, and others have admitted to pressurizing the roll cage with nitrous in the past, I honestly wouldnt put it past teams from back in the day.
He kinda did that. The fuel lines went through the roll cage pipes.
@@coreylawrence567 IDK, considering his good friend Fireball Roberts died in a literal fireball, I figured Smokey would've had more consideration for safety, at least after that.
I got it instantaneously.
I thought I'd got it, but I was thinking of the car that had fuel in the tubes that made up the car. 😆👍
Yep, knew this from the start, love NASCAR and Smokey was one of the best cheaters around. Love the Ross Chastain mention too
"The laaaaaarrrger fuel tank"
I swear I got this immediately! 😀
"My school is named after Nascar drivers"
Oh cool, what are the names?
...
What are the names tho??
Adam..
ADAM THE NAMES! WHAT ARE THEY???
my immediate guess was that the driver had a jerry can with him in the cabin and he refueled while he was driving (its quite easy to multitask when you are just driving in circles)
I watched a VinWiki video about this just last week
My initial thought was 2 fuel tanks
I would have suggested piracy. If you can get the fuel off of the other cars during the race you can have it.
Ben, “Is that interesting?” 💀
I guess you have to know these guys and the dynamic between them to appreciate that because, to me, Ben just comes off as the most unbearable person ever.
According to Smokey when NASCAR got suspicious they removed his tank and found the basketball so they disqualified him so he got back in his car and drove back to his shop with the fuel in his lines alone.
Wasn't it the same guy who dipped his car frames in acid to make them lighter?
I was expecting either: (a) Having a teammate's car push the car, using another car's power give it energy and reduce the fuel used, or (b) cheat the same way Williams and Brabham did in Formula 1, 1982: "water cooling" that wasn't actually used. They dumped water from the "cooling tank" after the first few laps which put the car below the legal minimum weight. After a race, they would add water to make it "legal" again and pass scrutineering.
It's surprising how many of the NASCAR rules revolve around things that Smokey Yunick did. I recall he also made something like a 7/8th scale car, so he can reduce weight and drag, but it met all the other rules at the time. They still check for that today.
As I recall, one of the ways NASCAR caught on to the "extra long fuel line", was they impounded the car and took a bunch of stuff out, to try and figure out what was happening. They couldn't figure it out, and told Smokey he could come get the car. Smokey got into the car and drove off. After he left, NASCAR officials realized they hadn't put the tank back into the car.
Smokey found different work arounds.. In one, he used the hollow pipes of the roll cage to hold more gallons of fuel.. -- The hack in this video, I believe he used radiator hose run as fuel line.
"NASCAR is just circles" is what someone says when they've never actually paid attention to a race or understands whats going on.
Large hose = hack
Inflatable ball = cheat
I git this half way through and waiting for them to figure it out was excruciating.
I knew this from the start! I've heard the story before. NASCAR is full of stories like this of trans manipulating the rules or "working in the grey areas", until the regulations change to stop it.
In any history of Nascar, Smokey Yellick's chapter is at least half.
I was thinking they were clear on the SIZE of the fuel tank, but did they specify a number? Second regulation fuel tank....
cooling the fuel...
I wonder if there is a case of someone using batteries to achieve something similar. Some research to do !
well that was alot safer then what i thoght it was, my guess cos of the thumbnail was that the filled the interior of the car with fual and just had fual at there feet, its not a tank if its not sealed
So remove the tank from the race car and put it in a plane that flys directly above it.
Wasn't there a guy that used the roll cage as a fuel tank as well. i thought it might have been this
best one yet.
I like cars tho...
my guess was siphoning lol
I was able to guess the right answer immediately. Yes I'm bragging, cuz I'm usually really dumb. But if there's one thing my life of avoiding responsibility while still pointing out flaws in other peoples responsibilities taught me, it was how to spot a loop hole.
Guess at 1:00 - did he refrigerate the fuel?
of course sam from wendover knows about an absurd plane record