[Lee Stewart]

Originally Posted by earntaz

Is that the one that was five inches narrower and back of roof had a "spoiler" on it??

If there were an Oscars for motorsports cheating, the statuette would be cast wearing a cut-down cowboy hat and smoking a pipe. The flat-hat-wearing, pipe-smoking Smokey Yunick is nothing short of a folk hero to motorsports tinkerers and fans of general impishness. Stories of Yunick’s rule-bending are legion. And some of them are even true. But even by his stratospheric standards, Yunick’s NASCAR Chevrolet Chevelles of the late 1960s were something special. So shrouded in folklore are these black-and-gold Chevys that people believed they were 7/8th scale models. They weren’t. Instead, they were full-size vehicles with a multitude of subtle and clever modifications, some of which were not exactly by the book.

The chassis used in 1967 had been custom-built by Chevrolet, which was then providing back-door support to certain racers, including Yunick. It had a reworked suspension and a roll cage that, tied to the stiff frame, made it effectively a tube-frame racer. Chevy also undertook an exhaustive aerodynamic study of the Chevelle’s body on behalf of Yunick’s car. It easily took pole position for the 1967 Daytona 500 against well-funded factory teams from Ford and Chrysler. But engine problems cut its race short, and it was heavily damaged in a severe crash shortly thereafter. But in 1968, Smokey came back with another Chevelle much like the 1967 car, although he built this one himself. The chassis was similar to the earlier car, with the body set back a couple of inches on the frame for better weight distribution. And the aero trickery was impressive. The chrome front bumper was deepened to act as an air dam. Rain gutters and glass trim were made flush with the body. The roof’s trailing edge was upswept like a spoiler. The underbody was smoother than stock with a modified floorpan for clean airflow. This time NASCAR called foul and banned the Chevelle from the ’68 Daytona 500 unless Yunick changed nine offending aspects of the car. The story goes that NASCAR officials even removed the fuel tank for inspection only to see Yunick start the car sans gas tank and drive it back to the pits, saying, “better make it 10.” Yunick noticed that the rule book specified a maximum volume for the fuel tank, but it didn’t say anything at all about fuel lines.

So, depending on which re-telling you believe (even Smokey had multiple versions), he replaced the normal fuel line with 11-foot-long, one- or two-inch-wide fuel line that added either two or five gallons to the car’s total fuel capacity. It’s such great story, it barely matters which version is true. As Yunick wrote in his autobiography: “Was this car a ‘cheater’ Smokey? You’re goddam right it was.”

https://www.roadandtrack.com/motorsp...ts-in-history/