Trans-Am cheating fact or fiction ???

[Jon Mello]

We know that the cheating went on from both the factories and the privateers who were just trying to do their best to level the playing field. The problem I see is if you tell the privateer he can't run because of a violation, it's not a big deal because there is probably some other privateer that could take his place on the grid. If you tell the factory team they're not going to be allowed to race, SCCA takes a lot of heat from both the factory affected and the track owner who is trying to sell tickets. It's the big name drivers who were driving the attendance and the big name drivers were only in the factory backed cars. It wasn't fair but the SCCA officials seemed to pick on the little guys more.

[satman]

MO,
      I agree with you 100% but at least in Nascar racing if you bend the rules you better be prepared to accept the consequences .....

http://www.popsci.com/cars/article/2009-05/nascar-driver-fined-200k-0-17-cubic-inch-engine-violation

AL

[satman]

We know that the cheating went on from both the factories and the privateers who were just trying to do their best to level the playing field. The problem I see is if you tell the privateer he can't run because of a violation, it's not a big deal because there is probably some other privateer that could take his place on the grid. If you tell the factory team they're not going to be allowed to race, SCCA takes a lot of heat from both the factory affected and the track owner who is trying to sell tickets. It's the big name drivers who were driving the attendance and the big name drivers were only in the factory backed cars. It wasn't fair but the SCCA officials seemed to pick on the little guys more.

Jon,
       I know the SCCA was basically between a rock and the hard place and they were trying to do the best job they could with very limited resources. But unfortunately this led to some of the competitors being able to take advantage of their leniency.........Example I think we were well into our 3rd. season before anybody decided to do a displacement test before or after a race. Hell even your local Stock Car tracks had stricter inspection procedures than we did//. But you know what in the end the racing was great everyone got their monies worth and I guess that's all that really matters.

AL

[janobyte]

I'm amazed with the displacement test---never would have guessed. Holds true no replacement for displacement, what an advantage that would have been. Good reading.

[maroman]

Would the privateers have gotten away with some of the things the factory teams did if they did it first? Like the acid dipped bodies or stretched fender wells, etc.

[satman]

I think that all competitors were treated equally............ Once at Mid Ohio we were cautioned on the offset off our rims ......... No problem we put the correct ones on then changed back to the good ones before the race. The whole inspection process was pretty rudimentary and I am sure that only the most obvious transgressions were scrutinized and very little if anything was acted upon.

Here is a link to a very interesting article that Sam Posey did for Hagerty about the series.

http://www.hagerty.ca/articles-videos/articles/2013/08/14/Trans-AM-Memories

[MO]

Some good postings Al!

[Trans Åm]

Absolute favorite line of the article: "It was Mark the good guy vs. Parnelli the spoiler, the hired gun — tough, mean, glowering, a man who wouldn’t hesitate to put you off the road"

[satman]

In my opinion they were both very aggressive drivers.......... I can still remember their famous duel in the desert at Riverside in 1969, watching the two of them go at it was some of the most intense racing action that I have ever witnessed............ Sadly for Ford the Mark's Camaro prevailed and they went on to win the race and the championship.

[JoeC]

I was told by one of the guys on the Yenko crew , when they brought the ex-Smokey Yunick Camaro to the first TA race, the inspectors recognized it as one of the old Yunick Camaros and refused to even look at it.

Don Yenko had to talk to them and explain that they did a lot of work on it to make it legal


 some pics of it in a 1969 TA race from the Sandford site

it still looks to have extensive modifications to the wheel wells - more then the other Camaros

the front had some type of head light covers that sort of looked like a RS grill

They ran about 6 TA races with it but was a low buck operation

[satman]

       Great looking car I am sure we must of had the pleasure of competing against it back in the day ....Smokey was quite a character and a brilliant engineer, but I think he got carried on his interpretation of the rules on some of his projects.........

[Jon Mello]

If you go to the Stanford website and blow up the images. that car is already kind of hammered and ratty and it's only 1969.

[yenkomark]

  Since I was there at the time, I got to see a lot of the Yunick Camaro.When I attempted to buy the car in the early 70's, I looked at it even more closely. Smokey was very clever..often made mods that were fairly easy to spot in tech to direct attention away from harder to see changes that made a bigger difference in performance. Probably good that I did not buy the car then, as I was helping Warren  D. with a short track asphalt Chevelle and he wanted to make into a short track stock car.

[satman]

       Looking forward and in light fact that the Smokey car is probably worth north of $1,000,000 today ..... It might not have been a bad investment.

[Jon Mello]

Reading David Tom's Trans-Am book, it does not sound like the body that was dug out of the snow bank when he bought it was savable. That there are no pictures of a car when he showed up to buy it, just a handful of parts, is very telling to me. I would not personally pay a million or more for a car like that but maybe somebody would. Just my 2 cents worth...