Junior Johnson reckons he wouldn’t have gotten caught like those poor guys from Joe Gibbs Racing did this past week in maybe the toughest cheating bust in the history of NASCAR.
He hates it for them, because they were just trying to hide what they’d earned honestly, with hard work: extra horsepower.
“There’s a difference between cheating and creating,” he said. “They were creating.”
What they did was just too obvious, he figures: placing magnetized shims under the accelerator pedals of two Nationwide Series cars so the pedals wouldn’t go to the floor in a dynamometer test.
NASCAR technical inspectors “probably noticed that the carburetor wasn’t wide open,” Junior surmised.
“What they should have done—if it’d been me, I’d have gone after the timing in the motor,” he said.
Junior got busted for cheating more times than he can remember—or NASCAR wants to count.
But many of his creations weren’t caught, through 50 wins as a driver and 140 as an owner.
Take his trick whereby, “You could run a 500 cubic-inch motor and it would check at 358 or whatever they wanted,” he said.
All he did was file a slot, a tiny channel, out from the edge of the spark plug hole. So when inspectors attached “that little pump” that measured cubic inches by air pressure, that slot “was letting off air,” he said, just enough to make the engine look legal.
Come race time, “You put a washer around the spark plug,” he said, and tightened it down, and off your driver went with your big engine.
“A lot of the stuff is not cheatin’,” Junior said, “just ‘cause you’ve got a great idea and you want to exercise that idea on beatin’ your competitors. NASCAR determines whether it’s cheatin’ or not.
“The guys at Joe Gibbs Racing, the engineers and the motor builders, have stayed up day and night and done the work to make their motors pull more horsepower. … Look at Red Bull [the distant second-best Toyota team]. They ain’t nowhere near where Gibbs is at.
“And that ain’t nothing but hard work.”
But, “The other three carmakers [Ford, Chevrolet and Dodge] have been bitchin’ about Toyota had a lot more power than they had, and they wanted NASCAR to take it away,” Junior said.
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