NASCAR’s car inspection standards in the 1970s weren’t as rigorous as they are now. This allowed or rather forced teams to find innovative ways to break the rulebook and grant themselves an advantage to get an edge over rivals. More than half a century later, the workings behind one of these innovations have come out in the open courtesy of former crew chief Gary Nelson and Dale Earnhardt Jr.
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Nelson’s entry into NASCAR was in 1976. He took on the role of a car chief for Darrel Waltrip and DiGard Racing. Unfortunately, the union had initially presented no good yield despite the chief and driver trying their very best. Nelson tells on Dale Jr. Download, “Darrell was a hell of a driver I mean great guy. But when we ran full weight, full height, full everything, we didn’t run very well.”
The lack of results cornered them into choosing a different road. Nelson quickly identified that they had to maintain the car’s weight only until it passed the official weighing scale. This realization led him to use releasable buckshots to add temporary weight to the car. He narrated, “I first went to the gun shop and bought a bunch of bags of buckshot.”
“The battery sat on top of the frame rail. You could take the battery out, drill a hole in the frame, and pour 50 pounds of buckshot in.” To release the buckshots from the frame, he cut the tubing in the jack post under the car and replaced it with a plug and a bolt. He continued, “You kept it tight [the bolt] for all the practice and just for the race, loosen it.”
How Nelson escaped further scrutiny from NASCAR
The way the mechanism was set up, Waltrip himself could turn the bolt mid-race. It was during a night race in Bristol that there came a reason to panic. The driver failed to turn the bolt completely during the race and it came undone when the car was on the pit road. The pellets ran down the road and into Junior Johnson’s pit stall. The rival crew did the obvious and turned Team Waltrip in.
Chip Warren, the NASCAR official who was in charge of such infringements then, had come up to Nelson and demanded that he be allowed to inspect the car’s underbody. Nelson obliged and placed the jack right where the buckshot was coming from to lift the car. He quipped to an amazed Dale Jr., “He crawled all around under the car and couldn’t find it and he came away from it and said, ‘It must not be them.”
The headache the incident caused had however convinced the team to stop using the pellet strategy in further races. As for Nelson himself, he went on to be NASCAR’s chief rule enforcer in 1992 and eventually the Managing Director of Research and Development. On the other side of the fence, Nelson ran a no-nonsense shop and levied hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines for rule-breaking.
