"I guess the biggest goal was to shed weight after NASCAR's official weigh-in. (In those days, there was no post-race inspection.) "Well, a buddy of mine was a gunsmith, and I was over at his house one day watching him load shotgun shells."
The gunsmith had 25-pound bags of pellets and fed the pellets into the shells using a hopper that never jammed.
The gunsmith had 25-pound bags of pellets and fed the pellets into the shells using a hopper that never jammed.
"So we built a little hopper and put it in the left door panel," Hyde recalls.
"The hopper would dump 100 pounds of pellets right out there on the track. You'd have to do it on the pace lap or coming off pit road. We built a false line to the fire extinguisher so the driver could operate the hopper. NASCAR never did check that because they didn't want that fire extinguisher going off in their faces. And the way we had it rigged, the exhaust would blow the pellets to the inside of the track."
"There were a lot of gray areas in the rule book back then," recalls Troutt. "We are responsible for the rules they have now. And that's what was so much fun about racing. It was the mechanics versus NASCAR. We were always trying to outsmart 'em. One time we got caught putting rocks up on the torsion bars. We'd wedge rocks in there so they would hold the car up at proper height when it went through inspection. Then when Isaac would get out on the track, the rocks would fall out when the car bounced. The car would drop about an inch, and that was good for about two-tenths of a second per lap."
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