By The Commish

Head north and east from the Daytona International Speedway. Leave Bill France Boulevard and the Volusia Mall in your rear-view mirror, and take Mason Boulevard East toward the Seabreeze Boulevard bridge. Just before the bridge, swing left onto North Beach Street, and look quickly to your right between High Street and the Halifax River. This is holy ground—the former home of Smokey’s Best Damn Garage in Town, and the spiritual home of every crew chief who has ever turned a wrench in anger on a Cup car.

I haven’t been in Daytona Beach since the late 90s and I know the Garage was sold in 2002, so I don’t know if the sign is still there–but the spirit of the owner remains wherever there are real racers. Henry “Smokey” Yunick was born in Tennessee and named just up the road from me in Neshaminy, PA, just northeast of Philly. After a colorful career in the Army Air Corps in World War II, Yunick bought a wedge of land that had previously housed a blacksmith’s shop and then a laundromat, and in the heady post-War racing days in Daytona Beach launched a career as one of the most iconoclastic and innovative mechanical geniuses American racing has ever seen.

Cars built by Yunick for Herb Thomas won two of the first four Grand National championships (the forerunner of today’s Cup series); Smokey and Herb won 39 races together in four years. With Glenn “Fireball” Roberts at the wheel, Smokey’s distinctive black-and-gold car won four of the first eight Grand National races run on Big Bill France’s Daytona International Speedway. Yunick also built the winning car for the 1960 Indy 500, driven by Jim Rathmann, and a host of other winning cars.

More than that, this mechanic with an eighth-grade education was instrumental in developing the Chevy small block V-8 engine, a design still in production today. Over the years his specialty modified cars have won award after award and race after race; auto racing guru Vic Edelbrock owns both Yunick's 1968 modified Camaro and his 1969 Trans-AM Boss 302 Mustang and still races (and wins) in both. Yunick is a member of every significant American racing hall of fame as well as the International Motorsports Hall of Fame– and he deserves the accolades.

Yet that’s not why the annual pilgrimage back to Daytona reminds me of Smokey. His legend in racing wasn’t just built on his “official” innovations–it rests firmly on his ability to bend, twist, tear, and turn the NASCAR rulebook into a Möbius strip with his reading between the lines, and to wave a red flag before the nose of NASCAR at every opportunity. Yunick was the mechanic who built an undersized Chevelle–the arguments vary as to whether it was 15/16 or 7/8 of scale– and raced it successfully for most of a season before NASCAR caught on to its nonconformity. He was apparently the first to figure out that nitrous oxide would give a car a short-lived but effective horsepower boost–just enough, say, to speed up a driver’s second qualifying lap and put him on the pole. As A.J. Foyt and Darrell Waltrip discovered when their nitrous injectors were discovered after Daytona qualifying in 1976, NASCAR’s reaction to such additives were negative indeed–they were kicked off the front row by an enraged Bill France. Yunick told an interviewer for Circle Track in 2000, "What I did was read the rulebook carefully, and then ...I looked it over for things that you could do that weren't forbidden." And that was Yunick’s genius: finding the things NASCAR didn’t say you couldn’t do–and then doing them in ways that caused NASCAR maximum embarassment.

The quintessential Yunick story has been retold so many times, and exaggerated so much in the telling, that today it’s almost unbelievable. The facts, if they can still be determined, are that Yunick showed up with a Chevelle at Daytona in 1967 for Curtis Turner to drive–in the days when Ford and Chrysler were at war and GM wasn’t supporting Chevys in the Grand National Series. Turner won the pole, and the big manufacturers blew a gasket–a lone privateer wasn’t supposed to show up the factory teams like that. The car blew up on the second lap of the race, avoiding further controversy, but when Yunick brought the car to the summer Daytona race, NASCAR inspectors, determined not to let their primary manufacturers be embarrassed again, gave Yunick a list of eleven mechanical items that had to be fixed before qualifying–which started in ninety minutes. (Item #1, reportedly, was “Replace homemade frame with stock frame.”) They removed the gas tank from the car, claiming that its non-exploding design was non-conforming. Yunick in exasperation told them, “Make that twelve items,” hopped into his tankless Chevy, and drove it back to its garage stall as the red-faced inspectors gaped. The rulebook didn’t specify what kind of fuel lines the car could run, so Yunick had threaded eleven feet of 2" tubing through the frame, allowing it to hold almost a gallon of additional gas. Within a week, the rulebook had been changed to allow only 5/8" tubing of a short length. Yunick estimated in his three-volume autobiography that more than half of the current NASCAR technical rules were adopted specifically to rule out his innovations.

That outlaw spirit–the spirit of competition that led one mechanic to try to outwrench the next as well as the NASCAR inspector–lives on. When Gary Nelson became Director of the Cup Series in 1991, it raised eyebrows throughout the racing community, because Nelson was regarded as Yunick’s spiritual successor in the garage. It was crew chief Gary Nelson who built Bobby Allison’s 1982 Daytona winner–the Buick with the rear bumper that just happened to drop totally off the car on lap 4, giving him an aerodynamic advantage over second-place Cale Yarborough. Nelson went on to build winning cars for Tim Richmond and Geoff Bodine–- not without controversy for either. When Bill France was asked why he had hired Nelson, his answer spoke volumes: he grinned wryly and asked why banks hired Willie Sutton as a consultant. No one appreciates the irony of Nelson’s current position more than he does: he’s the head of “Research and Development” for NASCAR. Strange days, indeed.

The ghost of Smokey lingers, too, in Ray Evernham, who called Yunick a genius far ahead of his time. We all know the story of the T-Rex, Rex Stump’s legendary chassis for Jeff Gordon, in the 1997 Winston. Evernham gave Stump an unlimited budget, the rulebook, and the simple instruction to squeeze every bit of gray matter out of it. Gordon won, the competitors screamed, and NASCAR was forced to add several more pages of “you can’t do that” rules to its rulebook. Evernham is now considered the master of psychological warfare in the Cup series; his “covered noses” of 2004 were just one more example of how great mechanics play games not only with the rulebook but with their fellow competitors. The 2005 teaming of Evernham with Slugger Labbe, master of the trick carburetor, has rulebook-flouting fans champing at the bit, dying to see what a collaboration of these two tricksters might produce. Doug Richert, Greg Biffle’s crew chief, confessed last fall that one time (he didn’t say when), one of his cars passed through inspection with its generator “accidentally” stashed in the trunk, only to be “discovered” and providentially removed just before the race started. Chad Knaus’s ingenious offset spoiler bolts are just the latest in a long string of Smokey’s legacies.

You can tell by all of this that I’m not among the people who calls crew-chief innovations “cheating.” Soaking tires, messing with fuel, traction control: those I would call cheating. They’re specifically outlawed and we know they’re wrong. But having a mechanic–be it crew chief, car chief, aerodynamicist, chassis specialist, or one of Evernham’s twenty engineers–discover and exploit a loophole NASCAR didn’t anticipate is, to me, one of the great joys of the sport. Maybe it’s the outlaw in me; maybe it is, like Smokey, that I enjoy seeing NASCAR taken down a peg or three; but I believe that the potential for creative engineering is one of the great joys in the sport. IT just goes to show that as long as clever and iconoclastic people build racecars, NASCAR can’t be completely homogenized or sanitized; there still is a place for people who, like Smokey, thought NASCAR should be about racing, not about “creating a value-based entertainment experience.”

So sometime this Speedweeks, if you’re in the Daytona area, drive down North Beach and whisper a thanks to Smokey Yunick. The man and the Best Damn Garage are gone now, but the legacy remains. And if you should catch a whiff of pipe smoke or carburetor cleaner, or see a flat-topped cowboy hat slipping away from you in a crowd, give thanks–thanks that the spirit of Smokey remains to keep the sport we love from turning into one more Florida theme park experience.

Copyright ©2005 Jeff Gordon Online. All rights reserved.