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Smokey was an amazing man.
I read an article in one of the magazines a few years ago (want to say Hot Rod, or Car Craft) about a lot of smokey's stuff he did to get around how overbearing NASCARS rules were. Here are a few I remember.
When the cars were really "stock cars" with stock interiors he had a radio made out of lead in the dash and a helmet made out of lead that he would set on the floor, and the roll cage was filled with lead shot.
He would drive through the vehicle weigh in, then go back to the pit...they would remove the lead radio and put the stock one back in, put away the lead helmet...and then he had a plug he could loosen up that would cause the lead shot to gradually fall out of the cage during the race and scatter on the track like sand...causing his car to lose weight over the first couple laps and make his car faster because it weighed so much less.
He also prepared a camaro...and NASCAR said it could not be heavily modified and had to fit/be above the specs set by the body templates. He asked if he could borrow the templates. He built a camaro body to 3/4th's scale with a heavy windshield rake thus making it smaller and more aerodynamic. He then made new templates based on his car and returned them to nascar to measure the other cars against.
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