The 1976 Daytona 500 featured one of the great cheating scandals in NASCAR history, with both AJ Foyt and Darrell Waltrip caught up in the controversy.
The 1976 edition of the Daytona 500 will always be remembered for two things: the all-out last-lap battle between Richard Petty and winner David Pearson, and the cheating controversy in qualifying that swept up two of the sport’s most popular drivers, AJ Foyt and Darrell Waltrip. Both Foyt and Waltrip, NASCAR determined, were using nitrous oxide in their Chevrolets to illegally boost their speeds, and their qualifying times were . thrown out.
Nitrous oxide, known as laughing gas at the dentist’s office and used by the German Luftwaffe in World War II to boost the emergency combat performance of its piston-engine aircraft, had found its way into professional motorsports by the 1970s. In NASCAR in particular, it was one of the sport’s worst-kept secrets. It was a simple matter to hide a small pressure vessel somewhere on the racecar with a hidden tube to feed the oxygen-rich gas into the intake manifold and provide a brief but considerable boost in horsepower. Who all was using it? Depending who you ask, no one or everyone, but somehow the stuff had become common knowledge in the NASCAR garage area.
Matters finally came to a head in February of 1976 at qualifying for the Daytona 500, where the no. 28 Hoss Ellington Chevrolet driven by AJ Foyt and the no. 88 DiGard Racing Chevy of Darrel Waltrip were suddenly one second quicker on their qualifying laps than they had been in practice. Foyt’s pole-winning speed was more than 187 mph while Waltrip’s 186.617 mph run was good for second. Hmm. At NASCAR headquarters, at least one eyebrow went up. Waltrip’s car was summoned to the inspection area, where crew chief Mario Rossi was told by NASCAR officials, led by Big Bill France himself, that the car would be cut into tiny little pieces until the nitrous oxide hardware was found. At that point Rossi confessed and revealed the system’s location, hidden inside a chassis tube.
In what seems like a slap on the wrist by modern standards, the two teams were fined $1000 each and their qualifying times were disallowed. Harry Hyde and driver Dave Marcis were also caught up in the scandal (unfairly, Hyde always felt) when their Dodge was also disqualified for a trick aerodynamic gadget that closed off air to the radiator to reduce drag. Ramo Stott, a USAC stock car regular from Iowa who never won a NASCAR race, was awarded the pole for the Daytona 500, his lone NASCAR pole.
To this day, Foyt has denied any knowledge of cheating in the Hoss Ellington car, but Waltrip, who had been caught red-handed, was forced to be more candid. Echoing the old-time racer’s adage that if you’re not cheating, you’re not trying, he came up with one of the classic quotes in NASCAR history. “If you don’t cheat, you look like an idiot,” said Waltrip. “If you cheat and don’t get caught, you look like a hero. If you cheat and get caught, you look like a dope. Put me where I belong.”
