I Know He's Cheating

Harvey said:

What if you just had a race event where all cheating was legal as long as no one can figure out how you're cheating. You don't remove cheaters if they are found out, you deduct from their score (time, points, whatever is the scoring method) when someone figures out what the cheat actually is and the deduction depends on what type of cheat it is, but if the event finishes and no one has discovered the cheat then you're free and clear!

The "I'm Totally Not Cheating 500" or possibly "The Tour de France".

The best part would be the people that don't cheat at all and still win. "The Paranoia Grand Prix"

Reminds me of SNL's Steroid Olympics.

In reply to fornetti14 :

I agree 100%. Close examination of the rules , understanding what the exact limit is , and pushing it to exactly that point is not cheating. It's good attention to detail. 

If rules are ambiguous, poorly written or offer up loopholes, pushing and or exploiting said issues is not cheating in my mind. 

I am involved in Polo( horses balls etc) as a veterinarian, we have a drug testing system in place. It is poorly written contradictory and often not in the interest of the horse. 

My approach is this -i alert the sanctioning body to the issue. Allow them the chance to rectify the situation. If they do not close the loophole I use it to my advantage. Morally I don't feel 1 iota like a cheater. ( To reiterate I do Nothing to endanger the horse!) 

I feel the same applies to car racing. 

Trackmouse said:

You guys are crazy. There is NO grey area. Ever. Either you are cheating or you are not. Black or white, yes or no. The world is based on the probability of 50%!

So let's say you bought a used car and won your class in Solo.  You get protested for illegal lightening.  Turns out some hackjob did a heater core in it before you ever got it and left half of the screws and clips out of the heater box, and someone looked up under the dash and saw it.

You didn't know.  You couldn't know.  The performance difference is so infiinitesimally small as to make no difference.  But - your car is illegal, and therefore you cheated.

Great overall topic!  Welcome to the stock market, pro sports, politics, etc.  As much as we all like to hate rules, we all need them badly in order to feel like there's a point.  That said, auto racing would be much more entertaining with more unlimited classes . . .

One thing I have noticed re reading this whole thread is that I think people confuse is cheating versus finding a loophole in the rules.   Cheating is braking the rules.  A loophole is not cheating it is being smart.   I am perfectly ok with some one finding a loophole in the rules and exploiting it. But I also have a zero tolerance for those that are cheating.  

I found a loophole one year.  I found a loophole in the rules that classified the 924s one class lower than the 944. The next year the car was re classified. (some one figured it out)  Was I cheating?  No I found a loophole in the rules that no one else had found.  And no I was not a better driver I was just better at reading the rules.  I found a competitive edge that others had not found that was perfectly legal by the rules and I used it.  Don't confuse cheating with finding loopholes in a rule set.  Finding the loophole has been part of racing for ever you can say it is what drives innovation in racing.  When the loophole is found it will be evaluated and either closed or clarified in the rules.  Cheating does not drive innovation. Cheating is cheating period.  I was always a big fan of the rule sets that say if we don't explicitly say you can do something you can not do it.  This one sentence made many of my late night ideas not happen. 

That Spec Miata one was a heck of a loophole and *really* vague.

Well, I made it thru the comments. 
regarding the "if everyone is doing it make it legal":

1. is EVERYONE doing it? Doubt it. BUT IF SO then sure make it the new standard. Unless any single person didn't do it. 

2. However, If it's now legal then it's now a basic requirement for keeping up. Congratulations, you've instituted inflation. You've made people spend more money than they had to just to keep up. And for what? So *all* of you can get around the course a little faster? That makes no sense. Then get a faster car in a faster series if you simply need to race faster  

Which brings us back to why people started doing it in the first place: because not everyone was doing it so they did it in order to overcome their lack of driving skill by leveraging their off the track plotting and scheming skill. Surely there are better playgrounds to exercise that skill on, like go get some friends and play Diplomacy, but not by raining on someone else's parade when they're there to, ya know, DRIVE

I like the addition of "if it doesn't say you can then you can't" addition to the rule set. 

JimS said:

I like the addition of "if it doesn't say you can then you can't" addition to the rule set. 

It's AMAZING how many people don't get that.

Enough so that the SCCA RallyCross Modified class ruleset is being engineered AWAY from this.  Because what is even more troublesome than people saying "well you didn't say I couldn't do X" in Stock class, is realizing that the rules would need to be 50 pages long in order to accomodate a more or less "anything goes" class.  So, the goal is a ruleset of minimum requirements, not maximum allowances.

Like, it wasn't until recently that you were allowed to move the battery.  Oh, there was a requirement that the battery had to be in X specification container if it was in the passenger compartment, but there was no allowance for actually MOVING it.  And fuel!  Fuel systems are free, but does the fuel itself count as part of the system?

Rules are there for a reason. But if they aren't enforced they are meaningless.

My brief period of participating in hill climbs illustrated this. There was a car in my class that CLEARLY had a non-stock cam. When I posed the issue to one of the stewards I was told that "He's been a competitor for years. You can protest him if you want, but we'd rather you didn't." The good old boy network was alive and well in the sporty car club regional level.

If you have to cheat to win a $10 trophy it says a lot about you.

re: loopholes...

IIDSYCTYC.  If It Doesn't Say You Can Then You Can't. This is one of the cornerstones of Spec racing- if the modification isn't clearly defined and recognized in the GCR, it's illegal and you need to run the parts as they came from the factory.  Most "loopholes" clearly violate this. 

In reply to JG Pasterjak :

Heard of a guy who raced a 924 in SSA when a 924 was the car to have.  He bought the best car in the country at the end of the season, tore it down, reassembled it unchanged then went out and won the Runoffs with it.  After the car passed inspection, he showed the inspectors a list of every illegal thing the car had.

In reply to jerel77494 :

That he found, anyway.

My first thought when I saw the title was "Damn, is my wife posting again?"

If you have a budget that includes a team of engineers it's one thing, but it takes a special kind of shiny happy person to willfully cheat at the local or regional level of amateur motorsports where people are just trying to hang out and have a good time.

Knurled. said:

Trackmouse said:

You guys are crazy. There is NO grey area. Ever. Either you are cheating or you are not. Black or white, yes or no. The world is based on the probability of 50%!

So let's say you bought a used car and won your class in Solo.  You get protested for illegal lightening.  Turns out some hackjob did a heater core in it before you ever got it and left half of the screws and clips out of the heater box, and someone looked up under the dash and saw it.

 

You didn't know.  You couldn't know.  The performance difference is so infiinitesimally small as to make no difference.  But - your car is illegal, and therefore you cheated.

Agreed, "the car is not legal" does not necessarily imply that the owner/driver is cheating.  He could be making a completely good-faith effort to comply with the rules, and yet still have something that's illegal due to lack of knowledge, errors in production/installation, or mechanical failure.  That's true in grassroots solo like your example and all the way up to F1 (see Lewis Hamilton's rear wing after qualifying in Brazil).  The car should still be disqualified, though.

As for the Spec Miata thing (are we still beating this horse?), what I was told is that the plunge cut was originally supposed to help alleviate core shift during manufacturing of the production engines.  One of the problems with building a spec series based on production cars is that not all production cars are the same.  Manufacturing tolerances mean that some engines are better than others, and that means that people who want the best machinery and have lots of money can get it by buying 30 cars, dynoing all of them, and then selling the 29 slowest ones.  If you can come up with a way to equalize them, it may be cheaper for competitors to have equal machinery by spending a smaller amount of money up front.

I have no idea how it came to be accepted as normal if it wasn't explicitly permitted by the rules, though.

I'd also say an illegal car doesn't mean the person was cheating.

I know someone who got tossed at the RunOffs. One of the shocks failed a test post race, they were built to push the envelope but the right rear missed by a small percentage. Regardless it was illegal and he was rightfully disqualified.

Next there are people who do the "it doesn't say you can't" yet we all know very well that parts/mod are illegal becuase they weren't explicitly approved. These competitors know they are cheating.

Just wanted to jump in here and say how beautiful those E30s are in that first pic in this thread. BMW really hit it out of the park with that generation. In fact this being an old thread I probably posted that exact same comment some where else in here  previously but nothing wrong with saying it twice.

Okay let's say it's the local rallycross.  A guy has a carbon fiber hood in prepared which is weight reduction hence not legal.  What if I'm the only guy in the class besides him, and I flat out tell him it's fine with me?  I'd way rather have fun, have someone to compete against, then complain about each and every rule.  Pushing him to modified would leave us both competing against ourselves and no one else most events.  Why do that?  

AnthonyGS (Forum Supporter) said:

Okay let's say it's the local rallycross.  A guy has a carbon fiber hood in prepared which is weight reduction hence not legal.  What if I'm the only guy in the class besides him, and I flat out tell him it's fine with me?  I'd way rather have fun, have someone to compete against, then complain about each and every rule.  Pushing him to modified would leave us both competing against ourselves and no one else most events.  Why do that?  

IMO...  then it's fine.  If you have a local gentlemen's agreement and everyone is happy then that's that.

At that level of competition I think it's more about transparency and competing in good faith.  People are coming out to have a good time and enjoy a little competition, not because they spent dozens of hours scouring the rule book so they can be a buzz kill that protests ticky-tack stuff.

However, if someone comes out to run their Subaru in a stock class and I can hear the turbo pushing enough boost to send a piston to the moon I might be a little irritated.

In reply to AnthonyGS (Forum Supporter) :

I think intent has a lot to do with it. 

When my son is driving the F500 at autocross the car is 25lbs underweight. To make the car legal I should  add 25lbs but as he's 2 seconds slower than I am at a legal weight I'm not bothering with that for a local event, especially considering he doesn't drive it a lot and we are also the only F500 at the events.

Tom1200 said:

In reply to AnthonyGS (Forum Supporter) :

I think intent has a lot to do with it. 

When my son is driving the F500 at autocross the car is 25lbs underweight. To make the car legal I should  add 25lbs but as he's 2 seconds slower than I am at a legal weight I'm not bothering with that for a local event, especially considering he doesn't drive it a lot and we are also the only F500 at the events.

 

My son is slower at rallycross too and he has a weight advantage over me too.  I'm just looking forward to having someone in my class all season next year.  

AnthonyGS (Forum Supporter) said:

Okay let's say it's the local rallycross.  A guy has a carbon fiber hood in prepared which is weight reduction hence not legal.  What if I'm the only guy in the class besides him, and I flat out tell him it's fine with me?  I'd way rather have fun, have someone to compete against, then complain about each and every rule.  Pushing him to modified would leave us both competing against ourselves and no one else most events.  Why do that?  

That is the way it usually works.  People are upfront about their whatever that is technically illegal.  My PR car had at least five things not Prepared legal last year and nobody cared.

Locally, we used SR as a catchall for people who just wanted to have fun and not care about whatever.  It was all the same group of friends anyway.