Scandal! The 1933 Tripoli Grand Prix

Cheating has been part of motor racing since motors have been racing. It happens in every corner and at every level of the sport, largely because it is so easy to do. In my world of historic racing it’s usually pretty basic stuff: an over-bored engine to give you a few more horsepower, electronic ignition hidden in an innocent looking distributor. I’ve seen aluminium radiators painted black to look like originals, modern dampers that look like old dampers, distinctly non-standard cam profiles, limited-slip differential internals in old diff casings and so on and on.

The wheezes get cleverer as the spoils of victory get higher. Bodies dipped in acid, seven-eighth scale cars and one completely bent car being replaced by a legal car only at the final pitstop… The stories, some true, some apocryphal, have become part of motor racing lore.

Right at the top the consequences get very serious: Tyrrell was retrospectively disqualified from every race of the 1984 F1 season for using lead shot in water used to top up a tank for the water-injection system at the end of a race, thereby allowing the car to run significantly underweight during it. Similarly Toyota was excluded from the entire 1995 WRC season because it found a sneaky way of bypassing the engine restrictor and an incredibly sneaky way of (almost) ensuring it never got caught – namely designing the cheat so that the very process of accessing the restrictor to inspect it undid the cheat.