Your Cheatin' Art

Naive? Us? Surely not.
Perhaps we're trusting, invariably on the lookout for the good in our fellow men. And women. When Janet Jackson says it was a wardrobe malfunction, who are we to argue? When Donald Trump insists that's really his natural hair color, we just marvel at his lucky genes. When a race driver says he didn't cheat, and if he did cheat, he didn't mean it, and if he did mean it, it was because everyone else was cheating even worse -- well, we try to be objective and open-minded.

We try, but we don't always succeed. Late racing legend Mark Donohue called it "the unfair advantage," and he patterned his career after it. What it meant is this: Make the absolute maximum use of what the rules say, and more important, don't say.

Over the last century or so, lots of racers have sought that unfair advantage. If you want to call it cheating, well, go ahead. But we're much too civilized. Here's more than a dozen of our favorite automotive opportunists.

One: Henry Ford, as always, is a trendsetter.
June 1, 1909: Six cars embark on the first transcontinental automobile race, from New York City to Seattle. Though at least three dozen cars were rumored to be ready for the race -- after all, there were at least 250 companies building cars then, in the U.S. alone -- only two Ford Model Ts, a Shawmut, an Acme, an Italia and a Sterns crossed the starting line. Newspapers decry the event as an open invitation for "speed maniacs" to terrorize the continent. They needn't have worried. The Sterns, for instance, makes it 24 miles before self-destructing.

Twenty-three days later, one of the Model Ts crossed the finish line first, the other third. Henry Ford himself was there to greet the winner. A newspaper described him as the "happiest man in Seattle." A massive publicity campaign ensued. Tens of thousands of booklets were distributed, each telling the tale of how Ford won the race with "a standard stock car, an exact duplicate" of the car any civilian could buy for $825.

But that wasn't quite true. The other entrants were essentially stock, but the Model Ts had been prepared and massaged by Ford engineers, stripped of everything but the bare essentials - so light that when the Model Ts got stuck, the driver and navigator just got out, picked the car up, and went on their way.

It gets worse. A protest suggested that Ford had illegally replaced an axle, sent in a replacement driver, and bribed a ferry operator to delay the other competitors. The most serious charge: The winning car's engine had been replaced en route.

The protest was eventually upheld, five months later. Subsequently a Ford employee admitted that yes, an engine may have been changed at a Boise, Idaho dealership, but most certainly without the competitors' knowledge.

This gave the win to the second-place car, a Shawmut, a fast, tough car built in Connecticut. But the upheld protest received almost no publicity, and the five-month delay gave Henry Ford all the promotional time he needed. As for Shawmut: The factory burned down, and the owner had no money to rebuild it. Had their car legitimately been named the winner of the race when it happened, we could all be driving Shawmuts.