Veteran NASCAR Crew Chief Confesses to “Blatantly” Cheating Right in Front of Officials

Jack Roush and Mark Martin ©Jack Roush and Mark Martin

NASCAR teams are famously known for exploiting the grey areas in the rulebook to give them even the slightest bit of advantage over their competition. However, these ‘techniques’ can sometimes be so blatant that it can become rather difficult to draw the line between the grey area and straightforward cheating. And doing it right in front of the technical inspector? That was unheard of, but that was exactly what Ben Leslie and the rest of the **Roush Racing**crew did back in the early 2000s.

When Ben Leslie’s crew played with the NASCAR officials

“He’d [NASCAR inspector] get all mad because then when he turned it back on, it erased it, it went back to zero.” Historically, cars have always had a limit on the fuel that they can carry at once. While it has been reduced to 18 gallons now, back in the early 2000s, when **Mark Martin**was driving for Roush Racing, the limit was set at 22 gallons.

But Leslie, who became Martin’s crew chief in 2002, had a unique approach to overcome that limit. Before the races, officials would inspect the car and the fuel can, making sure that it didn’t cross the limit. However, the moment the reading would start going beyond the limit, some other crew member would turn the pump off, which resets the scale, dropping it to zero. While this seemed too straightforward, they made sure to play it smartly sometimes: “So then, you know, you do that a time or two, and you make the fuel guy mad, so, ‘well, let’s put some fuel in it before we go over there so we don’t, we don’t keep just showing how blatant we are’.”

Having more fuel in NASCAR has always helped the drivers. Overfilling enabled the teams to pit less and make the most positions while others pitted. Even the smallest bit of difference, even by two or three gallons, would help the teams make that difference. Moreover, the measuring scales, close to three decades ago, were never very accurate, so teams like Roush managed to play around with them.

While exploiting these grey areas has been rather common in NASCAR, it has sometimes gone to the extreme. And around the same time when the Roush crew did this, another team found itself in the middle of massive trouble.