So refreshing to have stories that are not “how I bought my 7th Lambo”

The biggest cheaters never got caught and never bragged afterwards.

Cheating stories are one of my absolute favorites on this channel. The ingenuity these folks had is hilarious.

Small side note about John's story on Jocko Flocko. Tim Flock never had him in a cage in the car, he had a custom race seat installed for Jocko to ride in while he went around the track. The incident where Jocko attacked him in the car was because Tim Flock had a panel attached to a cord that he would pull to check tire wear while driving. During the race Jocko got loose from his seat and since he saw Tim pull the cord so many times, pulled the cord and opened the panel right as a large pebble came up and smacked him right in the face. Poor Jocko wasn't freaking out cause he was in a loud race car, he was freaking out cause he got wacked in the face by a rock going probably 70mph

John is one of the GOATS of Vinwiki!!!

John Ficarra always gets a fast click, If you’re not first, you’re last!

I always click on videos with John, no matter what I’m doing

Who ever snitched out Toyota is a scumbag lol. If you aint pushing the rulebook you aint trying bro. Great video.

In our formula student car, we milled a steel plate for the chainguard. The requirement was a 3mm plate, we milled ours down with a big face cutter at an angle to less than a millimeter in the center. Outer face was exactly to spec... Saved about half a kilo of weight. Which is a lot on a 150kg car.

The Tyrell got caught not because the shot leaked, but when the car left the pits it did a burnout and basically turned the car into the worlds largest shotgun, firing the led shot against all the mechanics in the pits behind them.

I do love me some creative interpretation of the rules! Enjoy!

I remember the Celica being the heaviest car with the most HP in the old rally video games, I never knew

John is such a great storyteller. I'm not a big racing fan, but I enjoyed this immensely.

It's also possible they sandbagged (i.e. weighted) the rear bumper, making the rest of the car lighter, knowing that weight would get knocked off...

It is important to distinguish between a cheat and a creative interpretation of the rules. The latter is cool and awesome while the former is grounds for disqualification and punishment. In the case of Toyota the rules explicitly said that any air entering the engine had to pass through the restrictor. What Toyota did was a incredibly well engineered way of deliberately breaking the rules. The FIA comes down hard on deliberate cheats which is why they were excluded from the WRC. To me the real art in racing is to do something that (when discovered) leads to a changing of the rules because it was so clever.

I need as many Ficarra cheating stories as this man can tell. Dude is a legend at storytelling and has all the history knowledge to back it up. MOAR!

FINALLY!!! He tells the Celica GTFour WRC story! Long anticipated! Couldn't believe it wasn't in the first one!

My all time favorite cheat was back in the 70s. Some wiseass shows up to a race with a 23 gallon fuel tank. Scrutineers see this and tell him that fuel tank is too big and he has to replace it. Well, he hems and he haws and curses up a storm and stomps back to the garage and, knowing full well the scrutineers arent going to check the replacement tank, replaces the tank... with one that holds 28 gallons.

That last story was certainly short, but also the best lol

I love these stories. I worked at a really high end shop. The top guy (who took forever to get friendly) finally started to open up about his past. He was a crew chief for a privateer 962. He was telling me stories about (not the 962) having camber limits that they would beat by turning 2 degrees into the tire itself on a lathe. Shoving dry ice in places, then panicking because the car sat longer then expected and started to drip. And my favourite was fuel capacity limits they overcame because the rule book never specified *how long the filler hose could be.

10:16 - Squoze?...is that a word? 🤣 EDIT: Apparently it is...kinda...it's a "facetious past participle of the verb 'to squeeze'"...well done, Ficarra. Well done.

In racing If ya ain’t cheatin ya ain’t eatin

John of course I'm gonna watch

Always loved the ford focus boost tank in the rear bumper

It's only cheating if the rules explicitly say you can't do it... The best wins are the ones that have the most creative interpretations of those rules. Especially when it's the classic "David vs Goliath" underdog tale. Everyone loves a creative and wiley underdog win.

I don't watch racing. But I love listening to these cheat stories.

We want stories like this. I enjoy listening to them 😊

Always love Ficarra's stories!! Such a good story teller, one of the best really, and always such fun/cool/interesting premises.

I do believe the John Ficarra is the best storyteller and one of the most genuine enthusiasts on VinWiki.

I could listen to John all day, I love history and I love race cars it checks all the boxes

John always has the best stories! I love his knowledge of the cars and all the lore with early racing! I could listen to this guy tell stories for a long time!

Great stories John, keep em coming

MORE CHEATS VIDEOS! I'VE BEEN WAITING FOR THIS!

Love the videos! Always the first thing i search! Keep it up :) Love from ireland

John's stories of racing have the energy of a race with sly technology of the brilliant minds that find a way to win.

Love these stories.. Keep up the good work

these are the best ...... we need more stories like these from John

Thanks John for another great video.

Saw the title and knew it'd be a Ficarra one. Love your stories mab

Not me binging the John Ficarra stories playlist last night just to have a new story today. AWESOMEEEEEEEEEE

The Focus 03 WRC Car with an air tank in rear bumper is another…

I absolutely love hearing these tales and stories. These types of antics and rule bending ideas made racing so exciting. I miss the days when everyone had their own unique ideas and setups. It wasn't just a full field of the same cloned vehicles racing for hours.

I haven't laughed this much watching a YT video in ages. More please!

One of the best videos in a long time

I always love hearing these stories about ingenuous cheating. Having teched a few spec Miatas in my day, I've seen some pretty good cheats in my days

This was good. Its much appreciated.

VINwiki, Subscribed because your videos always make me smile!

Not even really a motorsports fan, but I could listen to John talk racing all day. His passion comes right through the speakers.

Always love these stories

Fantastic stories as always

Love these stories. My Dad was rallying through the 60s, 70s and 80s in Ireland. He failed scrutiny in one Rally, in the 60s, when the Mini Cooper S was missing one crossbeam on the roll cage. They were only intruded that year. So with no time to get a new strut welded in place the got a Plastic Pipe, of the same diameter and similar black colour, and fixed in place with Sticky Tape. Passed scrutiny and off he went Rallying. Them were the days, eh ??? GK.

Ohhh yess, another cheaters' story video! Today is a good day. Please make more of these !!!

Love John's stories!!!

I first heard about the Toyota on BOM, thanks for filling in the rest of the story.

What a stories!!! Haven’t laughed so much at car stories for a while.

I love how ficarra tells his stories

yes yes yes, more of these please!!

Reminds me of Honda winning races years ago on the Isle of Man. There was a restriction on tank capacity. Honda used oversize tanks but made of thin alloy. When they crossed the finish line the rider would punch the tank in triumph, thus reducing the capacity back to what it should have been. ECU mods were commonplace. There was no way to check what the ECU programming actually was, the scrutineers could only check the filename. So all that race teams did was change the programming, but use a filename from an approved program.

Gary Nelson saying, “We had no idea”. I can’t stop laughing. You didn’t mention the hidden fuel in the trunk bulkhead. Nelson told that story on TV many years ago. On the TV show Car Crazy Sam Posey told the story of his Trans-Am Challenger that was a collection of cheats from one end to the other. Hilarious stuff.

Thank you for making another cheater video, my friends and I loved your first one and listened to it multiple times. Your new video made my day

Great guy, great stories 👍

This is exactly the kind of content I come to this channel for. Plus, John is such an amazing story teller. #Moreofthis

Kenny was such a good man. He dumped a bucket if water on my head by accident when I was like 8, he thought it was my dad walking through the door. I remember crying hysterical, but he's the man

i love the Schumacher story of the annual driver + helmet weigh in.. it was discovered his helmet was 40kg as it was filled with lead shot. this allowed the driver + car to be a lot lighter :D the 1984 lotus that had ground effect side skirts - ally sheets were so thin that they would give ground effect on a qualifying lap. just do 1 or 2 cooldown laps after to wear to the min height allowed by the FIA. for f1 there are just too many to mention.

For our friends that are not very familiar with WRC. It was the round headlight celica that had the turbo cheat, not the pop up headlight model. As both are shown in the video. Also the drivers were unaware of this. You can see them on KZfaq videos being interviewed during the rally and being surprised at well the car performed. Search Corsica wrc 1996

John F. It’s good to see you back in the Vinwiki chair

Having a famous cheater become the tech inspector isn't just a NASCAR thing, Charlie Whiting, F1 Race Director, was quoted in an interview about his days as a mechanic for Brabham saying, " We never had a legal car."

It's always good fun when John sits in VinWIki chair!

I love the cheating/innovation stories with stick car racing. I grew up around dirt stick cars and have seen alot of cheating/innovation. A good one i have is a chassis builder built a fuel injected engine that looked like at used a carburetor - not legal in dirt late model stock car racing. Fuel rails and injectors were integrated into the under side of the intake in a way that they were harder to notice if you didn't know what you were looking for. The carb basically worked as a throttle body as the fuel injectors controlled the fuel mixture - gave you better throttle responce, more hoursepower and torque. It had a problem when starting as you needed a squirt bottle to spray in the bowls of the carb (fuel was not plumbed to the carb). A person i know fixed to problem with starting by running a secondary pump to pump fuel to the jets in tue carb when starting the car. The person who figured out the fix got to run the engine for a while but was told "don't get caught and dont be too dominant". Had an amazing season with the engine - won a few races but was always in the top 5 that year.

The Celica GT4 is one of my favorite cars of all time, and I love that story but Toyota stopped running it after that which sucks, tho it supposedly ran by some privateers. The ST205 is so frickin cool.

Creativity abounds!

Not "racing" but still competitive motorsports, in truck pulls, we are limited in engine size depending on class and they test this with a flow machine in the pits. One popular cheat is to put a couple cigarette butts into the combustion chamber through the spark plug holes to make it appear much smaller that it is in actuality. And of course, once you start the engine, they blow out the exhaust and are gone lol

When SCCA went from Showroom Stock to IT (International Touring) classes, one of the best "cheats" was to split the car under the rear seat area, take a "porta power" and stretch the car, then fill in thr gap. This allowed a slightly wider tire to be installed, giving the obvious advantage..

I was on teams for a while. Teams started to try this again in the 2010’s. NASCAR then made a rule that said the had to have the bumper cover on at all times and made teams start to have extra ones they could rivot or tape on if they were involved in a crash. If you didn’t have a spare or couldn’t get it to stay on, you didn’t go back out on track.

Back in 2003, WRC Ford Focus had a boost tank installed in the rear bumper to prevent anti-lag, absolutely genius

Where have you been John? Love your stories ❤

You're a star, keep shining bright!

More Ficarra content please!

I remember the bumber controversy, my teachers were even talking about in school the next day.

I always love stories of cheating in racing. Thanks for this one.

I totally agree with all these other similar comments that John is one of the best storytellers on Vinwiki!❤

I saw the Celica's compete at the RAC Wales stages in '95 and unsurprisingly, they were noticeably faster than the competition.

Always loved the 90's Celica WRC livery.

FiCARra! I love it!

One of my favorites is Volvo with their BTCC 850 head, but my absolute favorite is what Lancia was doing in rally during their 037 era to try and beat Audi, they were manipulating the conditions of full stages etc, lol.

I love this guy. He's the only reason I subbed this channel

Filling the cage with birdshot for weigh in, was my favorite DiGard story.

"The reverse of cheating is having a monkey in your car" just entered my top racing quotes. Right up there with : "F1 is IF spelled backwards"

Lotus 88 and Brabham with their ground effect car after it was banned was also wild

So torn… Simultaneously so happy this story is being told (especially by John!). But I’m so torn because the Celica is one of the last affordable JDM legends and I want one! 😂

Being the owner of a 1989 Celica st185, I can confirm how brilliant these wee ct26 turbocharged cars are.

Awesome story, much better than a boring guy talking about the time he bought a lambo

That GT4 rallye thing was just cheeky :)

Alfa Romeo's cheat for the British Touring Car (BTCC) was excellent, they knew that you could only run cars that were actually sold, so they made a number of specials that had recessed slots and groves where the rear spoiler could be raised from and allowed for angle adjustments. they also had a hidden front splitter under the front bumper which if you loosened the bolts you could push the leading edge forwards. Now for the first few races no-one noticed or realised that was what was happening until a couple of the rivals got their hands on a car and rushed in a complaint. It did get banned for the rest of the season and Alfa started losing races almost immediately as a result. But what happened was for the following season new rules came in to allow after market aero on the cars.

Smokey Yunick’s reverse rotation Hudson Hornet ranks up there with some of the best stories as well.

A VINWIKI STORY ABOUT A CELICA, I CANNOT WAIT!!!

that lipcrawler looks like its glued on for the video 😆

More of these plz

Ficarra is always an immediate thumbs up on the video before it begins

I was privileged to have owned a 1995 Celica GT-FOUR in 2012, it was a UK spec, not many around. Beautiful car and went like ⚡ They're worth so much now, wish I'd kept it!