Cheat Neat

In the Charlotte edition of Creative Loafing, Tom Jensen has an entertaining history of NASCAR cheating -- from Junior Johnson, who "learned about aerodynamics running whiskey on the hardscrabble back roads of Wilkes County, NC," to Fred Lorenzen, who pulled off a scam

that involved one of NASCAR's most time-tested tricks: replacing an illegal part with one even more flagrantly illegal. "One time at Martinsville, Holman-Moody's car that Fred Lorenzen drove got caught," Latford said. "It was supposed to be a 22-gallon gas tank, and there was 22.9-gallons or something like that, and they made him take it out and take it away. And the team fussed and fumed and did the work, and they put a 28-gallon tank back in. They never checked the one they replaced it with."

Though raised a Tarheel, I never spent much time in Junior Johnson's home county. But I got the measure of the place from my brother, who ran into a few of its native sons at summer camp one year. "Hi," they'd say, "I'm from Wilkes County. Wanna fight?"