Michael Waltrip Racing — A Doctored Fuel Mix, Caught Before the Green Flag

In February 2007, before a single competitive lap of the Daytona 500, NASCAR inspectors found an illegal additive in the intake manifold of Michael Waltrip’s No. 55 car and dropped the heaviest penalty the sport had levied to that point. On February 14, 2007, NASCAR docked Waltrip 100 driver and 100 owner points, fined crew chief David Hyder $100,000, and threw Hyder and Michael Waltrip Racing competition director Bobby Kennedy out of Daytona International Speedway with indefinite suspensions. The verdict on record is a penalty, and it was historic in scale.

The edge was a substance that did not belong in a stock car’s fuel system. NASCAR has long policed not just the legality of parts but the chemistry of the fuel, and an oxygenate additive blended into the mix is a way of squeezing out extra horsepower in a manner meant to be hard to detect. It was found not in a fuel cell but in the intake manifold, which is to say in the path the fuel-air charge takes on its way into the engine, precisely where an illicit boost would do its work. The discovery came during pre-qualifying inspection, before the car had earned anything on track.

The catch was almost banal in its method. An inspector noticed that something was off, a strange odor under the hood and fuel of an unusual color, and pulled the thread. For a team built to debut a manufacturer, the timing could hardly have been worse. The 2007 Daytona 500 was the first race for Michael Waltrip Racing’s new Toyota program, the moment the operation was supposed to announce itself, and instead it announced itself as the central figure in NASCAR’s biggest cheating story to date.

The cost was front-loaded and lasting. The points penalty was, at the time, a record, and it shoved the No. 55 into the season’s second race with a negative point total, an almost unheard-of position for a NASCAR entry. Hyder was placed on leave and eventually released by the team that April. The penalty stood, the season never recovered its footing, and the affair became the reference point against which NASCAR’s later crackdowns on doctored fuel and parts would be measured.