This one was about 20 years ago. I was chief of tech for a 1 day racing school at Lime Rock Park (Why am I always chief of tech? Must be too stupid to turn down the job. I really should do something about that.)
So there is a driver in an ITA RX-7 who is fast and aggressive - and she spins her IT car in a fast part of the track. Her car doesn't have clips or straps on the windows, so when she spins it the windshield pops out, lands on the track and develops the expect spiderweb of cracks while staying on "one piece" - sort of.
She returns to the false grid for the next session sans windshield (it's not a spare you normally stick in the back of the pickup.) Grid quite correctly sends her away, the configuration is not permitted. A little bit later I get a radio call, "tech please send someone to grid". I walk on over. Her crew (which i as i recall was her father) has duct taped the cracked windshield back into the car and thinks she should be allowed to go back out that way, despite the fact that there is no way that she can see through it. I support the grid workers who have made the correct decision and direct them to take the car back to the paddock. Her father was an experienced driver who should have known better; I never figured that one out. I guess even crew chiefs can get the red mist.
I need to point out that although the issue was in a car belonging to the Bownes unit, it wasn't actually his bit of "fabrication".
Bob had acquired an old Spitfire production race car that had been sitting in a barn for a Very Long Time. He called me up to come over and inspect it. When I popped open the trunk to check out the fuel cell, I immediately called bob over and pointed out that while the fuel cell was fastened to the trunk floor with sheet metal screws, they weren't necessarily what was going to fail first because the trunk floor was fastened to the rest of the car with sheet metal screws.
I have recently posted a number of entries on this subject on Facebook and am now copying them over here for posterity. I may even fix various typos and grammar errors, but no guarantees. Here is a longer one about events at a National race years ago. This is not so much about one person being stupid or doing something stupid, as opposed to a situation where a straightforward but dumb solution was the best way out...
It was a National race at Lime Rock Park some years back. The Honda S2000 was newly classified (in the old SSB class, I think) and there was a mistake in the weights; the rulebook called for the car to weigh about 200 lbs more than it actually did. Ballast was not permissible in the class so coming up with an extra 200 lbs was trickly.
So i suddenly find Ken Payson and a friend of his visiting tech. The name of Ken's friend escapes me, but he was a prominent and fast Solo driver who had switched to Club Racing, where he was also very, very fast. He was certainly going to win his class in the S2000 the next day, which is where the problem came in. The car was underweight per the GCR, and Ken & friend suspected as much.
However, the question that they asked suggested that, for as many many years of experience that Ken has in club racing, he didn't understand one of the finer points of the official scales at the race track. He asked what would happen if they wanted to weigh the S2000 on my scales and turned out to be underweight. They were afraid i would spontaneously DQ the car. The answer (obvious to tech inspectors and stewards if not to anyone else) is that a random weight during the day is a non issue; no impound is in progress and and competition is not at stake. I only take action if a car comes in underweight during an impound session.
So they brought the S2000 over and put it on the scales, and it was indeed 200 lbs light. So they asked me what to do.
I told them that I of course couldn't advise them to do anything that violated the rules. but I also advised them that I had no plan to open trunks during post race impound - I would do so if directed to by the chief steward, but as far as I knew he wasn't going to make that request.
The next day, the car ran, it won, and it made weight. We never discussed how much crap (floor jack, two spare wheels & tires, etc.) was in the trunk.
The alternative path here, the official path, is to let them run underweight, DQ them, and depend on the appeals process to overturn the DQ based on errors and omissions. This would have worked; I know this because I traded email with the club tech office and they admitted the weight in the book was probably wrong. but that would have taken years and cost millions of lives...