The real trick here was not in the piston pin. Offset wrist pins were banned and easy to spot, so Smokey Yunick went after the geometry that made them useful in the first place. By shifting the crankshaft centerline relative to the cylinder bores in Hudson blocks from the foundry, he created the same effective relationship without using an offset pin that inspectors could quickly identify. That is classic Smokey: if the rule targets a part, change the architecture around it. The lesson is simple—when you understand the mechanism, you can hide the advantage where nobody is looking.
In the early 1950s, Vince Piggins served as a racing engineer for the Hudson Motor Car Company. During that period, he worked alongside Smokey Yunick, who later became famous for pushing and, in his own words, bending the rules in racing.
Smokey recalled a specific rule from that era: NASCAR did not allow offset wrist pins. He wanted the effect of an offset wrist pin arrangement, but using one directly would have been easy to detect during an engine teardown.
According to Smokey's story, he found a way to achieve the same result without making the wrist pins themselves visibly noncompliant. He obtained engine blocks from the Hudson iron foundry and had the centerline of the crankshaft shifted relative to the cylinder bores.
By moving the crankshaft centerline in relation to the bores, he effectively created the offset geometry he wanted while avoiding the obvious evidence that inspectors would look for in the pistons and wrist pins. As Smokey described it, he had effectively cheated by changing the engine block geometry from the crankshaft centerline outward.
