Trivia: Matt Damon's primary reason for taking the part was because he was keen to work with Christian Bale.
Trivia: Christian Bale continued an impressive history of weight gain and loss for this part - he'd put on weight for his role in Vice, and had 7 months to drop it all to play Ken Miles. He's said he just didn't eat. He's previously lost weight for The Machinist, and then gained it all back in short order for Batman Begins.
Trivia: James Mangold wanted to make the film 10 years previously, but it was stuck in development hell. After the success of directing Logan, he was hired as director and reworked the script with other writers, managed to lower the budget, and the film was finally put into production.
Answer: Technically, neither of these incidents would be considered cheating in the classic sense. Stealing the stopwatches would be just that, stealing. It's likely that some other members of a team like Ferrari had back up stopwatches. Dropping the lug nut in the Ferrari pit would just be a mind game to put doubt in the minds of the pit crew as to whether they got all the lug nuts on the wheels. Neither of these incidents would affect the performance of the race car. It was mischief, not cheating.
This doesn't answer the question at all (and seems like someone's trying to correct this thinking it's a mistake entry). I said "cheating like this" for the 2 examples I gave, because it's cheating (by definition) but not necessarily breaking La Mans rules. Plus I also asked about actual accusations of cheating.
Bishop73
It's called gamesmanship, how is dropping a lug nut to make the Italians think they had forgotten one cheating? Now if he had taken the lug nut so it delayed their pit stop or so it wasn't put on at all that's a different story. You seem like you never competed if you think those things are cheating.
And stealing a stopwatch is gamesmanship too? The question is was this based on anything. I've never competed in LeMans, but in a majority of sports there are rules against deceiving the other team (for example a balk). Seems like you've never played sports.
Bishop73