Mark Martin Shows Us His Personal Racing Museum! (Every Car Has an EPIC Story)

i never saw the car until it showed up here like this hand written journals for 1974 and 75 here when i would hit i've seen those ripped things away over there like that and i told them do not clean it in 1975 this car sitting on this trailer i wouldn't be the person i am today if that hadn't happened so we're here in batesville arkansas at the mark martin dealership museum with mark martin who i guess is strangely enough a frequent viewer of the channel that's how we ended up here what do you got going on here well we've got uh kind of a museum 40 years of sort of my stock car racing history is here come on in let's have a look all right how many of your fire suits did you keep how did that did you keep them knowing that you wanted to hang them up someday or did they just have them kind of kept them uh try that try to have one of ever flavor whatever it was obviously if it was just a one race deal or something like that maybe i didn't have but that was one thing that i did try to collect where a lot of the trophies i gave away back in the day just for instance when arlene and i got married in 1984 we moved seven times in the first five years we were married wow and after the third move you know and some of those were apartments and stuff and after the third move all my trophies were broke and broken and everything and i had them in the under crawl space underneath the house in north carolina i think it was and i was just pissed and i threw them all in the dumpster wow and that was 1984 and so i don't have anything that predates 84 and going forward from 84 anytime i won a race all i was worried about is getting the check you know i wasn't worried about the trophy i didn't have any place to put the trophies they were a burden to me at the time i always gave them away you know friends owners somebody threatened whatever well let's walk if you want to see the very beginnings the most embarrassing part of this whole place to me is my journals the first two years i raced we had a lot of things going on a lot of issues in the pits a lot of interesting things and so i i had my hand written journals for 1974 and 75 here the feature race we were in second um that might have been i don't see the date there but that might have been like the second race i erased said nolan grabbed the plug wire and got knocked out of them yeah yeah or uh blew up second lap heber springs april 13th yeah so this is the very beginning of my career less maybe the third race but you can see i'm running second and third right out of the gate with the feature races they usually had three uh three heats and a feature around here back then but here we won 33 dollars at heber springs so we get just a little deeper and we we start winning some races and getting first place how did you keep all this stuff i i don't know exactly how we did that uh i kept the journals somehow or another they were piled up with i think my mother's kept a scrapbook which if we move over here you'll see the pictures and she did this and remember though you don't know you're too young the polaroid you know instamatic or whatever photographs of my very first race car in our first trailer that we built and we'll talk about the trailer a little bit more later she kept these scrapbooks all the way up until i made it to to nascar this is an interesting one so we built the car uh in the trucking company shop uh just drug a 55 chevy out of the woods and gutted it out and put a roll cage in it and we're going to race the six cylinder class so the 90 cams in memphis we took the motor to lanati and had them you know build up the motor i remember that and so we went out to practice the first night and i maybe made four or five laps and broke a rod and you can see the the shop towel hanging out of the oil pan so we were in deep deep trouble uh weren't going to be able to race and we went to the local hero hero here wayne brooks who won everything at the time and he had a old wore out standby backup engine and we made a deal with him uh on that engine and uh so it was reliable and we got a lot of experience with it uh and wayne brooks was kind of the save of the day from your dad's uh trucking company desk oh wow yeah see i don't even look at this stuff i don't even know what i have here to be honest with you it's invisible to me so the third yard raced we built a late model and my dad was all about horsepower so he had lennati build a 496 cubic inch big block and i'm uh 16 years old and 110 pounds is that the car that didn't have power steering yeah it was a beast it was a beast uh and we quickly had to figure out how to junkyard uh go to the junkyard and put power steering in it but it was a pretty cool old car pretty neat it is good looking is that kind of like the origin of your signature bird paint scheme to evolve yes it now that's pretty much that's really it when it was orange and white the first car was just orange but all my late models after from 76 on were orange and white yeah with the white on the roof um one of the things that's interesting if you go back to the podcast is the the trucks each year i think the story is as interesting about the tow truck is it is about the race car itself um and this is the third year evolution the first uh the first two years it was just a pickup truck and you know whether with towing a trailer but then we did the four-door truck with a ramp truck part and of course my dad was all about speed so it had a 454 in it uh and then he put a double stick transmission some kind of two-stick transmission in that thing and of course we it was all hopped up and then it wouldn't then it wouldn't stop so we had some crazy stories about about our haulers in our podcast but before we skip too far forward i want to take you back here and show you uh we were not able to get our second race our first race car our very first race car i think wound up going to a crusher but our second car we were able to get our hands on larry shaw was able to locate the car and was able to restore it uh quite a few years ago and so we we had that car sitting here in the museum and then in 2015 somebody shot me a picture of of this old trailer out in the woods that was all rested up and said hey isn't this your old trailer and i'm like yeah i gotta have that so in 2015 i went got this trailer and uh restored it and put the car on it and there's a picture around here somewhere where in 1975 this car sitting on this trailer with my trophies in front of it 40 years later i was able to get the trailer get the car on it put it in here and uh you know the trailer is really cool because free house trailer axles and and uh some angle iron and some wood uh boards and that was our that was our trailer and just used uh my dad's everyday pickup truck to tow it so that's how we that's how we went racing the first two years did you restore this yourself i did i did uh uh now i did send it out to be powder coated so i didn't do that but yeah i took it all apart personally by myself really with no help and and redid the the axle the wheel bearings and everything and uh yeah i did it i did it all myself i needed something to do i was retired uh so i really did enjoy it do you remember uh your routine with this thing where you strapped it down pulling it on there what you looked at like you know all that stuff i i vaguely remember it i vaguely remembered i remember more because because i was as young as i was my dad and larry shaw did the heavier more important mechanical work um and as i because i was still going to school they would work on the car at night and a lot of times i'd go out there in the shop and hang with them and as as we progressed through the years i got more and more mechanical by uh 78 i was doing you know 78 was the first summer that i was graduated from high school so i was out of school so i was in the shop every day and we worked every day in the shop so i became more and more hands-on starting at 78 i have total photographic memory of 1980 and 1981 and quite a bit on 1979 as well those were the years that i was in full sort of command of the car and was doing you know i was doing all i was hanging all the bodies i was doing the painting i was doing all the chassis setup um you know we were designing and redesigning and chassis and development and building trailers and that's really the meat the real pride of my career is 79 80 and 81 those those three years you know i love the cars you know nascar cars are okay i didn't build those cars i didn't hang the body on those cars i didn't do the setup on those cars uh or in 82 maybe i did but i wasn't successful so that's not really important to me because we failed in 1982 but in 1981 uh we really did some cool cool stuff and those again are in in the podcast yeah i really like those uh those episodes you remember everything down to what springs you had around the whole car and all that stuff and we're like how do you remember that did you write that stuff down too no no i could in and each year in 79 when i'd go back to the same track in 1980 i'd remember what year we ran what setup we ran and if we needed to do something different i didn't keep notes didn't keep setups didn't write them down it was all in my head and i went from track to track to track to track i don't know how i did it but and i still remember you can show me a picture of a car actually all the way back from 77 because you can show me a picture of of a car on the track and i'll in that track it'll jog my memory and i can tell you the springs the shocks the sway bar the weight distribution within a half a percent uh you know all those those details and people ask me how do you remember that and i just my answer to that is it was important i mean it meant the difference in winning and not winning surviving and not surviving in in the business i mean in 77 when when it dawned on me that i was going to be able to make a living racing cars dude that was that was crazy i never dreamed that when i first started driving race car it was i was pretty good at it and i loved it because i couldn't you know i couldn't play basketball couldn't play football wasn't very good at baseball you know i wasn't going to make it in uh nba you know and so i found something that i was good at and it really felt good to be be good at something was that you're like a turning point for you as a person did you have the attention to detail and work ethic that you have now when you were younger or did it was it like a light switch it wasn't it was developed it developed so the first two years i raced and really three the first three years i raced larry shaw and my dad worked on the car every night and you know i'd come in or or or i wouldn't but i was a junior in mechanical skills and no fabrication skills um so junior to them so i did more watching and listening to them uh you know talk then i did uh you know work itself and as you know as i progressed into i really say 78 was the first year that's when i was full time on the race car um you know i was out of school wasn't distracted with that with school or homework or whatever and i had seen the light that i was going to be able to do that for a living so that's really when the work ethic began and and then when we went into 79 i moved from here from batesville up to dylan's shop in north liberty indiana and it was just me and banjo grimm and david levindog just three of us and we i mean we had to work we worked from you know seven seven in the morning till eleven o'clock at night every day and it was like a vacation to go to the race to race because you know a lot of times you were driving instead of working in the shop or or whatever so um the work ethic was something that developed kind of over over time and really hit its peak there in 79 and 80. when uh when you were listening to your dad and larry shaw work on stuff were they actively trying to teach you things or did you learn by listening to everything they did i learned by listening they didn't you know they didn't talk to me directly and they spent a lot of time talking about how good they were how good our cars were and you know uh i mean they were real talkers oh man they just one would try to up the other one and you know how you know because it was just insane they were real talk talkers i'm telling you it was unbelievable and uh it was and it it rubbed off on me some because you're a product of your environment so i was fairly you know cocky in my earlier years uh until i really had the humbling experience in 1982 that took me completely to my to my knees and that changed me but to give you an idea of how bad it was this is an uh embarrassing story um we were going to go in 77 we were going to go out to las vegas and run the craig road speedway big race out there and new newspaper guy got ahold of shaw somehow or another i don't know how and thought it was me and shaw you know they were larry phillips was the man i mean hall of fame man here out here springfield missouri and he went out there and cleaned their clock every time he'd go out west he cleaned the clock and so they were talking about oh larry phillips can you run with lyra for that he said we can outrun larry phillips on four flat tires so which was you know insane so evidently there was an article or something was said that i was the muhammad ali of stock car racing so yeah you learn your lessons as a young one as you go go forward i became very humble especially after that experience and the experience that i went through in 1982 well that's really interesting probably got like a bazillion more questions oh yeah i want to show you uh over here this is probably the biggest milestone in the museum this is jr10 when we started at jack roush uh racing in 1988 we started numbering the cars from number one this is the 10th car that we built it was the first uh mike laughlin front steer car that we ever built we ran second five times prior to finally getting our first win this car we we got our first win with jr10 in 1989 at rockingham you know it's so cool uh that you just did a video on rockingham speedway uh and it's fitting that you're here now yeah with the car that got me my first win but this is some of the footage from uh you know victory lane and you know i didn't even remember there's ryan pemberton as a 19 year old tire tire changer in the in the photo and you know it's just uh there's my dad right above the trophy looking away there i didn't even remember remember my dad being there you know it's just so crazy to see some of this stuff the story on this car and why this car is even more important than just getting our first win is we retired this car in 1990 because you know we continually built new cars and thought we were building better cars after it was retired for a while we learned some things on the hanging the bodies and couldn't get a chassis soon enough to get a new body on it to get it on the racetrack like we wanted we're gonna have to wait so we grabbed this thing cut the body off of it put another body on it and we did that after a long drought you know where we hadn't won any races for a you know we're in a drought period brought it back out won a race again that happened three times and uh i think it was 93. we re-bodied it again and been parked and retired and we re-bodied it for phoenix and went out to phoenix and i think we think we either sat on the pole or outside pole and you know won the race out there i believe that i believe that was 93 you know so this this car out of my 35 i haven't been able to prove it exactly for sure steve neal and i think that this car won probably five of the 35 races that we won at roush racing together so this thing is uh you know was very important to to my career wow so wasn't wasn't your first win jack's first win as an owner too oh yes so this is like an important part of him too yeah yeah see uh yeah i don't even know how i managed to buy it from jack but i was able to pry it out of his hands somehow or another uh but yeah you know when it was in our it took us two years to get our first win we were really close to winning uh bristol about our fifth race together but then after that we we weren't really in contention to win the rest of the year but the following year in 89 we were running second and third all the time and really running good and it was just a matter of time until we got our first win do you remember any uh interesting details or dents or holes or anything in this thing that have always kind of been there anything cool like that or has it been restored to the point of only knowing what it is from a number you know i just know it as as jr10 um but i could tell you you know we ran us at rockingham when we won that race in 1989 we had a 1700 in the right front and a 1200 in the left front a pair of 325s in the rear and i think that i think the track bar was nine and a half ten and a half so it's weird you know i can't remember what i had for lunch today but you know i remember crazy things like that this thing's cool so this thing was ran from 88 to 93 in various on and off configurations it ran from 89 to 93 with various different bodies on it yeah i mean the same style body but we were learning all the time to push this over pull that up you know you could do a lot more in the gray areas back at that time you know there weren't as many templates and so we were we were making more and more downforce through the years oh this one's awesome it's like straight off the track too yeah this one right here uh is my final ira championship car uh from 2005 and i told them i wanted it do not clean it i wanted all the rubber marks on it and uh and everything just straight off the race track and they've been warned here to not clean it it's still got the rubber uh thrown up you know underneath the hood from the tires and everything and you can see here if you look really close you can see i did just a slight amount of pushing uh this is from the atlanta race uh but if you look in the back i got a lot of push pushes i did a little bit of pushing but i got a lot of pushes from who oh who knows i don't even remember but that's pretty serious oh yeah we did some battles uh iroc was really really really good for me it's the pride crown jewel of my career and um and this this was one of those million dollar paydays for me um in 2005 i won my fifth uh iroc championship uh i think we won like i think it was 13 races and they only had four a year and i didn't get invited every year i wasn't in it every year that i was in nascar because some years i didn't either win the champion the champion always got uh invited back but if if if you weren't the champion you had to run about top three in nascar points to get invited so i had some off years where i wasn't in that so i wasn't wasn't in it all the time but uh it's the only thing that i was able to one-up dale earnhardt i think he won 11 races and probably four championships so um it's definitely you know the cars people ask me you know why i had so much success and i said well the car never runs out of gas it never seems to blow up and i never have a slow pit stop because there weren't any pit stops so it was more just you drive you you go out on the race track and you you leave it all right there there were less things to go wrong and i had a lot of things go wrong in my nascar career i mean so many races that we coulda shoulda but you know every you know stuff we we had a lot of problems believe me um there were a lot of races that got away from us it's really cool that like you're the winningest driver of all of iraq history aren't you yes yeah that's that's why it's the crown jewel in my career without a doubt that is really neat knowing that um does it like help you be less angry about those bad things that happened knowing that when those variables were removed that maybe weren't even in your control that you were able to do this i see it it's a sense of pride for me that that i accomplished what i did and especially in iraq because i built my career on what i felt like was better race cars because when i raced against larry phillips he was a better driver than me but i could win if i made my car enough better and then when i moved on to uh you know racing asa it was the same deal with triple triple was a better driver than me probably surely but i made my car better than his so i got my share and then when i went to nascar i did the same thing i know dale earnhardt was a better race car driver than me but i got a few wins i had my victories and it was based on you know paying attention and making my car better uh to be in equal cars and have you know the success that i had is really really special and it does make me think maybe maybe i was okay maybe i wasn't all you know race car knowledge i thought i knew a lot about race cars and setting them up and bodies and aerodynamics and stuff but maybe you know maybe that wasn't all of it i don't know i don't know all i know when i look back on my career it's it's a foggy vague memory and i don't believe that i did what i did i can't believe that i got to race against richard petty and david pearson and you know that i got to race 40 years and have the career i had and the success i had because i never was good at anything else and i haven't been since i quit driving race cars any good at anything else so it's hard for me to believe that i had the you know the little bit of success i had it certainly isn't you know on the on the level of dale earnhardt or jeff gordon uh you know or jimmy johnson or guys like that uh or you know david pearson and richard petty but you know i had had my day in the sun a few times and that's pretty cool i think your story is uh extremely inspiring because of the way that it went like you just had this rise and then you got punched in the face and you had to start all the way back over but you came back and still did it i think a lot of people don't even know that that ever happened because i didn't know i think it's something that people need to you know look into more yeah that was really good for me it was it's painful as it was and it almost broke me uh spiritually and mentally almost destroyed me but i only i wouldn't be that person that i was in nascar if it and and i wouldn't be the person i am today if that hadn't happened i think it was important that it happened to me because uh you know it really made me appreciate the success that i had made me appreciate jack roush when he gave me my second chance i stayed with that guy for 19 years you know when you know there were opportunities to drive the 28 car and and uh multiple multiple different opportunities you know different times that i could have moved over to the 28 car and and um i stayed with jack because he gave me that second chance and because you know he let you know he let his drivers have a hand in the direction of the cars and how they were you know for years how they were built you know the early years you know i had a good bit of input in the last few years i had a little bit less because it was already starting to get a little bit more engineer driven but you know that arrow was a golden era you know from the 80s to the 2000s of motorsports because things were changing all the time and there were so little rules that when you would do something you know that really gave you an advantage they would see you know they would see that and make a rule against it so you were always a rule maker and that's what i always wanted to be you know i wanted to be out front that's one of the things that really made me the racer that i was there was two two individuals prior to me getting to nascar that really forced me to up my game and that was junior hanley and gary baloo those two guys were very important because they really really were progressive and out there and those guys made me step my game up whenever you were like coming back up did you ever have any kind of method to what you were doing are you feeling like okay i'm getting a little too good here i need to go somewhere else so i can put myself back at the bottom of the ladder and like or i feel like i'm not learning anything here i need to change it up that's spot on really 74 the first year i raced you know i was learning so much i was so young so i stayed in that division for 75 and then 75 we had a lot of success so it was certainly time to move on to late models from the six cylinder division for 76. by late 76 we were having to travel out of state to find competition that pushed us and made us really step our game up and at that point having to travel that far there wasn't an asphalt trap in arkansas so uh you know we had been on exclusively dirt but at that point in time by end of 76 and traveling all out of state it might we might as well the daytona 500 wasn't on dirt it's on asphalt so it's time to go to pavement racing for 77. and you know that was a big step and to go through the track championships at springfield missouri and fort smith arkansas and asa rookie of the year to asa championship in 78 79 and 80 those three years back to back yes it was time to step up to nascar problem was i'd never been in the garage area of a nascar race i'd never i'd just been in a few grandstands of nascar races and i didn't know what i was getting into so i waded into it deep and it swallowed me the first go-round so that's kind of what happened in 81 i did five races with a cup car built my own cup car just like my little late model it was way ahead of its time and uh we you know we only raced it once every month or every two months only raced it five times so we were able to prepare and out prepare a competition and so we heck we set on two poles with that car out of five races third race i entered a set on the pole third nascar race and uh we finished third and seventh with that car with my little asa late model team racing against richard petty and and all those guys i mean it was like crazy but the following year i went full time in 82 and i was not prepared for that and we didn't have the funding for that i didn't have the personnel we just we just failed after that i mean that was you know it took me a few years to get back to nascar and get back with jack roush who could give me an opportunity to work with great people like steve mill and robin pemberton uh and you know we had to build a nascar team from scratch but in our second year we got got our first win and it was a dream come true from there it was uh we just built the team stronger and better and then multiple cars you know it was just a single car team for several years and teammates and multiple cars and uh and then matt kinses was able to bring him their first championship and then kurt busch just a year or two later and so um it was even though i didn't get a championship it made me proud to have you know jack roush have an owner's championship uh because what he meant to me what is uh this car over here so the story behind this car uh i don't think i uh i think i had a winless season in 2001 and i was afraid that i'd never win another race so 2002 um i switched teams with uh kurt busch so i had kurt's young guys and curt had my veteran guys uh we felt like that would be better for kurt and i both there at roush racing i'd had a winless season in 2001 i was afraid i wasn't ever going to win another race uh loved charlotte was in the noble five for the charlotte race eligible for a million dollar bonus and ben leslie the crew chief told me one day at the shop about two months before the charlotte race he said we're going to build you a car for charlotte we're going to hang the body on it like you want we'll make a whole lot of front down for us like you want and we're going to win that no bull 5 race at charlotte and i'm like cool sounds good you guys do that and i'll take half of my part of the winnings and share with the race team and we did it we did it so this is the car uh jr i think it's jr44 it was the car that we won uh charlotte with and uh does it still have the the body on it the way it was or has it been re-bodied and reused no this is the body the way it was and interesting fact if you'll come to the front i like i like the opposite race cars than matt kinses that kenseth liked low downforce front and a lot of side force uh cars i like my cars with a ton of front down force and so if you'll look real close this thing is cheated up pretty good it's got a real long low nose on it and the nose is scooted to the right it has a humongous left front fender you know on it and not a lot of right front fender they took it to the wind tunnel they made a ton of front down force on it and uh and i like cars like that one of the things though we were traveling the car quite a bit and late in the race the ductwork had been dragging the racetrack and it drug a hole in the ductwork for the radiator it still seemed to turn pretty good but it got awfully hot if you look at the pictures photographs like this one up here victory lane you can see my face is pretty red it was pretty hot uh that night at charlotte but we just barely beat matt kinses to win that race but it was a very very sweet victory and this this photograph from victory lane almost brings tears to my eyes because i never absorbed anything when i won a race i would be standing in victory lane already worrying about how could we win next week's race what can we do to the car what are we going to do to win i never soaked it in really took it in and this picture shows what i didn't see when i was there like all the coke splattered on matt's shirt him holding the million dollar bonus check uh he was so excited uh that we won a million dollars he thought we were rich and um and then to see this whole race team and to see how wet you know like arlene's blouse has gotten wet you know i mean we were sure enough celebrating here and if you look at the face of these guys here on this race team many of these guys have never been to victory lane in the cup series this was a young group of guys and for a lot of them it was their first win and it was really really special do you uh regret not absorbing things like that more or do you think that you would not have been able to function without keeping your mind forward so i do regret it and i regret not having more fun i could have been i could have absorbed it and still probably had the success i had um i could have absorbed it more and i could have just lightened up a little bit and and uh i was telling kenny schrader just because kenny knows me really well he was there most of the time and i told kenny i said i really regret not having more fun and he said yeah you know you would have still had as much success if you would have just lightened up a little bit that's my personality i was serious i was dead serious you know i was serious i wanted to win and i didn't want to look away i just i never wanted to take my eye off the target and i felt like that was my uh that was my edge that i knew more i had seen more absorb more of everything you know about the cars about the track about the tires you know about the setups you know and all that stuff you know i just kept it in my mind all the time and right there in my focus and never let my eyes look you know uh very far off of that target how did uh was that like a learning curve for the people around you to kind of like learn that you are kind of like matter of fact or short because you're focused on something else and like did people people are off put by that yeah i mean i was uh you know i was not uh over overly social um you know i was pretty direct my guys david levindale that worked for me he came to work you know when i moved from here from batesville to north liberty indiana i took banjo with me banjo graham and and david levindall david uh nicknamed me the prick of misery uh and uh there was another one too i can't i can't think of what it was but yeah i mean i was pretty tough i i was demanding i wanted them to work as many hours and as hard as i did and to care as much as i did you know i think the hours that we spent would have had to been spent to be successful but i think you could have lightened up i i you know i think it could have lightened up some and and still had the success and you know that is one regret that i have um is you know just not having more fun along the way i don't remember that this car over here is the first race car uh that jack roush gave me we had legendary success with uh winn-dixie as a sponsor this was the last race for winn-dixie his sponsorship was down at homestead and this is straight off the racetrack you know we led most of the race i thought we were going to win the race should thought we should have won the race but jeff gordon uh drove up and passed us late in the race and won the race i never even understood i never looked at the car i just figured we just got beat right so when we unloaded the car here and lifted the hood if you'll have a close look the cords in the right front that's why we lost the race because the right front corded on the last set of tires and uh so i have an excuse and how how many years had gone by before you noticed that uh probably a year or so and just lifted the hood and there it was but that's that's the tires that were on it and uh like i say it's right off the racetrack and we had a lot of success uh that car was hard to be anywhere anytime when that thing unloaded the competition knew that they they had their work cut out for it uh to be able to beat that car the yellow chassis is really cool i wish they still painted chassis different colors yeah this was still back before this you know really put a lot of emphasis on the safety this seat was the seat that i raced asa with uh dixie anna built these seats for me um and i ran them in asa and then i ran them in nascar and cup and everything and they're flat eighth inch uh aluminum with no bracing so if you reach over it in here right now you can just push the ribbon i mean it's wow when i would hit that thing would open what white you know wide open like that i've seen those ripped things away over there like that and uh you can see the head i mean yeah it's crazy to see i'm lucky that i survived the tire wars in in these seats you know because uh we blew a lot of right fronts and hit took some really hard licks before we really ever got those uh you know really stiff seats and the in all the you know the hans and all the restraints and all that stuff i i really feel lucky to be be able to say that i survived all that was there is there like one specific crash where you're like that that could have been really bad the one the one that i know would have killed me was talladega it was around 94. we're in the triangle guy's wreck in front of me and hit me in the right front and i turn sideways it breaks a brake rotor so i've got zero brakes and i'm hung sideways and can't i can't get it to change it just stays sideways and it goes down and there's a guard rail and i'm coming at that guard rail probably 150 miles an hour and i'd had a friend killed by guardrail larry deychins uh and i was very scared of guard rails coming up inside the car and i thought you know i'm gonna i'm gonna die and i went through the guardrail just never even slowed me down went right through it and then to a chain-link fence and of course you know the guardrail it wasn't even a hard hit so we leave there everything's fine i'm you know i'm hurt a little bit but not injured and so we come back for the next race and i roll out from practice and look over there and that where that guard rail was is a concrete wall not survivable that that hit would not have been survivable the one thing that i was so afraid of probably saved me which was the guardrail you know just being able to go right through it wow that's crazy is crazy to think about did you were you like apprehensive a little a little bit skittish after that or did you just kind of process it and move on oh process it moved on i did i i think i've seen some other drivers say this before but in especially in a dangerous era which we're not in now this is the safety has come so far but in the dangerous eras like you know whenever uh 80s and 90s you always figure that it's not going to be you you know that's dangerous but you've got control of things because you're driving and you've got control of it speaking of technology and safety my last big hurrah i guess winning five races and finishing second and the points of 50 years old it's not something that happens every day you know all five of the trophies are over here in the corner uh old faded uniform and whatnot were you having more fun by this point oh yeah oh yeah because i had thought i'd given it up you know i was i'd already uh done two partial schedules in 07 and 08 and had no intention of ever racing for a championship again rick hendrick kept on me about coming and driving for him and i said i'll come and run 24 races i'm not going to drive the full schedule and after the after turning him down twice the third time he asked me i just got to thinking daydreaming about what it would be like to win one more time just one more time so i talked it over with arlene and we decided to give it a whirl i don't know the history of this this car this particular car it's more of a symbol whereas you know this the rest of the cars here these four cars in the circle they all represent wins and milestones in my career did you absorb more of the having fun in the bush car or was it the same type of seriousness on both levels same seriousness this car is uh pretty darn cool for me because one of the first years i think that they were paying a million dollars to win the all-star race is charlotte and this was a race where you know i i didn't have a dominant car i had a good car i always hate when somebody says yeah but you know i planned that move right there and i did you know and you know was the right move your move is only right if everybody else does the right thing to make it right you know if you make a choice to make a move on the racetrack and everybody happens to do something different and makes that move not work then you're not smart you know and i also believe that you're not truly not that smart if you do something and it works because you don't have any control a lot of times of what everybody else does well this particular night every move i made on the racetrack worked it's one of those nights when dang man every every time i chose a lane or every time i made a pass or every time i made a move it was the right one i really felt like i had a hand in winning that race as a driver not just as a car and taking the car and winning but you know and i know that i was lucky because i know i don't control what everyone else does but it just felt good for everything that you know to be rightful once instead of doing something stupid it's even cooler that that that happened with the the throwback paint scheme yes this is the same chassis as that yes like this restored that is the chassis actually uh what happened was uh jack sold it to an arca team and it raced several years in arca i got a phone call it's the car you won the all-star with all-star race in 2005. uh would you be interested in it sign me up so i bought it from him and i had it you know repainted restored really because it was uh kind of raggedy and restored it and put it in here so this is the chassis that that won that race who does all the the recreation of the graphics i'd have to look it up but somebody in in in north carolina i never saw the car until it showed up here like this is the bill ryan yeah yes what's the story on this car here and that's another just kind of a symbol car of what we did uh i don't know the history behind this particular car we you know we won about five poles and i was 53 years old so get this we're about to go on a field trip with mark to look at some of the old buildings and historic places around here that he had i don't know associations with i'm not exactly sure what he's gonna show us but we're gonna hop in his uh his denali and see where we go

Channel: Stapleton42

Views: 356,870

Keywords: lsxcalade, escalade, turbo, twin turbo, pfi speed, hondaru, stapleton42, Mitchell stapleton, 427, lsx, dyno, 2000 hp, street outlaws, cleetus, leroy, ruby, turbski, bald eagles, 4x4, rowdessy, big turbo, suburban, yukon, denali, 1320video, dale jr, do it for dale, Brent pfi, 2.0, rmrw, drag week, boost, v8, ls1, esv, boom tube, nascar, daytona, Alex bowman, Blake wilkey, suck it, mcfarland, dale truck, monte carlo, first gen monte, ls swap, pro touring, lsa supercharged, iroc x pipe, dr gas, rippin

Id: XXFIwkkZd5U

Length: 51min 29sec (3089 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 24 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/BLARG13]

Mark Martin was and still is my favorite driver. Have so much of his gear and die-cast over the years. This was a really enjoyable watch for me and I hope you all enjoy it too.

[u/bakaVHS]

Having lived in Arkansas for 20 years of my life, there's only one reason to go out there and it's the Mark Martin Museum in Batesville. So much history, and a very cool gift shop full of awesome retro designed shirts and signed diecast.

[u/SteelCityChamp1]

A real racer showing off real race cars ... man I miss all this

[u/Chippah716]

This was one of the most enjoyable hours I've spent sitting in front of the TV. Mark was never my favorite driver, but one I always respected the hell out of. Thanks for posting!

[u/TruckSeriesFan4Life]

How in earth did he get Mark the kid Martin from Montana... That is freaking amazing.