Ray Evernham takes you inside Big Iron Garage: NASCAR Garage Tour

hi i'm ray everingham nascar championship winning crew chief and and member of the nascar hall of fame and you're at the big iron garage and big iron garage is where well we just have a lot of fun this car is really special this is the car the original car that buddy baker broke the 200 mile per hour barrier the first car ever to go 200 miles per hour on a closed circuit before indycar did it before anybody did it buddy baker did it in a nascar stock car at talladega march 1970. this car actually was dc 93 they called it it was the chrysler test car it was used for a lot of different things it was actually raced in some races by guys like richard brickhouse bobby allison a buddy baker even dan gurney test drove this car so it's got a lot of again a lot of history big old chrysler hemi in there which was the signature uh of the day this car was uh restored went out to don white and actually ran dirt tracks it it ran usac races and arca and lots of different things but this is the actual nose fenders hood even some of the duct work off this car my partner in this car greg kwyatkowski has spent almost three decades tracking down every nut bolt decal everything he could find we've been restoring this car for almost two years it has many of the original parts greg has photos of everything greg worked at chrysler for years and got access to some of the original notes from the day that this car broke 200 miles per hour this car was painted several different colors so when we restored it we actually painted it using the same process that they did and then eventually it broke the record that day the car right now is very representative of the day it broke the record i've been around nascar stock cars for quite some time i love the big wing cars and i'll tell you that this may be the most accurate per date restoration that i've ever worked on these cars were special everybody knows that they worked on the aerodynamics that big wing in the back helped with a lot of stability it wasn't just down force it was stability and this nose certainly cut the air you know made it again aerodynamic but some of the things that when you look past it that chrysler did venting the front fenders that added as much down force to the front probably as that nose you know little things like this chin spoiler the way that it worked with this with this big dodge daytona nose and underneath this car has four different levels of how the front duct work was put in and each one of those levels does something else aerodynamically so they were pretty advanced i said that that big hemi engine certainly didn't slow it down at all but these guys also were very sharp on what they did with the front end now chrysler at that time was very very advanced with their race car building their data they were actually one of the first companies to put two cars in the wind tunnel nose to tail to see how the second car was affected by the first this car uh it's been called the purple people eater but it's not this is one of my favorite cars this car was driven by dick trickle in 1975 in the 1975 daytona 500 and it was owned by an independent a family um dell and diane puro right from here in north carolina this car is a banjo matthews chassis 115 inch wheelbase it is actually a mercury 1973 mercury body and you can see when we were talking about the 69 daytona things have changed a lot the wings were outlawed the big hemi engine the big cubic inches were outlawed from 426 to 351 cubic inches little spoiler on the back of this car flat nose but these cars were still pretty good some guys out of stuart virginia named the wood brothers won a lot of races with cars that looked just like this one and again this was a very fast car back then still had chrome bumpers glass windshields that's something that we just don't use anymore but back then one of the ways that nascar controlled guys maybe wanting to cut up the roofs to narrow the cars if a stock windshield fit they knew that they didn't you know move the roof the va pillars and and things like that this car's got a lot of really cool history not only did dick trickle drive it but this was driven at charlotte motor speedway that same year 1975 by another famous guy named bobby isaac who has a great history in racing so even though this car doesn't have a long winning history things like that it it was driven by some great drivers and represents what the backbone of nascar to me is the independent racers this car through the years had a body change it was driven by richie ponch in many races we found it it was in a storage trailer where it had sat for 30 plus years we found it drug it out put it back to the original condition that dick trickle drove it in and would plan on not driving this thing around too what you're looking at here is probably the purest most unrestored jeff gordon race car that exists outside of hendrick motorsports this is booker this is our 1994 daytona 500 car we finished fourth in the 94 daytona 500 and we finished eighth i think in the july uh fourth firecracker race this car sat in a museum for quite some time and when it came here it needed a little bit of tlc to get it running uh but it had as we dug into it had many many of the original parts and pieces and including jeff's seat the pedals the brakes all those things we had to find a hendrick engine for it which we found many of the original pieces from a hendrick engine and had it restored and if you look at this car back then the crew chiefs used to have to work on the car and i was the aluminum welder so a lot of my welding and fabrication were in this car we were drilling holes and doing these things the more i look at this car the more it reminds me of how much fun it was to build cars back then in the early days at heinrich we pretty much built everything we built the cars we built the engines bodies uh transmissions and gears so this is a pure hendrick racer and again 94 was a special year for jeff gordon and i because it was the year that we won our our first race together at charlotte not too long after that and we finally started to to perform in the restrictor plate races our daytona and talladega cars were very different from the rest of the cars that we used to race and the rules were pretty lacks back then you could move the bodies around you could move the frame rails around things you just can't do now so we stood the bodies way forward on the speedway cars and we'd make them real round so that they didn't create a lot of drag couldn't run them anywhere else this car ran daytona twice uh finished fourth in the 500 eighth in in the july fourth race and ran talladega twice where i think we wrecked it but it seemed like we always wrecked it at talladega for some reason at the end of that year if you remember from 94 we switched from lumina to the 95 monte carlo so this car was sold at the end of the year and what was really neat i haven't i haven't seen this car since 1994 so it was great to see it again i don't remember ever wanting to do anything but work on cars um and i love all types of cars i've always wanted to race be a race driver uh be involved but at the same time i love classic cars and i love the history of the sport it always motivated me uh i know growing up a lot of kids were football baseball and things like that and my dad actually played semi-pro football and baseball and i think i broke his heart when i told him i wanted to be uh be a racer but it's it's what motivated me there's just something about the cars the the design the story when you have a competition mechanically it's i think it's different than having a competition in sports you're something you're doing physical with your body would love to have been able to drive like jeff gordon or aj ford or mario andretti but i wasn't given those gifts the things that i were good at was really doing things mechanically in that challenge and being able to compete uh as a crew chief or build a car that you knew could compete for a championship or compete for race wins and there is no better feeling than when you build a car and you hand it off to someone who you know there's no one in the world that could drive that car any faster than that person and always had that kind of relationship with jeff gordon and working with jeff really fueled my competitiveness because i knew that that if i gave him a car that could win he was going to win with it and that that was a lot of fun being able to go the racetrack certainly uh every sunday thinking that you learn a lot of lessons and one of the lessons i i've learned and i try and tell people all the time you may not get there as fast as you want but i don't know anyone who's ever worked on a car long enough or hard enough that finally didn't win with it we're just going to keep fixing up these cars wish you the best and look forward to seeing you in the future

Channel: NASCAR

Views: 79,303

Keywords: NASCAR, motorsports, racing, stock car, Kyle Busch, Kevin Harvick, chase elliott, fantasy sports, fantasy fastlane, glass case of emotion, ryan blaney, crash, wreck, pileup, pit road, penalty, race track, super speedway, highlight

Id: r2roaxeiLXM

Length: 9min 59sec (599 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 26 2021