Abandoned Days of Thunder Cars Reunited with Original Crew Member! (Special Effects Evidence)

That's what's left of one of the flip cars. I've seen a few of them over the years. Yeah. Not this many in one spot. Well, maybe you've seen on the internet there's this guy who's been digging all these old Days of Thunder movie cars out of the weeds. Howdy, everybody. What do you have going on in here? I don't know. Uh it's uh it's been a very slippery slope. A friend of mine uh last fall sent me a message and said that a buddy of mine in Florida knows where there's a Days of Thundercar in the woods. And I was like, "What?" Like, "No way." He said, "There's a guy named David on my friends list." He said, "Look him up. Tell him I sent you." So, I sent him a message. Later, I got a photo in my Facebook Messenger of this car sitting in the woods. I mean, it was trees around it everywhere. I thought it was his car at first and he's like, "No, it it belongs to the guy up the road. I don't even know how to get in contact with him." He just gave me the address where the car was. I didn't know how to get a hold of the guy. My mom's real good with doing like property search records and stuff. So, she found a name and an address and a phone number that didn't work. I did the oldfashioned way and just sent the guy a letter. And u about a month later, I got a random phone call from the the city where the car was. And at first, I thought it was like someone like a solicitor's phone call. It was a Sunday afternoon, so I didn't answer the phone. And I was like, "Wait a minute, that's the town where that that metal yellow car was." So, I called the number back. Guy was very polite. He said yes. Said it belonged to his dad. At one point his dad had a bunch of them down there and they just kind of all got sold off over the years and this was the last one sitting down there. Said his wife was wanting to clean the property up and told me come get it. So I went down there and got it. I had no idea what to expect when I got there and this is what I got. Like back in that corner over there, there's a big hole cut out of it. just they're very very hastily cut out. And in the scene where in the scene where they come across the start finish line, like in the movie, there's a bunch of smoke coming out of it, but when you watch the B-roll footage, like I mean, there was sparks and fire and all kinds of stuff. And in the driver's compartment, right by the clutch pedal, there's a whole bunch of extra like fire padding stuff that's been added to it, which kind of would make you think they're trying to keep someone from getting burned up. There were three of us doing that. We was all on the same crew, but there was only three of us doing paint and body work and decals. Pretty safety cautious, especially the stunt driver. He was really cautious. He want He wanted everything exactly the way he wanted it and he wanted it perfect. Mhm. It was going to be the way he wanted or he wasn't going to do it. Yeah. This thing's been absolutely destroyed the front. They kind of very hastily just crammed. them FX guys, they know how to make something do something, but sometimes they wouldn't the neatest at Was there a a scene where the front end got smashed in one of these things? If you Well, if you look real close, like when they're in the Daytona 500 in the movie and they have the wreck, if you watch real close, there's a Miller yellow car that just gets clobbered in the front hard and it just kind of skirts down off the track. I guess they thought you weren't going to see it when you were to watch the movie. But when we first went to Daytona, they flew in a whole bunch of stunt drivers. I don't know where they got them. Some of them couldn't drive a straight drive. Two of them were motorcycle stunt drivers. Never been in a car. There was a lot of cars that got tore up, but they wasn't meant to get tore up. I stayed up a lot of nights putting cars back because they done something foolish on the track that they weren't supposed to be doing. And we had to have it back at 6:00 the next morning. And it got a lot of that stuff got tore up, but it wasn't intentional. It was just accident, you know, experience. People were not paying attention and all kinds of stuff. It looks like this hood has that Superflow pink on it. It's green, too. Some of them cars got painted different cars three or four times. It might have been a Superflow car. Next week it might have been a mellow yellow car. Next week it might have been city Chevrolet car. It just whatever they wanted and what they needed for whatever they was filming. The uh lip of the trunk lids still got the top of the X on it. But we had a lot of bodies that we skinned off of these old race cars when we got them. They were all kinds of cars. Yeah. And the bodies got set off and they got set over there out behind the building. I don't know where that stuff wound up going. Somebody got it. Somebody hauled it off. somebody. But they would skin a whole car, set the body out behind the building, put a new body on it. We'd do the body work and paint, decal it up, set back up. I mean, we had all kinds of cars. We had Ford T-Irds that had V6s and aluminum bodies on them. So, I mean, it was just wherever they could find an old race car, it could have been from anywhere. And if you notice in the movie where all them cars, like after the race, they look like they're dirty. Mhm. You pull this and like they got like rubber all over them and whatever and dirt all over them and all that kind of stuff. You know what that is? No. I've always wondered. Brown hair dye. Interesting. Spray. They would take a car like this. It would be perfectly sparkling clean. Put brown hair dye in a spray gun. Go down the side of it and put that brown hair dye down side of it. They'd come back do a big swirly thing on it like that. Like it had a tire robe on it. Okay, take it out and race it. That's the way they did it. I always thought those cars look way dirtier than they should for some of it. Looks like they got stuck in a like a coal mine or something worse in the front. It would fade to the back and like I said, they would put tire swirly marks on it like they'd been up against the tire, you know? Yeah. And that's how they did that. It was brown hair dye and we bought that stuff by the gallons. Were the spoiler angles consistent with the type of track they were shooting on? Or is this one flat and that one's not as flat just cuz that's how it got put together? How it got put together? Yeah, that they was not that technical. It had to look like a race car. Didn't have to actually be a race car. Yeah, some of them were real race cars. Hendrick had a couple of them that, you know, were the real deal race car, but a lot of them was just old race cars. A lot of them had some good engines in them. Some of them didn't have such good engines in them. It was just depending on what they was going to do with them that day. Chassis looks like it used to be red. [Music] There's a home and moody switch plate. I thought that was really cool. It is. I I wonder what this car used to be. And the front clip is still funky, too. Have you any kind of theory what this chassis originated as? It's like looks like it's red. Has a whole movie switch plate. Brandon, didn't you say that y'all got a bunch of Bud Moore chassis? Yeah, that was probably T-Irds. One of the guys that was working on the movie with us used to work for Bud and that's how we got some of the cars from Bud. Those motorcraft cars have red frames back then. Yes. Yeah, that's probably what this was. And I didn't really spray the inside of too many of them. maybe three or four. Mostly just the outside. A lot of times the boys in the fab shop once they got the old body skinned off, they go in there and spray touch up the road cage and spray all that stuff and all that kind of a lot of that was done before the body and the sheet metal and all that was put a lot easier when all that stuff's off. Where did the roof damage come from? So, if I'm right about it being that car, if you watch real close, the roof on the on the car that passes the start finish line, it looks like someone fell on it. I mean, it's it's caved in. And it looks like, you know, someone could have got in there and just pushed it back up fairly easily. Well, if you watch a lot of that, when that was done, a lot of them guys jumped on the car. Really? At the end. But there's a lot of stuff that's filmed that ain't in that movie. I mean, there's days and days and days of film that's not even in it. That never wound up in it. I spent three days filming a part inside the garage and the whole thing got cut. Never. Cruise walked up to a drink machine, got a drink out of a drink machine, and we was all standing around and we done that for three days, and none of that is in the movie. What else have you noticed climbing through these things? We haven't looked much at the Russ Wheeler car yet. It's kind of hard to see, but the door bars in this thing were some point they were black and then some point they were yellow. So, I don't know if this was like a old uh Levi Garrett car at some point or it's hard to say what it was, but it's just got it doesn't have the uh stamped floor pans like it's supposed to have in It's like someone just kind of did some quick bead roll flat panels and stuck them in there just for the sake of it having floor pans in it. Yeah, that's right. Cuz they would have had to use that forward standard back then. Yep. So, the story I got on this car is I actually knew about this car first and I got to looking at it pretty close and I was like, I think that car is the real thing. So, I did a little bit of research and I figured out where the car was and I called the guy and apparently a few other people figured out where the car was also. And as soon as I said what I was calling about, he started cussing me out, told me, "I don't know how y'all figured out where this car is. It's not effing for sale and blah blah blah blah blah." And hung the phone up on me. And this was probably three or four years ago. And uh I just kind of washed my hands of it and didn't think much about it. And then after I posted a video of the 51 car, I had a three guys message me and say, "I know where there's another one if you're interested." I'm like, "Yeah, absolutely." And uh I started getting random photos from them of this car. And the way they said it was uh a yellow car. So in my head, I thought it was going to be a city car. And I saw the the pictures of this and I was like, "Well, how that's that car out Florida." Car was sat down around the Daytona area. And the guy that I got the car from to the guy that yelled at me sold the car to the guy I got the car from. And he said they leased out, I think it was a Scotty's hardware store down there, and that's where they did all the they'd fix the cars at night, repaint them, do whatever they had to do, and then get them back out to the speedway the next morning. And he said the guy that owned that building was given that car when they were done filming, like as a souvenir, and somehow ended up in the junkyard down there. But, you know, I don't I don't know. The guy who ended up buying it that you bought it from, did he get cussed out by the other guy, too? He did say that the guy was very honorary when he spoke to him. So, how did he get it though? I don't know. He offer him enough money or I don't know. I don't know if he uh he called his wife instead of basically. Basically, I have no clue. But, uh yeah, somehow he he talked the guy out of it and ended up with it. and he was apprehensive about selling it. But when the other guys told him about me that I already had this car that that I was trying to get my hands on the Hardy's car to put it back with this car and get him inside at least try to preserve him. He was kind of I guess changed his mind and had a change of heart and decided to he let the car go and he's a nice guy. Nice guy. He's very pleasant. Much much nicer than the first guy, that's for sure. Crazy how much uh how many layers of paint are on there and how you can see where the sun didn't touch it or touched it less. The paint on them cars wouldn't last a week. Really, it would fade out in the sun in less than a week. It was House of Color neon. Every one of the color, the Superflow car was the red neon color, the green and the yellow on the city. It all was put over a base coat of shimmer and white and then you sprayed the neon and then you cleared it. You could go back in a week or two weeks if you had to do a repair and peel the decals off and you could see how much it faded in a week's time or two weeks time under compared to what it looked like under the decal compared to what the outside looked like out in like this car. See, it's turn it's turned back completely white behind the plane back there. It's so much more blue. Yeah, it is. And that's not even like the neon part. Do you have a third one now? There's a third one sitting right there on the trailer. Did you buy that or did he just bring that here for fun? Uh, I bought the car. Oh, so this is like delivery day basically. Yeah. Yeah. Should we go out and look at it? Let's take a look at it. But that's what's left of one of the flip cars. Wow. So, is this one that would have had the pyrochnics in it to launch it into the air? Yeah. So, a friend of mine, Robbie, worked for Hendrickk, uh, when they were filming, and they ended up with one of the cars back there. I guess the cannon was behind the driver's seat, and then this car, the cannon was actually set kind of back here where the pool side was, so it was all back here. I found like B-roll footage of the car when they shot it off, and they towed this car behind another car. So, if you watch the B-roll footage, there's a Richard Petty 43 car towing this car down. It was a airport down there down a runway and you can see the 43 car lets this car go and it rolls about 20 ft and just basically explodes. Is that why the whole back is gone now? Yeah. Yeah. As the car flips over, you can see, you know, there's nothing left of it. All you see is like bent up trailing arms and and they cut for some reason they they're like hollowed out the back of this the huh third member there and when the car flashed through the air you can see that all cut out. There's a crankshaft in here. The dash says Oldsmobile. Do you know what what the past life of these chassis were before they were movie cars? They were all bought. I've heard a lot of them come out of Bud Moore's shop. I've heard a couple of them came out of Hilton shop. So that says Swisser Sweet Oldsmobile on there. So that's It had to been an old Roboso Oldsmobile before they cut it up and put the Chevy body on it. Still got the tow rig up front. Nice engine. Yeah. You going to fire that up again or what? Great. You can probably grill something in there pretty easily. So I guess it was made so when the charge went off and the car flipped forward like that would dig into the ground and flip the car over. Oh, that makes sense. So, where did you pull this one out of? Uh, Chznney. I was up sitting behind a guy's property in Chznney in a giant field full of studio bakers. What happened to these cars after the filming was done? Did someone go to amusement parks or like why why South Carolina? Well, they all didn't go to South Carolina. It's just my shop is in South Carolina. Oh. So, some of them I did before we left. Some of them I did at different racetracks in different like Daytona and then we went to Darlington and stayed for a long time and they actually ran rent ren leased us out of old dealership down there that was closed. So we had a service department offices, body shop, everything in in Daytona. We they leased out a big lumber company that used to sell like 84 lumber that used to just sell building materials, you know, big warehouse buildings. So, we had one of them in Daytona that we had like the Fab Shop and all different kind of stuff in that one big building. And then they rent they leased me a body shop over away from that a little bit, a closed down body shop in Daytona. So, I used that in Daytona. I used to dealership in Florence when we was down there doing them at Darlington and Florence down in there. And then a lot of that movie was filmed in Florida at Valuchia County Speedway. All of the pit stops scenes, most of that was done at Valuchia County Speedway. And they learned real quick not to stand behind the car when it come off the jack. It didn't take long. They got beaned in the hill with about 17 lug nuts. And It's not bad. It didn't take them long. Did you have to do any coordinating with Hendrickk or like what was their involvement? I kind of This right here kind of fell under the Hendricks umbrella. We got That's kind of the way we got paid. That's kind of how we worked this thing. It was all kind of under the Hendricks. I don't want to be the only one asking questions here. These are your cars. What did you want to talk to him about? Do you like recognized, you know, like that car was from this scene or that car was from that scene? Or a lot of times I was in the shop working, so I wasn't at everything that they filmed. You know, I I did sneak off sometimes if it was fairly close where I could go watch something. You know, the FX people was in that same building we was in. So, and in Daytona, they was down at the end of the building we was in. So they did a lot of that special effect stuff, the smoke and the part where the motor blows up and the piece comes out of the hood. I actually cut three hoods with a plasma cutter with a little star and skimmed them with body filler and they had a small cannon on the roll bar and it when you shut the hood it was right there and it would blow that piece of out of it and it would peel up like that, you know, and look like something come flying out of it. So I had to do one so they could play with it and see how it worked and oh yeah, that works good. Then you got to do three more because we going to film it three different ways. You know, they had cameras outside, they had cameras inside, they had cameras everywhere. I mean, they had cars with camera mounts. Depends on what they was doing. Yeah. But that car over there still got the camera mounts on posts on it. We had some was on the front. No windshield. We had some inside the car. They was some behind the driver. It had them everywhere. The blue, it was blue Alka-Seltzer car had to be, we had to fix something on it that night because it got tore up and it had to be over at the other fab shop from my from my body shop to the fab shop so they could load it up and get it to Daytona that weekend for all the filming they did at the real race. Mhm. All the roadbacks were loaded and they didn't have one to come and pick the car up and it's about 3 miles. I said, "What we going to do? What going to do?" So, one of them said, "Well, just drive it over there." So, we made sure there was fuel in it. And I said, "What if I get caught? I mean, I'm going to go to jail driving this stupid thing." I mean, it was a full-blown race car. It was a real race car. So, I drove it down through that neighborhood and one of the guys was following me in the truck going to bring me back. And we was going through that neighborhood and it was like probably 8:00 one Saturday morning. We were close enough to the racetrack that you could hear the 24 hours of Daytona the whole time we was working. So we weren't far. So I jumped in it and we drove down through the neighborhood and they followed me. Well, there was this guy out in the front yard at the corner of the street and he was trimming hedges with his trim his trimmer. He looked up and seen me coming down the road. He walked out to the edge of the road and he was following me. So when I got right up beside him, I pulled up and stopped and I said, "Hey dude, can you tell me how to get to the…