Abandoned Rockingham Speedway Coming Back! Exploring The Facility & Days of Thunder Movie Car!

jamming that gear with no clutch it it ain't like nothing else look at the old gatorade logo on the ground you got ac in this thing i was told it was in days of thunder you get chills man yeah it's got like a hole in the moody switch panel yeah that's a hole we're on the way to rockingham speedway right now apparently it's less abandoned than it used to be and they're actually starting to do stuff there again so we're gonna check it out and check out some vintage stock car stuff i really don't know what's going to be there but we should be able to wander the track grounds and look at some of the facilities we're in marshville north carolina right now and there's like a house on fire like for real oh wow if you like the shirt i'm wearing in this video you can find that at staplesonautoworks.com we will check out the rest of these at the end of the video now we made it this place is like a giant north wilkesboro almost it's like abandoned but it's not i don't know that back of that billboard says winston cup series on it's all faded out i mean this is awesome i'm so pumped to be in here right now and we gotta go inside now we're going under the tunnel wow this is like the garage area it's like some of this has been repainted or progressively redone except this looks like my grandparents house yeah this is some there's some history left in here that's for sure what's in here an old desk it smells old in here too i wonder what this office used to be for during nascar races if there were like garage officials in here or something i never thought i would hear a lumino cup car make noise at rockingham they're making a run the road course thing here you can hear him wherever he is he needs to get out there with that rusty wallace car yeah [Applause] [Music] it's the way those things echo through like the grandstands and stuff you just can't duplicate that how did i end up here right now uh well i saw all the cool nascar stuff you were doing i was like hey this is a guy that is interested in the same things that we are so i was like hey you might enjoy this so our group is called stock car classics we're just some guys that are into the older cars uh like this car behind you the roy turner car we've got some guys that are into the iconic stuff like this uh we've got a nathan thunder movie car in the group he's a big pontiac and he found his way to us and then my car is kind of a family heirloom kind of thing uh and we're just trying to put them back on track and get people involved trying to show people how easy it is to have fun with these things keep them going so what's the story on this particular car so this particular car is a miracle at least for me my family used to run in nascar in the bush grand national series uh full time from 87 to 2001. this car was built in 89 as a pontiac and then due to an aerodynamic rule we went to chevrolet for one year they had a template that had a hook on it and all the pontiacs had short necklids so at the big tracks like here at rockingham they were loose all the time so we had always been gm so they said all right we'll go with chevrolet so 94 we took one of our old short track cars and put aluminum body on it this is a 94 chevrolet aluminum uh we ran v6s back then too anyway so we set this up as a road course car for 94 and ran it uh with jim bound as a driver and lights off the sponsorship for the first year and at the end of 94 lo and behold they changed the aero rule so we decided to go back to pontiac because they had a nice small team program they were pretty good for helping out small teams of supplies so we went back to pontiac so this was our oldest chassis at the time it wasn't going to be worth it to re-body it as a pontiac again so we sold it to a man uh named tom forgione in new york and he wanted to go bush north racing which is like a sister series you're familiar with like arca that's like a sister series that's lower than cup but they use similar cars so this car fit right in at busch north so we sold it to him complete with the odd fire v6 turnkey ready to go just as you see it today sold it to him so he kept it and he ran a few races at watkins glen that's what it's currently set up for and anyway he got tired of doing that he ran with svra for a while then it's racing in the 90s even when it wasn't that old and uh he kept it around and just lo and behold through facebook i've always wanted to build one of our old cars because you know a lot of race car guys are nostalgic but some of them aren't we didn't have any cars left over and so i was like i'm gonna build aluminum you know because that was my favorite car i was born in 93 so this is probably the first one i saw so i went to searching i said nascar aluminum and guy said yeah i got this one for sale and it looks exactly like this and it turns out it was our car i found it back in february uh it had been updated with the uh v8 motor yeah what's the setup in here so like i said 487 to 94 they ran v6s there was buick and chevrolet v6 is for the gm guys four guys didn't have a big program but they ran odd fire 280 cubic inch uh basically a 4.3 but just to the max products top in common pin crank anyway so in 95 the bush series went to uh v8 engines so they were an 18 degree uh valve angle v8 358 just like the cup series so when tom bought this car and went bush north racing in 95 he put this 18 degree 358 small block in it so it's making about 720 horsepower basically turned it into a cup okay so this is a period correct 18 degree smallest pretty much it's a it's a very correct for 19.95 okay so it's uh you know basically a brodix top-end shaft rockers 8 000 rpm it's got a jericho four-speed nine-inch rear you know just pretty much like any cup car you would have seen from about 89 to 99 uh same drive training all that stuff so anyway i found it and it was already like the car i was going to build so i said well i'll just buy this one and uh it's it's had everybody panel put on it it's been raced consistently since 89 professionally and you know recreationally like we're doing today and uh so we just pretty much did some cosmetic work uh got some got some period correct decals put on it some fresh slicks set it up my dad's still a crew chief in the camper world truck series he's with chase purdy with gms right now and we took it down there and he checked it out nut and bolted it like we were going to take it to the racetrack and uh this is my second time out with it in competition and it's uh it's a hell of a run are you living the dream pretty much yeah it's pretty surreal and i didn't know how i would react you know if i ever did find one of our old cars i didn't really have faith you know they all get wrecked or scrap and when i found it i didn't know what i was going to do so i saw it and just got in it and i pretty much told myself look all these parts are really available it's all the same as it is today almost you know same uh same control arm same clip style same motor all this stuff i said it's already had every part put on it might as well just keep running it you know even if we scuff it up or something like that that's what it's been doing it's not like uh keith's beautiful example here this is a amazing roy tyner car uh pontiac grand prix uh he'll tell you more about it too this car you've probably seen this picture you ever seen a picture of the mike curb number two dale earnhardt car sitting in a junkyard uh yeah everybody's seen it it's an old like polaroid looking thing yeah looks like it's in the 90s or the 80s and everybody wanted oh why did they leave that well this car was in the same junkyard really at the same time and keith bought this car in 92 i know i'm rambling but he you can see the quality of this build he's doing roy tyner uh a big justice here and it's it's a beautiful car he actually turned a couple laps with it earlier today didn't think i'd ever hear aluminum make noise in rockingham yeah that's like this is cool you get goosebumps the first couple of times watch the sun come up this morning we roll the garage doors up like they did back in the day and it was like you get chills man it was pretty cool places like this they just don't lose that that feeling that you get when you come here i feel i don't think the hair on my arms has stood back down since you pulled out of here yeah it's it's it's like looking back in time and i'm just i'm just glad to be a part of man i'm truly blessed to even find it in the first place and to be able to do it it's it's awesome i plan to build more joe's got one over here he's working on that 27 car he's going to build more we're going to try and we're not quite aaron brown level just yet but but we want to we want to get there yeah i need i need one of these now that's that's it like i have to have one all right i need to fix it yeah you can do whatever you want i don't know if it has to be illumina but so back then they actually use factory sheet metal on the trunk and the hood of these things still so in the 80s it was like legitimately gm part number stamped on them like you could put on a car you had to haul them out yourself so as you can see this has still got all the support in the trunk later on they would just give you the scan you can build it however you want to is all this patching in here from when it got re-bodied from pontiac to chevy so this is a beat down race car as you can tell it's tapped the wall a few times they've hammered it back out they put new new crush panels and stuff like i said i mean it's it's very sustainable because you can still get a lot of these parts but like i was saying before in the 80s it was basically stock parts and then so mid through the 90s now this is a purpose-built fiberglass bumper cover yeah at the very beginning it was still rubber like you got them like on the nose you can tell they came super aerodynamic already but you know in the beginning it was literally old plastic stuff that you could put on a factory car and they just modified the heck out of it to fit oh yeah this is walking clean because it's got the fuel fill on that side yeah this one uh this one should have a drive brake but where it's road core certified for competition now they require a locking cap but it's on this side because it's a road course car yeah because that's where the pits are this hood this is a factory skin that's been hauled out and they put these braces in there you know for that yeah but this bumper cover here this is a later one this is probably from 94. uh one of the last ones they made you can see it's obviously custom i've always been a big rusty wallace fan i was always looking for some reason a miller car ever popped up for sale you know i'm gonna go buy the car and this thing popped up for sale about two years ago it was on facebook market and it disappeared and i think well someone bought the car no big deal and i was talking to a buddy of mine and he said no i know the guy's got that car and you still want to buy it i can try to put everything together so the car was in way on the other side of chicago we live just outside anderson south carolina so between me and the seller and my buddy we went back and forth about two months and i didn't really know what it was when i bought the car i just knew it looked like a rusty walls car and looked close enough so i was going to just kind of roll the dice away so we got up there and we got the deal done got the car home and like everything else she kind of started doing all the research on everything and trying to figure out exactly what you've done when i got the car i was told it was in days of thunder and it's still got the camera mounts are still welded to your a-post on the inside of the roll bar i kind of believe that part where is that on this side there's three pilots there on both sides of it so they would pull the windshield out of the car and then put those giant cameras they used back in the 90s yeah they would fill the driver like you know as a chase car they would film the other car so i believe that park story yeah it is there [Music] through a long process i found a guy that actually purchased the car from hendrick motorsports and so when they were done filming the movie uh rick hendrick apparently had an auction and they sold all the cars off out of the movie and the guy still had the paperwork and stuff saying this was definitely the car it was in the movie i spoke to a guy that worked for rick and he also worked for paramount and why she sent him pictures of the car um he said that pretty sure this is true he said that so the fictitious cars in the movie hendrix built those cars but they went around to all the teams and they bought their show cars up so this car i'm assuming the richard petty car and that stuff were all former show cars for the teams he said they went to blue max racing who at that point in time rusty wallace drove for and he said that was actually a real blue max show car and i spoke to people that worked for the crew at that point and he's there said you know because there's liability involved if you say yeah that's definitely that car unless you've got paperwork saying it but he said most likely that's a real car and if as old as this chassis is they would have bought a chassis from nc anderson when uh raymond beatle who owned bluemax racing he bought out m.c anderson out of savannah georgia so this would have started off as a valvoline kellyarborough car and then it would have ended up being a tim richmond car so it could have been a bunch of different things you can kind of when i found out it was in the movie i started washing the clothes [Music] but there is the scene when they're supposed to be at bristol and it's a night race and they're all standing there by the wall after the race is over and um what's his name uh john c riley he said he makes that joke about there's a panel we don't have to fix the robert duvall kicks us out of the car if you look behind that car this car is sitting right there right behind you in this slivery yeah just like it is now right now yeah it's got like a hole in the moody switch panel yeah that's a whole chassis uh the stuff i found on the car that has dates on it for my 1983 83 so right now it's still got the engine transmission that was in it when they filmed it i haven't had a chance to pull this stuff out so basically i'm driving until i killed it is it 18 degrees small block what's the regular old small block 350. probably out of a truck or something so it's not even like a race car motor oh man sounds like it does look like a truck motor [Music] check out that radiator it's basically serving a purpose right now that radiator is a is a prime example of the period correct parts that that radiator is probably with this chassis [Music] yeah they had them but i mean that's what they ran 200 first way back i've got a dry sump 434 with afr heads on sitting back in the shop waiting for this thing i just didn't have time to before we came out here well you fired up can you hear what this one sounds like oh this is like a rear steer box chassis this is a super speedway car it's manual steering uh really cool it's got 256 when you're in there yeah wow that's funny because it it doesn't really have the thunder from the compression at idle but when you rev it it still kind of sounds the same it calls race car it's those pipes make everything great and the firing order oh yeah i think it's the small block fire order it just it just does that the ls engine does not sound like that for those i want to take a cam and have it ground to the old firing order and switch coil packs around to see if we can get an ls motor to sound like an old small block that's going to happen so you see that nose right there we were talking about the 80s versus the 90s parts yeah that's an older style bottom nose or where the cowl is so later on they got a little more racy later on they didn't have all that extra on the bottom see where it looks like it's got a splitter you know yeah it's real first rendition like an 88 or an 89 28 grand prix like 93 it was yes 93 it was super arrow all you had to do was cut your brake ducts in it's super trick really nice but i mean these cars they took a lot of pride in building these things you see all that b roll front right there [Music] [Applause] what's under the trunk is there anything cool to look at in there you can see the factory decklid deal and right here same deal this is like the trunk this is a factory part like i guess they call it the package tray but that's that's a factory part they just trimmed and tacked it in they would have got that from pontiac and yeah tacked it in there's the factory number for the whatever well not not factory like streetcar but from gm gm produced this this panel here exactly but you can see even in this car i mean the fuel cells are the exact basic you know same dimensions amount of bolts into his here's a bolt into mine even a car from the 2010s and even later the theory is all the same yeah i need one yeah they're out there if you find any for sale send them to me oh you don't messed up now you'll get them all we'll send them day after day they're they're hiding everywhere man some people hold them away some people uh won't you know the typical i'm gonna fix it up one day and some people like my dad you know they got done with them either sold them or crushed them but they're they're out there i found one sitting in a guy's front yard he's sitting in the front yard that comes with a car you know and then there's they got them up in their rafters you know they're like muscle cars you can still get them for cheap though sometimes uh but they're out there this thing is so freaking cool you can tell it's got the factory upper arms in it they're just kind of plasma cut out and factory cowls carved out to get air to the carburetor it's like this little tricks they did like he was saying this thing was it was it's a real car it was in that junkyard with the old dylan heart car so i would imagine that all that was like already carved out when he got it he just kind of cleaned it up and painted what he had to throw the factory dash in it starts the key this is just the coolest thing ever somebody probably welded those bars in 1972. i don't know what this is here it's like whatever this is like post race tech inspection or something [Applause] and they have a power shower too here's victory lane oh a helicopter pad oh maybe this was the infield care center because it's right next to the helipad that would make sense what is that [Music] the classic championship some richard childress event function was probably the last thing here they put something on there for and they just left it there [Music] man oh my gosh what it's yeah it's cool think about all the freaking cars that sat there all the people look at the old gatorade logo on the ground that's sweet man i think that had been painted over either that or it just didn't it faded off the black but not the white man can you guys believe all this stuff is still here like i'm so glad they're doing stuff here again to keep this place from getting destroyed or dilapidated beyond repair like wow there's graffiti on the walls people have broken in here and mess with stuff which is a shame if you're into this kind of thing you better hit that subscribe button because we're just getting into the skin of it right here this is just the beginning i wonder what kind of pull some pulls there you know i'm gonna have to spend like four hours on freaking google searching victory lane pictures to see how this evolved or what would have gone on here with that building in the background and all kinds of stuff this was the motor coach parking because i have a picture of our newel sitting over there it's a picture that someone took from turn one and you can see whenever it was robbie gordon's it was parked over…