Bob Keselowski's 1980s Cabover Custom Race Hauler RV: Old School ARCA Series Survivor!

Did it ride good? No. Now if you really needed to stop for some reason, you're just waving out the window hopefully he's looking in a rear rear mirror or I did fall off the top once when I was a kid. Fell down to the bottom and never woke up. So what is this truck we're looking at here? >> Okay, so this is my dad's hauler from the ARCA days and early truck days. [Applause] [Music] I think it's like an '80 one or '82 cab over white. And it had gotten the frame extended on it. And a box put on it from somebody in Michigan. And then we re- rebuilt the whole inside of it as a motor home {slash} ramp truck. And that's what we ran in ARCA all the way through from about '88 through '95 and then we ran truck series with it. And we actually ran this all the way up to the start of '97. We sold it to a guy named Roger Blackstock that ran some ARCA stuff back in the in the '90 '80s and '90s. And that's who we ended up buying it back from. That was what I was going to ask you. Where did it go and how did you get it back? >> He had some different decals and paint and stuff on it, but and honestly, Brad's guys did such a good job on this thing. It's way nicer than it was then. So this would have been pulling around the Black Bandit era ARCA Monte Carlo. >> The late '80s there and into the Chrysler days and into the Mopar days. Yeah. Um we spent a lot of time driving up and down the road in this thing as kids. We were just little. Brad would have been I don't know, 5 to 10 years old and I was a couple years older than Brad and we spent a lot of time in this thing. Didn't have air conditioning, nothing in it. So when you're going up and down the road, it was it was hot. So we'd be hanging out the little window on the side and >> This one here? >> Yeah. And uh all the cabinets all had racing parts in them and Uncle Ron usually drove it. My dad and uncle were known particularly in this part of uh you know, metro Detroit as being the guy you go to if you want something done on your hot rod or drag car or whatever it might be. So they had a business they ran called Kislowski Race Cars. Basically, if you wanted like a cage in your a roll cage in your new drag car like you brought your car to them, they put a roll cage in it. And they would do that particularly during the uh the winter months just to pay bills. Towards the truck days when I started going with the race team a lot, I ran rode a lot with him in the hauler. But uh yeah, it she's a big old beast. They did a great job repairing this thing, put it back together again. Yeah, the black paint Oh, yeah. This thing looks immaculate. >> Fitzgerald Gliders went through the engine and the the drive line and everything on it for them. So now it's got an automatic transmission in it. There's some pictures of the old days at the old ARCA shop. That's the that's the Auburn Hills shop right there when it and then the Lake Orion shop below it. It's a 2790 Auburn Road. This was my dad's race shop when I was a kid all the way up till 1999. You can tell where he paved all this to park the race car haulers. Still has it. They say the lights go out at two. So you can always tell if something used to be a race shop. It has parking that doesn't quite make sense and an electrical plug-in. It's kind of like I seen some of your videos before you talked about how they have three flags. Yeah. >> know why that's like a motorsports thing, but this is one too where you see like random electrical plug-in and parking that doesn't really make sense. So when my dad went to he got a second hauler. He had two haulers at one time. That's exactly what he did. He paved a little wider so he could park both haulers. The flip spot. Gymnastics. Here we go. So the race hauler would park like right here. It's a really nice building at the time. Now it's a gymnastics center. Look at that. One of the fun things about this building you can kind of see it. See the line on the wall right there? >> Yeah. Uh when they were building it uh we had like an unexpected thaw and frost event and the the wall froze and caved in right on that line right there. And they're just like, "Oh well, we'll see what we can do to fix it." Cuz they were supposed to move in at the start of the '99 season and got pushed back to the middle because the building collapsed. And me and Brad sitting at think at like Flat Rock. I probably was I don't know, eight or nine. Brad had been about six or seven. I remember in some of his stories where they made him stay with grandma while you would go and work on the car. Yeah. Was it more when when he went on the trip were you like, "Oh, you're bringing Brad?" Like What was crazy my brother had a driver's license. But he wouldn't let me ride with him. So I had to ride the bus. Was he too cool for you? Oh, definitely. I was a freshman, he was a senior. He was too cool for school. I was like the dweeby younger brother. Or was it more fun when he was there? always went, right? And during the the times uh the spring or the fall where we couldn't go to the races, then you know, we spent a lot of time at grandma's house or my sisters would watch us or something, right? So my grandfather built this house and uh when he built it, you can see the tall part. That's what he built. It was this tiny house and he put this extension on it. Uh when I got old enough to go to the race track when I probably didn't look old enough, but they they called it good enough. >> My brother looked like he was 18 when he was 14, but I looked like I was 14 when I was 18. And uh so my my parents took full advantage of that. And uh they falsified my brother's NASCAR license when he was 14 and said that he was 18. And he got to travel with them and I didn't. You know, it is what it is, right? I didn't like it at the time, but I got it, right? Like he got he could get away with it and I I was not going to get away with it. I was probably about 12, 13 years old and and actually going to the races quite a bit. Maybe not when I was at school, but so you know, we spent a lot of time going up and down the road, but we always spent the summers where we were all racing together, you know. >> Oh, okay. Unless it was some kind of crazy long road trip thing, but back in ARCA days, we didn't do that that much. Truck days, it started getting a little more serious. Uh we we would you know, stay on the road for a month at a time plus doing the West Coast races or whatever. And we didn't get to go to those a lot. When all you guys would go to the tracks, who would camp in here? Who would stay at hotels? >> So it would mostly be me, my mom, my dad. Uh we would be in the the camper part of this back here, which is a little bit smaller than it used to be because Brad had had some stuff moved around a little bit. I'm sorry, actually it's a little bigger than it used to be. So it used to be smaller. You can imagine that. There was a bathroom in here on the side. It was a removable little toilet and kind of it was nasty. You didn't want to have to use that if you didn't have to. But we had bunks up top and and down here. I mean, there was times we probably had six, seven people in this thing. Wow. >> And it was was it configured like this with with the benches here and stuff? It looks exactly the same. They they redesigned everything. This is the way my mom made all the cushions. She did all the sewing and all the stuff and all that. So and these cushions pick up and there's boards underneath of them and there's storage underneath you here. And then there used to be a thing up top. It's gone now, but it had like a small TV with a VCR in it. We would watch either old races or old movies or whatever going down the road, but the TV probably wasn't more than 10 inch TV. It was a tiny little thing. Might have even been black and white at the time, but we didn't have air conditioning in it then. So it it could get pretty hot in here. So we had little windows and that's all you had is these little windows that open. This little thing here flips down. Once you're up there, it would flip down and you could kind of just walk around the whole thing. >> And that helps. And do whatever. This is not connected to the cab. >> It's not connected to the cab. So there's no way. There was no communication. Nobody had cell phones back then. >> Wow. So if you really needed to stop for some reason, you're just waving out the window hopefully he's looking in a rear rear mirror or something like that. So but yeah, it uh there was no communication. The cab's its own deal. We had a deal leading before that. There was a it was uh like a big stake truck and it had a hole in the back the back of the cabin the front of the box where you could kind of go between the two. I mean, that's that was early '80s. That was late model days into the first part of the ARCA days. Uh that thing was rough. This thing was a lot nicer when we built it and then uh you know, as we got the the more sponsorship in the Mopar days come through, that's when we got our first tractor trailers, but that wasn't until '97. And we didn't even get it until like the second or third race in '97. So we ran this the first race or two in that those first Mopar days. And nowadays, it's just hauling around some go-karts and things like that. Brad and uh and the guys will go over to GoPro and and get some laps in for road course racing, but uh we were talking about maybe taking the truck in this and we may if we run the Charlotte event, may take that in this just to have like a full-on vintage thing, right? But we didn't really want to drive this all the way to Watkins Glen. It's not something you want to have a super long road trip in right now, so. Would you believe me if I told you that I've never owned a flex head ratchet until now and I've never owned a stubby ratchet either? Now I got it all with Tool it. This set right here is certainly a great addition to my toolbox, especially at the race track. You never know what you're going to need. Half the time your race track toolbox becomes a fix your tow rig toolbox or cobble your trailer back together toolbox. We got long 3/8, stubby 3/8, medium 1/4 inch, and a long 1/2 inch. We need them extra torque. 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Go to the link in the description and get yours today. Take it to the Where did you guys shower at when you camped in this? Uh hopefully at the racetrack. Yeah, that's about it. That's That was You just got lucky. We did have a lot of times you'd have like water somewhere, but it wasn't the nicest. So, you get a little stinky in there. Yeah, we didn't We didn't stay in this a lot at racetracks though. Like we didn't camp in it at the track a lot. A lot of times we went to hotels or whatever. And then by '92, we had the for the the ARCA stuff. And that kind of ran through in our truck days. And then we got a motorhome and we stayed in a motorhome at the racetrack. But previous to '92, we must have stayed in hotels and stuff, you know, whatever. I don't remember staying in this at the racetrack. It was something that like once you got to the racetrack, you would sit in there in the lounge area or you know, the camper area. You know, dad would change his into his uniform or whatever and stuff, but um I don't remember staying in it a whole lot at the racetrack. But you stayed in a lot going up and down the road. Boy, I remember being like the old um uh dirt track days like when we ran Springfield New Coin. It would be so hot and we'd have a cooler with ice in there. You just had to stand in the cooler. It was so damn hot. I mean It's amazing getting carsick in there. Oh god. Yeah, that would not be good. Luckily we didn't, but I did fall off the top once when I was a kid and fell down to the bottom and never woke up. And they thought I was in pretty bad shape. I kind of complained about my ankle a little bit and then when I did wake up, I was like, "How did I get on the floor?" I mean, little kids, they're pretty resilient apparently. >> You fell off the top bunk. >> top top Oh wow. >> All the way to the floor. Going down the road? >> Yeah. They probably was like, "What was that bump back there?" I don't know. Mom was like, "I wasn't sure you were okay." Oh my god. But cuz it's all steel floor, too. So, you land, you land. Yeah. It's solid. It's amazing the shape the frame is in. Yes. Like being in Michigan and Luckily they did a full-on box off restoration. I mean, they they really went through this thing and did a lot of work. The whole ramp in the back folds down. And then we used to have a winch in here and we had like eye hooks in the front of the car with a thing that would go between and the winch would hook to it and then would come up to the top and then actually come back down with a winch. All that stuff I think is He might still have a winch, but everything else has been removed cuz that was all add-on stuff from later, but uh Was it common back then to have a like this isn't a truck and trailer, it's just one It was one unit. >> one unit >> We did later on put a thing for a trailer to be on it if we needed a backup car, things like that. But back then, we didn't have backup cars. Like you just You didn't do that. That's That was really kind of a thing that happened maybe on a cup side by like the early '90s when money started really coming in and everybody got bigger. But for us in ARCA days, we never had backup cars. So, if you crashed, like you had to fix the car that you were you were running. There's only one time I ever remember using a back backup car was '92 at Michigan. And we had our intermediate car and he wrecked I want to say qualifying. We used to do two rounds of qualifying and we come back with this the super speedway car and ran it. And I don't remember exactly where he started in that race, but he ended up winning that race. And that was the only time we won at Michigan. They won it in a backup car. Is that cuz you could just go to the shop and get it over there? >> went to the shop. >> didn't bring it with you That was 2 hours away from the track, you know, our shop was about 2 hours from that track. So, yeah, we didn't bring it with us. We never did that. That was all added on for a lot later in the in the deal, but like when we started going West Coast with the truck series stuff, I mean, we only had one truck then, too, when we first started. So, we didn't even have a backup truck. So, you wrecked something, you had to fix it. What engine is in this thing? Detroit diesel thing. Old old two-stroke. Yeah. I mean, this thing is like It sounds good. It is old school. It really is. Like I said, Fitzgerald brothers went through it. They did a pretty good job with it. I'm pretty sure it's an '80 or an '81. It says 6Vf on it. I don't know what the rest of the numbers are. I know 6V is a number I've heard before, but these things aren't really >> I don't honestly know much about these things other than just what I've been told. [Applause] [Music] Did it ride good? No. No, not particularly. It had I think like air ride seats. I never got so sick in my life as riding in the front seat. This thing just all over the place with um I taught myself how to just go lay down if I had cuz this thing would make you would shake your bladders loose, right? You'd have to pee about every 20 minutes. I taught myself how to just to go to sleep and not worry about having to use the bathroom every 20 minutes. And that That taught me how to go up and down the road more often without having to stop all the time, but yeah, if you told him around you had to pee, he would go an extra 200 miles just to have to have to stop. You didn't want to tell him that stuff. You just had to wait it out. Sounds like Mitchell. Yeah. It's like, "We'll stop when the tank's empty." Yeah. Yeah, he didn't say it had 600 miles left to go. That is amazing how nice it is living in Michigan and the salt and parking on mud and all that stuff like >> I'm betting you a lot of a lot of things have been replaced in there because of that, but um she was pretty rough when we got it back. I can imagine. Yeah. Just someone's daily driver just rotting in a parking lot for years or something. >> Yeah. Crazy thing on this one. I may have a picture of this thing when the guy sent it to me before we bought it back. And this thing wasn't running for a few years. Like it sat in the guy's like lawn and it'd been sitting there for a year or two plus. And I mean, it just it was basically junk. So, I noticed this has leaf springs in the front. That had to be pretty It does not ride good. I don't I That's one reason why we don't want to take it to walk Between I don't know if it'll make the trek and the ride for it, I'm not that interested in driving it that far. Does it still not have air conditioning? It does in the main part uh because Brad had that put in. And I think he's actually got like a real diesel generator for it now, too. That was an extra We didn't have a generator in the in there. But we had a removable generator, but it was not something you could run going up and down the road. So, it was something it was put in towards the back about where that plug-in is now. I'll never forget it because when I was like 11 or 12, dad's trying to get me to help him put the generator in and he smashed my finger in with it. And he's like, "What are you doing? You know, why won't Why can't you pick this up?" And then I'm bleeding everywhere. He's like, "Ah, go to your mother." All those little clips of Brad talking about this stuff are from the hometown history tour video that we did with him where we go through all the shops where they grew up, all kind of stuff, all kind of stories about his dad and even the shop that his uh his uncle raced out of in the '70s. We went there, too. So, you guys check that video out if you haven't seen it already. It's really, really good. Where did you first race a full-bodied stock car at? Auto City Speedway. Uh I crashed and I crashed in an embarrassing fashion. I bumped the guy that was uh like in front of me and when I did, our bumpers got stuck together. And we looked like My dad My dad said you look like two dogs I'll never forget that. Uh I don't know if that's going to make the film or not, but I can censor stuff. So, like our cars are stuck together, right? And they literally had to stop the race, bring out two tow trucks. And we're on the front stretch. They like tried to unhook our cars cuz neither of us could move. I remember the tow truck driver ran up to me and I was like 16. And this tow truck driver had this deep voice and he's probably like 50 some years old hailing his little daughter and goes, "What in the hell are you doing?" It's like I can still hear him saying it, right? And that was like 2000, 1999, 2000. That was 24 years ago. And we did a…