Brian Keselowski’s Vintage Dodge Ram NASCAR Truck Resurrection! Reunited After 18 Years

It sat in a junkyard in a building in a junkyard. About as nasty as you could imagine it could be. What I really really wanted was an Xpipe. >> This was actually a purpose-built truck for Denniser in 99 for one race. >> And obviously the lessons have paid off. He has got that number Dodge conserving tires. Here we go. >> And it was built brand new for the 2000 season as a road course truck. So, it was a purpose-built road course truck. Has the reverse mount, panard bar, the battery mounted to the right side, all the stuff we can do for right side road course racing back then. And since then, all that stuff's becoming illegal. You can't do that anymore. But, uh, the unfortunate part was is the truck stopped road course racing after this. This was the last one they had for almost 10 years. We had no use for this truck, so it sat in our showroom for the next 6 years, and it just sat there. And when we sold our race team, it got sold to one of those crazy Dodge guys that loves Dodge stuff out in North Dakota. So, he bought a bunch of stuff from us and about 18 years later, we ended up back with it. >> Did you know that he kept it the entire time? >> I I kind of knew because about not just after dad died, but a little over 3 years ago, the guy contacted me, his son contacted me and said his dad was running into some health problems, too. He's like, you know, I'm going to sell all this stuff. and he sold dad's old Lebaron and he bought a Dodge Charger from us to a street car that dad had and he sold that to somebody else through a lot of different people. Brad ended up back with the Lebaron. It's not here. It's over at a different place. But, uh, this truck still sat there and the guy didn't know what he was going to do with it. And honestly, there was no real resale unless you were a Dodge guy that wanted it. And at the time, I told him, I don't really have anything I can do with it because I was trying to get out of the shop that we were in and and just was no reason to have it. And then last year when Brad went to walkins Glenn, Jim France and Mike Hilton have bought into this HSR deal. So they actually are running it out of Daytona. I mean it's it's like a full-on almost NASCAR deal now. So uh they started a NASCAR Classics division within HSR and they're bringing race cars to the track to try to just drum up some interest. And when Brad went there and and he watched the race with them and noticed how excited that those guys got about this this event, he's like, "I think we need to be involved in this." So he had me come over and he's like, "Well, what do you know about historic racing?" Like, "Well, I know about nothing, but you know, they run with us. I I just know that they run old race cars, you know." So I started looking into it and I knew where this truck was. So we contacted a guy and he's like, "Yeah, come get it." So, we I drove up to North Dakota and went and got it. I haven't touched the paint on the chassis or the body. >> Really? >> Yeah. So, that's how good it actually stayed. I think it was kind of helpful that it was as dirty as it was. >> It sat in a junkyard in a building in a junkyard >> and that's where the thing sat. Had a street motor in it at the time. And I had them pull that out cuz I didn't want nothing to do with that. And I think the guy drove it around a little bit. I don't really know where or what. I think it was just some shows or something. But there it sat for years and it was a mess. It was nasty. It had rat turts in the seats and just half inch of dirt on the thing. It was just about as nasty as you could imagine it could be. >> Some of these graphics are original. >> So everything but the Mopar graphics. The uh the contingencies are all original. The Mopar graphics were just put on here recently because we had taken them off a long time ago back when I sat in our showroom. But the big thing for us and for this series is they want the cars to be historically accurate for the library, right? So that's how they want it to look. This was about as close as we could get. The best way to recreate it is we bought a model off of eBay from the 2000 year and it had a decal pack in there and the decal guy actually was able to copy that and recreate the decals based off of that model. >> That's pretty cool. >> So that's how everything turned out. So, who's supposed to drive it now? What are you going to do with it? >> I guess it's going to be me. >> Oh, yeah. >> Yeah. I I didn't really want to do that. That was not the goal. I wanted to put it together and and go on the racetrack. I was hoping Brad would drive it and uh you know, there's some extenduating circumstances with the Dodge and the Ford stuff. He just didn't want to upset the Apple Card any. So, uh I guess I win the the prize. I get to do it. So, but uh we'll see how that works. I have to I put my seat in it. So, it's a big seat in the car and I haven't been racing in quite a while. I drove dad's land speed car about 3 4 years ago, but other than that, it's been 10 years plus. So, >> you're still probably more qualified than a lot of those guys that are there. So, >> I will say the last cup race I ran was at Watkins Glenn. So, at least there's that. You know, >> you're fresh. >> Yeah, fresh from two 2013. >> More than anything, my biggest concern, I just don't want to wreck it. >> Yeah. I just want to keep it clean and cuz you're not going to find body parts for this thing anywhere. >> Mhm. >> This um this was a little bit of a specialized truck too. The year in 2000 we went to a new nose piece and uh this nose I'm not 100% but I'm pretty sure only ran a 2000 year. And then when they went to Dodge, the street truck came up with a new like headlight and bumper had that kind of circular headlight with >> the curves on the bottom. >> Yeah. >> So that I'm pretty sure the race truck got that same styling to it. So this nose was actually something that we developed in the end of 99 and we went to California Speedway and ran it and um and tested it for quite a bit and then this is what we settled on and that's what we ran into,000 years. So, you're not going to find that unless you can find a very very specific truck that would have had that. Lower nose on these Dodges were Pontiac. That's that's from the early '90s Pontiac Cup car. >> Like from here down. >> Yeah. Basically from here, they had the old dish in here. And the original trucks didn't have this grill work involved in it. So, let's say like 95. The original first truck Dodge trucks had a Chevy lower nose that we used on it and it was a weird kind of shovel nose looking thing, right? 96 we went to this styling of nose for the lower half of the nose and that was dad ran Pontiacs in the early '90s and that was where we helped design that. So that lower nose was actually a early '90s Pontiac lower nose the design of it. And of course this this stuff wasn't involved in that. We actually made it out of aluminum. So like 9798 if you looked at the trucks everybody had a little different styling of what they did right there because it was pretty wide open. Then they molded it in because they like the styling of it. So that aluminum piece all ended up molded in. And of course this year this year nose was all different anyway. It's a 2000 was like its only gear that it ran. But the original base design off of this was all off the early '90s Pontiac. >> And that's cuz your dad had that one sitting around. We liked them and we nobody could come kind of agree on what they wanted to use for a lower nose because back then the trucks were very wide open. Like that first year or two of trucks, you could about do whatever you wanted cuz they just didn't have a locked in design. And once we got about 97 or so, that's when they started really locking everybody in and saying, "All right, this is what we're coming up with." So once Dodge actually got super involved, cuz that first year Dodge wasn't very involved. '95 they didn't have a lot of programs involved. At 96 they got really involved with it. Made a Dodge truck out of petties and a Mopar truck was actually with the 30 truck that year. Jimmy Hensley actually drove in 96 uh before he got the Dodge deal cuz um Rich Bickl was in the Dodge truck. So Jimmy ended up in the 30 truck and then he moved to the Dodge truck the next year and then we got the Mopar deal. >> Oh. So, but yeah, original design was based off early 90s >> Pontiac. >> Is that why it's got this little flat thing in here? >> I think that was just some of the styling from the Dodge bumpers. I'm I'm not sure if the the 99 truck was different. >> It was that was a little different. So, in 99 when we were running the the engineering team, um, we come up with this new nose working with the the Dodge engineers and we actually had a 99 truck and then a 2000 nose that would bolt onto the truck. Like, we could take the old nose off and put the new nose on at the racetrack. And it was a really kind of uh uh funny deal where it actually bolted in the middle of the fenders. That's that same year that Greg Moore died at at California. Um, so we ran the truck race on Saturday and then tested Monday and Tuesday, like right after he died on Sunday. So we were at the track the next days. Like we stayed there the whole time, but we ended up doing a ton of testing with this. We blew up like five motors. It was a mess. The whole test was a super big mess. But we landed on running this nose design. Even back then, they ran wicker bills on the trucks. So, these were actually optional. You had like an 18-in long one and a 24-in long one, and they had to be/ inch wide. So, they kind of had rules on all that stuff. And we actually ran that for quite a bit. And probably jeez, maybe 2000, like late 2000s is when they stopped running them, like 2008. >> What was the difference between the 18 and 24 in? >> Just the amount of downforce and drag you were going to have. A lot of times we ran the smaller ones on the intermediate tracks. Um, at one point they made these mandatory at 24 in for the super speedway races like Daytona and you know, so that was actually a big thing at Daytona in about 2001 or two. Uh, Rick Crawford and and Ted Musgrave got up in the wall and qualifying on purpose to flatten these out. And then they had done a bunch of stuff with shifter boots and oil tank covers. And then they started making everything mandatory because everybody was finding all this stuff they were, you know, basically, for lack of a better word, they were cheating on, but they were just moving things around. And >> they ended up making all these rules where you had to like the oil tank lid on this doesn't have a real lid. Well, now everything had to be sealed off and welded down because everybody was doing things to prop them up and get air out of it and it would make it faster. Same thing with the wicker bills. We're just making you slower so you get up against >> the wall. >> Yeah. Then on a warm-up lap, come up and up against the wall and flatten that thing off a little bit. There you go. >> How did they catch on to that? Like, >> well, when the two trucks that did it qualified on the front and they come in and they were all, you know, they were worked off the right front and like, why are you guys hitting the wall with these things? They're they come up with a pretty good idea why they did that. Oil tank were falling apart. Like the whole lids were coming off, the shifters were all coming off. like all the boots and everything, everybody had holes in it cuz they were just letting air out >> and it made it faster. >> The hood is a actual stock hood, >> but is something that they actually sold sent to us from a Dodge manufacturer that just didn't have the internal parts of the hood welded into it yet. And the original hoods that we had, we had to strip all that stuff out of them. Like we would get street stock hoods and have to strip everything out of it. Really roofs the same way. Well, we finally by about 98 99 we're starting to get just skins. You see with the air cleaner previous to cow induction for the trucks. >> We didn't go to cow induction until about 2002 maybe three somewhere in there. And they had this air horn style all the way up until that point. And that's that's how we ran from I think about somewhere between 97 98 all the way through the about 2001 or two is when we ran this air horn style. >> I bet that's like 40 or 45 lbs that hood yours is yours is 30. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. That's a lot of steel. >> It's like half the fender too. It's kind of the way it's almost like the old Buick how they came down on the fender. >> Yeah. That's uh it had its own styling for sure. That was all handbuilt type stuff. Obviously, we'd get the skin, but we'd have to do all the internal parts to it. And back then, we used to run these shocks. You can still find these at auto parts store. So, we actually put one on the other day, and it bent the crap out of our stand. But, uh, so that one was a little too strong. So, we had to go on, uh, Amazon and go find some that were a little different, but they still use these today on street cars for like rear windows or hoods and things like my Ford truck out there still has them on the hood. >> When this was raced, would it have had a the R3 W8? So, yes, they had the W8 in this particular truck. Yes, we were pretty much all on W8s by 98 and on. >> Uh 97 the W8 came out, but we weren't honestly we really never got one until almost the end of the year. So, dad won Richmond with a W7 headed. >> So, which was actually if you go back and watch the Richmond race, they kind of talk about that a little bit. >> Motor ran good. Gary stay engine just ran flawless all day and had adequate power. I mean, uh, >> he's like, I got adequate power, but we didn't have the new motor yet, which was odd deal because we were the Mopar truck. We would have thought we'd had a new motor, but we never did. But it was just kind of slow to come out in 90 97 and then '98 everybody was on the W8. >> Were the cabs on this truck? Factory stamping. >> This is a factory stamping. Yep. Uh, the Bost is actual Bost off of a truck. And then uh when we started, what we originally did is we took the back bost cuz the door would come in seameed right here. We would original Bost off the truck cuz you can see how it's a little shaped different through here. And then what we did is we cut two BS in half and made the front half out of the rear half. >> Oh. >> And then once we kind of got into that, that was probably 95 67 right in there. Then they started making stampings. So this is actual stamping. This is not an original like street Bost, but it's all copied based off of that. But it is the original roofs. Uh I think we had to make our own Apost which was really kind of easy. It just seamemed in right up in here and here and you just rolled it. It was a fairly easy piece to make. This was previous to both the common body in 2004 and then sometime about mid 2000 they allowed us to narrow the roofs up. So we cut the roofs into four pieces and narrowed the whole roofs up in about mid 2000, but this was previous to that. So this was still the original big Apost Bost roof from the Dodge stuff. This is how it came. >> Interesting. So that's the kind of stuff I'm real interested in to see how these things were actually constructed. >> So that year I actually came off the road and started racing myself. This was the first year I raced and I worked on the engineering team. So we did a lot of that development on the engineering team with that. So, we had two teams based in our in our shop. And my dad still raced, I'd say, three, four, five races, something like that that year in 99 and 2000. And he raced the engineering truck. And we built it and did a ton of testing. And we that back then you could test anywhere and do anything you wanted. So, we tested and tested and tested all the time with that truck. And then we built a brand new truck to mirror some of the stuff we had done with the the race team. And um he actually ran really well at Michigan that year with it. I think he was running second, hung it in gear on a restart and blew the motor up and wrecked it pretty bad. We were uh doing a lot of testing. It was actually a pretty interesting year. I was 18 and just kind of helping working on trucks and you know, we went all over the place. We went and did um some drag racing testing for restart stuff. We went to a drag strip um Norwalk up in Ohio >> really >> and just we didn't do standing restarts. We did rolling restarts. So we'd have somebody stand in front of the line and then when he would get there he would be in second gear after he rounded a corner and then just drop the hammer and go. It was all restart testing. >> Yeah. So it was all rolling. Yeah. >> There's actual race classes for exactly that now. >> Yeah. So I mean we tried to do a standing start. to burn the clutch up in one or two stock. It wasn't These are not developed for that. Clutches on drag race cars are that big. Ours are this big. You know, that's that's not going to work. But uh um so we did a lot of interesting testing back then on this stuff. But >> do you remember what the trap speed was on the rolling start? >> No, that was 20 plus years ago. >> No, it was interesting. But we did a lot of engine changes and transmission changes, a lot of drive line stuff. just trying to improve restarts because we were getting our butt kicked pretty bad on restarts. The main building that Dodge had was three miles down the road from us. So, all their engineers would come over to our shop all the time and, you know, work very closely with us. >> Yeah. I think being up there would be an advantage here. >> Big time. Yeah. Yeah. It was previous to when they built the wind tunnel. So, unfortunately, we didn't have a lot of wind tunnel stuff at that time. That was unfortunate because they did end up getting a wind tunnel operation after that, which would have helped a lot. >> Yeah. I always wondered how the the roofs were done on these things cuz I couldn't figure out in the in the when the trucks started they looked like factory green houses and then somewhere in there they looked >> they started shrinking >> the same and then they still kind of like have they changed at all since so far? >> No, that is still the 2004 Ford roof and a post bose everything on that. The current truck is still the same thing that we've had since 2004. >> That's pretty cool. Yeah, it's obviously they've moved it around and they've they've changed angles and things like that, but the stamping it's all the same stuff. This chassis is actually powder coated and not a lot of teams powder coated their stuff back then, but this is powder coated. >> Interesting. Cuz I was looking in the engine bay. I'm like, this looks really, really nice. Like this paint, >> it looks too nice, right? >> Can't believe that it didn't re repainted or something yet. So, this truck only had the one race on it. So, that helped a lot. But back then, we could powder coat chassis so fast. It was actually way, way cheaper for us. And all we had to do is pull the fiberglass off. So, we would get an entire truck built, body on it, everything, pull the fiberglass back off of it, call the the um the place that did all the powder coating. We could have it there at 6:00 in the morning and have it back in our shop by 2 three in the afternoon. And they were 2,…