Ford Tricked NASCAR With a Fake Taurus Prototype and IT WORKED! (with Don Miller)

it changed a lot of the rules we're going to cut the car off and then we cut it off right here the tourist race car was made from that car give you a little bit of background on what's going on here ford is discontinuing the thunderbird after 1997 and the nascar teams using ford do not know what they're going to use in 1998 yet in a previous video with don he talks about their marauder super bird project where they basically took the best of every ford body panel that was currently available and constructed their own car out of it tried to get ford to build it for the street to homologate us they could use it in nascar well that didn't work that's kind of the precursor to this video where they docked her up this taurus to show it to nascar and pretend it's a prototype so that they can get more advantageous aerodynamics approved for the cup car body in 1998 at that time nascar did not know what the 98 taurus was going to look like so this prototype they built was a fudge they showed it to nascar and told them hey this is a pre-production 1998 taurus here's what it's going to look like here's how we want to do our stock car body and they bought it and then they found out that that was not actually what the taurus looked like and it's a pretty interesting story straight from the man himself don miller who was a co-owner of penske racing south of the time i'm don miller and i'm the chairman of the board of the north carolina auto racing hall of fame you're here today i suppose to talk about the history of the taurus as a race car not as a passenger car that car out there was it was just as we call it in the business a prop when we applied for you know the uh okay to build a tourist race car we had to justify how the rear deck versus the regular you know vision of a taurus with the sloping deck lid could come into play so um we built that car out there and actually told nascar that this is what the taurus was going to look like on the road and you know really when you really get down to it the funny thing about it was it wasn't the next year but about two and a half years later that's how the tourists did look the exact lid was flat so maybe we had a big effect on that i don't know ford motor company gave us a brand new taurus at the time we said we really didn't tell them what we were going to do but because i think they probably would have frowned on it but what we did was they brought it back to the race shop well what do you want to do down i said well actually what we want to do is come up right right from this spot where you can see all the the uh broken up bodywork we're going to cut the car off and we cut it off right here just cut it right across here and onto the other side took the whole back of the end of the car off and then we made new quarter panels because as you can see the deck lid is raised up about three inches so so what we had to do is put a piece in here and then we made this whole lower section of a rear bumper etc and kind of blunted it off so that you know we could really take advantage of the arrow effect and then took the existing deck lid and right and straightened it out put the tail lights and everything back in it put this panel here which was really nice looking when we did it but this is 30 years later and it's been outside somewhere i don't know where and and it's got plenty rusty but it made the rear window look more like a traditional window of today rather than the round window it had at the time then we put this little uh aero device as they called it a ford we call it a wing put that on the on on the deck lid to trim it out so as you can see it's a it was a major deal we had to cut all this out put all new pieces in and um it's it served its purpose but at the time it was a lot of work and as you can see this portion of the car is no longer uh you know a shock absorber like most of the safety bumpers are nowadays so it could never be sold to the public yeah this looks a lot different than a way a taurus would have come off what they what they're supposed to look like is this right here this indent kind of where the brake lights would have been with the yeah because it would have been down lower yeah but you know it served its purpose at the time and it looked realistic obviously there's not much of a difference between this and every other taurus on the road the one we uh really built it for though where they had a 358 cubic inch ford small block of the v8 at the time it wasn't considered um uh i don't know the uh i guess the straight-up way of doing it but we we wanted to get a car that would be competitive on the racetrack and the only way we could do that is to level the playing field and when i say level that's a key word because we wanted the top of the deck lid to be flat and level with the ground so that's why that car had to be built because at the time the rule was you had to have the factory silhouette yeah everything was governed by something like you see on that and that pontiac that's the long template that metal piece on the top of it that's an exact uh replica of the of the 19 or let's see i guess it was uh 1991 when we did that so that's what the template looked like in 1991 it followed that configuration and that's how your your vehicle had to uh fit your uh current nascar template a long template so when all this took place with the taurus it eventually caused nascar to finally give in and make a universal long template that fit every car ford chevrolet pontiac dodge whatever it was they all had to fit that one single long template and that long template was made off the taurus really absolutely off of that tourist up there off the tourist race car and the tourist race car was made from that car because that was that was the first four-door car that was adapted to be a two-door cop car wasn't it yeah it was you know back then everything was based on a real car you know what i mean and and tradition had dictated the fact that we all ran a two-door sedan because it was a sports model or a two-door car period and a four-door car wasn't even considered when ethel ford came to us and said we're gonna race what we build in the factory and that that was the key right there they build four-door tauruses so if you go back and you look at some of the history and if you look at that book the taurus it actually shows some of the things that uh the ford motor company wanted us to do with the race taurus to make it look like it was a four-door uh you know by changing the rear uh the side glass windows and everything on it uh putting extra bars on there really are made of decals you know so um but that didn't last very long everybody went back to making it look like a two-door so um the uh the taurus itself is uh was a real game-changer in in nascar it changed a lot of the rules when you were sitting at a table in a room over at penske who who were the guys at the table and who said let's take a car and make it how we want it and then show that to nascar and hope they buy it like who whose idea was this well there see there were there wasn't a uh there wasn't a group of people as you say you know sitting at a table there was only five of us and the whole decision was made in the wind tunnel that this decision told us that if we were going to be even if we were going to even be competitive we had to have a competitive uh vehicle and a competitive vehicle had a raised deck light if it was going to be a taurus and so there was there was no decision making no big vote to be taken we just said this is what we have to have and we built it so there was nobody ever had any uh dilemmas like oh well we're kind of this is not what the car is actually going to look like we might get in trouble there wasn't any of that no i had a i had a lot of that discussion with myself late at night and i thought i'll probably get fired about this one but i said that's the way it was you know you had to have it that's what we did all the cars look the same now because they are the same you know it looked like a it's like taking a whole big bowl of jelly beans and because they're all different colors doesn't make them different it just it's just a presentation and that's all they're after is the presentation what was nascar's reaction whenever they found out what the real taurus looked like they asked me to come down to daytona and i had a meeting with stuart with mr france and uh he let me know that he was very displeased with what i had done he probably he had more restraint than i thought he had he threatened to take my license et cetera et cetera but as it turned out it seemed like forever but it was probably only 20 minutes or a half an hour or something he um finally said you know what we're gonna do we're gonna make you guys been wanting this for a long time and i'm tired of fighting it and we've got so much going on right now we're we're going to create a long template that everybody has got to meet and i said okay that sounds that sounds reasonable and he said we're going to make it off that taurus so i want that car to stay here so we can measure it up and that's what he did he took the first taurus that we built kept it there and they measured it all up and created a new long template then those templates were distributed to all the teams didn't make any difference whether there was a gm team or a or a ford team it was everybody was the same the first car that you tested was that car ever tested in the wind tunnel no car was never tested in the window because we knew what the result was going to be because of these kind of things all these all these models that we built we knew what it was going to do so uh it's kind of like when they build an aircraft in fact it's not kind of like it's exactly like you make a prototype first of all you create a drawing and you'll see when you look at that book i got made your initial drawings because that's what i i studied you know i was a commercial artist so i drew the car up as to what it would look like ford okayed it and then we went to england and built a model you know and that's when we decided uh high the decklid would be well they do the same thing with an airplane you you you get a concept drawing and then you get a blueprint and then you build the aircraft and then you put in a wind tunnel and you work all the bugs out of the of the design and then you build a new then you build a full-size aircraft and then you test fly it you know all said and done taurus make it to the track was it a success it was an absolute success in fact if you go back and check all the records it was so successful when we first came out it won it at daytona uh i think rusty won the first 125 with it with a brand new taurus and then of course they started looking at changing the rules because they thought they gave the tourists too much so they started picking things out and the tourists that they didn't want us to have before the 500 ever ran and then after the 500 when we went to the to the traditional racetracks you know non-non-restrictor type race tracks it was immediately successful there as well and the taurus has started kicking everybody's butt so nascar started taking parts of the spoiler off i think a in a quarter inch i mean a half inch off on the right side a half inch off on the left side pretty soon they were taking some off the top of the spoiler they did everything they could to slow the thing down and kill the downforce but it it was too late the taurus was on its way how did you guys at penske become the arm to figure this out whenever uh yates was kind of like the ford team everybody has their own opinion of why it was done but um i think i think dan rivard and bruce camber and uh and edsel ford had a lot of faith and in our integrity we would keep it a secret and you know the history of all the rest of these guys including roush was nothing was a secret you know they were always looking to get padded on back about something we just kept it to ourselves and we did it well back in the day i was always on the hot seat with nascar and complaining especially when we had the pontiac you know we we we need this we need that we need it and we and i was the only one i was pumped to lay i was in there you know pitching the ball for pontiac and there was people in there doing it for ford and some for chevrolet et cetera everybody was trying to get their piece of the apple you know i was arguing with bill france jr and a couple of the other people at nascar about the length of the deck lid on the pontiac and and it was it got pretty heated and finally i was asked to leave the trailer so i was coming down the stairs and on the winston trailer at the racetrack the guy at the bottom of the stairs that greeted me was chrissy conomacki and he said don come here man i want to talk to you he said you know i like you he said i'm going to tell you something that'll you need to listen to and i thought oh boy here i'm going to get another you know another one of those uh long-term explanations of why i shouldn't do this or that but chris came up with something that i've always remembered i remember it clearly to this day he said you know back in the 40s he said the biggest draw in motorsports or the [ __ ] auto racers he says study your history i said i don't have to study my history i know what that was like that era was fine he said we raced six days a week and all over the country he said it was that way everywhere everybody wanted to go to the bemidji races because they were so you know charged with the excitement and you know the pros and the cons and the guys that get thrown you know so it was really exciting he said but they were always laboring to get the the rules tightened up so you know that nobody would have an advantage etc you know and he's pretty soon you know aaa and usac and the rest of them all got together and they they did make the rules a lot tighter and when they made the rules a lot tighter they found that all the cars are the same so nobody could pass anybody and somebody get out front and they stayed out front which really made it a boring race and within a year they were only racing three nights a week and he said then it got worse as you know check your history book think about that for those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it exactly anytime we are able to talk don miller is something that we jump on immediately because everything he has to say is just i don't even know better i don't know a better way to describe it than absolutely worth listening to because he's lived 10 different lifetimes of 10 different individual stories of so he's a wealth of knowledge in like every aspect of life yeah he's he's done everything everywhere and actually you can read about it in his book he doesn't even know that we're talking about this but i read it it's really cool and there's lots of pictures so and funny stories yeah funny stories don basically discovered rusty wallace um did lots of stuff with dick trickle short track racing roger penske in the early days lost his leg at talladega in 1978 by a pit road accident all kinds of stuff it's all in here he does a lot of good charity events yeah the the the north carolina auto racing hall of fame museum is a non-profit organization for the abused children of north carolina i believe i believe it's the the carolinas not just north carolina i think it's north and south probably it does good stuff for good people and um they got all kinds of cool old stuff in their gift shop too that people donate so when you buy it that goes straight to the proceeds of the charities so every time we go there we come back with all kinds of cool stuff that we don't need i got this really cool neo bonnet truck and i thought that was really cool because you never find anything to steal bonnet yeah there's this cool stuff all over the place and sometimes we go there and we get packages of old cards and we stick them in your shirt orders so if you like the shirt that you see us wearing and i'm wearing right now like this hat we have them all these on stapletonautoworks.com if you'd like to support what we're doing in this channel if you're a fan of nascar history as we're talking about this shelby the puppy is making us pay attention to her so she doesn't do something she's not supposed to do yeah she's shredding a tissue but this the shirt i'm wearing right now is the first white shirt we've ever had we got this one the car in the back limited stock yeah limited stock we're running out of these ones pretty quick um we got this one with the bigger logo on the front is black uncovering stock car racing history because that's what we do here like boom tubes we like to make cool noises here or a good wrench style pit crew shirt or monte carlo monte carlo or our og logo and we got hats our display is pretty whack we got matching hats for basically everything we have we have the winston hat too this hat and it's got the boom tube eagle bird on the side and he's holding a wrench because it's awesome all these different stickers you get all five of these stickers for nine bucks it's a good deal yeah it's a good deal most people sell one sticker for five you get all these for nine because let's be honest stickers really aren't that expensive and they're cool and we want you guys to be able to have them if you'd like to see more stories with don leave a comment because he's got a lot of them one of which is the invention of the roof flaps which he kind of told us about after we were done filming and you're you're gonna want to see that so he has about a million cool stories we could make a video every day for the rest of our lives with everything he owes yeah one of he's one of those guys that when he talks you listen and the camera better be going because it's valuable historical information so we're glad you're here if you're still here you are why we are able to do this if you weren't watching these videos wouldn't exist because we wouldn't have the means to produce them because they take a lot of time and effort so we thank you even if you don't want to buy a shirt or you want to buy them but you don't have the extra money right now whatever it's fine the most important thing is that you are here watching stuff participating leaving comments we want to hear from you we read like all of them almost so speak up we try our best it's kind of impossible to get all of them yeah when a video is new if you leave a comment and the first day or two a video is live you're almost guaranteed to get a response from one of us so just pick up down there we want to know what you think and you can stay tuned for some more build videos like the new exhaust on the monte carlo that's coming up among other things i actually gotta finish editing this video and change the radiator in it because the one in there leaks for some reason so we'll probably make a video about that on the stapleton 42 extra channel yeah a new problem oh yes a new problem on the car that just loves to give us them so yeah nothing new under the sun here but you're going to get to see how we fixed it if you want to see like the nonsense kind of videos it's just stapleton 42 space extra and we post whatever we want to post there because it doesn't matter