Holman Moody is Building The LAST Original Ford GT40 MKII Chassis In The World! (Insane History)

this one was uh in france for le mans back in the day so when mario andretti won the daytona 567 his cam probably came from that machine yep or that one we are standing in holmen moody home in a moody whatever you want to call it the holm and moody there's only one and they still exist and they build original gt40s in here among a lot of other things cool stuff let me gotta admit we've already walked around here a little bit we've been here about five minutes and it feels like we just walked back into the 1970s or something like this is just this is the coolest thing ever so let's we're going to show you what's going on in here and maybe we'll get to hear one of these gt40s with the 180 degree headers fire up so you're the man behind the magic here i reckon so yeah i'm the point man on the gt40s and i love it these are like the real deal right these are original chassis uh made in england by tenant panels uh they're the last of the last and they're recognized as original cars um we're finishing what we've got at chassis uh this car will be going to peru when it's finished and we got a guy i believe out of ohio who's going to take another one and i will be starting on it in heavy this summer wow yeah how much is one of those costs about a million oh that's it about one million dollars one of these but it's on the list yeah about 10 years we'll be able to pay for it the thing about this was done just like the 60s like the original cars from original molds for the body it's it's all true to to what it as it were so this is all exactly how it was done as it was original type wiring harnesses everything so what makes the harness like that era correct over something that would be done today uh because of the wrapping the gauge of the wires the ends now these are aircraft grade switches so that's why they're made that that way i mean these are high-end this isn't just off the shelf at autozone this is stuff that can be in a fighter jet or something you know it's it's they use the best of the best and like say more that aircraft technology from back then i hear leagues it was this what kind of wire is this where you get these these ring terminals they look different i couldn't tell you you'd have to ask lee you'd have to ask way nicer yeah i mean they're they're not like things you get today i want to find where these come from and start using them yeah those look so much better than what we like when you look at the switches real close see they've got a little a little oh wow yeah they're sealed yeah yeah they're yeah they're pretty amazing there's mil-spec numbers on there military grade just like the am fittings same idea so what else uh no but that some of them do get polished oh that's such a chore i've polished them before they're so pretty well though that's actually a ceramic coated that's been tumbled and then on the red car over there when you look at those those are polished stainless steel which is very tough to do yeah what kind of tape is this uh yeah i might obviously cloth based instead of vinyl base it looks like hockey tape yeah but kind of the same idea that's that's right that's right you have some pieces that look like you did well yeah these these ends are the end these connectors and all this is like the 60s i mean this is original type stuff how do you is it do you are you working off old stock for this or these reproduced you'd have to ask lee nothing fancy about it all very straightforward all handmade panels yeah even things like the shifter knob handmade with the exception of the the cloisonne's medallion this is an original piece that happened to be on the shelf from back in the day so there are some components that have carried over from there's gonna grab that scoop there we'll lift this body up get an idea how all that works wow quite a complicated affair duct work to assembling all the fiberglasses of mature and seal how does it feel to wake up every day and come to work here i love it i love it i'm all about it i've and i've i've built many of the cars the replicas and driven them and it's like a disease i'm infected with it it's it's awesome so is is this what the bear chassis has come like that's a bear chassis this is a roadster like a red car over there so it doesn't have a roof okay open top or a roadster car it has a unique windshield you know this will probably be the next roadster that we put together but this is uh this is the raw car right here and this is another one to look at even more raw oh wow so when you say these are original chassis when was this built these were these chassis i believe were built in the late 70s early 80s so they're really yeah and lead the company tenant panels out of england is who made them and they finished the run that they had done and lee bought out everything that they had and that's what we have here so they're they're not making these chassis anymore you're just running off of old stock this is old stock and these are recognized as the last original chassis they have serial numbers in line with the original cars oh my god so anything else like a super performance car or an era or whomever's replica is a replica but these are real and true in every way that's why that that board is all um component panels that make up the chassis menagerie of stuff but what you're looking there is many of the panels that actually make up the car and these many of these are extras so the car's been wrecked you've got some components to work with so these are new old stock also all from england tenant panels man yeah and if you uh snake around the corner there just keep moving that correction how is this real it's a two four barrel tunnel for it to go in the car later this summer two more chassis even a lesser state of completion so they don't have the cage on the front you can see in here where your fuel cells go inside and this is a coupe which has a full roof like the one i'm building as opposed to a uh as opposed to a roaster open car and this is a unique seat they did a lot of variations on the seats and um i like that seat if i was gonna do my own car it would be that scene that's an interesting seat it looks like a little bathtub oh yeah man you're all down in it you're all down in it and when you're driving the cars it's just incredible your perception of speed i mean 100 miles an hour is nothing absolutely nothing and then we like lee likes to say we make just about everything here i mean some things get subbed out some castings and whatnot but like the old myford lathe and the old bridge port down there this is all stuff that's been around for years and i stayed with the company so these are this some of the original equipment in here exactly exactly in fact here's a another artifact that could be on the table this is an original fuel cell out of one of the cars that crams in that the some people call it the side pod some people call it a sponse and there's all kinds of different lingo for the parts on the cars but you're also this area right here this shelf and these crates also more gt40 components and tooling for doing the chassis this is actually the chassis jig where you can take a raw chassis and it bolts this is what you build it off of wow so you start with a component like a side pod and it bolts on and you just start putting the panels all together and that's how chassis is made so this this came from england and this came from england and like like i say if you got a car that's erect you can chop away the wrecked parts put the chassis back on the jig and replace the components with you know replace the damaged pieces that's insane what what is the the history on that so there's like the famous one two three finish in the movie and that everybody knows about where does holmen movie play into those cars all of it all shelby american and home and moody were the two major facilities that were doing the cars developing them fine-tuning them uh a new idea they made them work and homomoody was contracted right through ford motor company like finishing manufacturing the cars you could say and you know the the gt40 program started in about 1962 or 63 and was developed over a period of years like when they won in 66. so at times the cars would come back from england go to home and moody or go to shelby get going through redone and then go back race again and then go back to one of the two facilities and get redone again because yes there were race cars they were in constant development and change and refinement along the way wow yeah they they tested for lamar at sebring and daytona and you know they did everything they could in the states and then to pack up and go to england and uh try and beat the ferraris which of course we did so we're we're shelby and holman moody i guess technical teammates under the forward umbrella but were they competitors within that umbrella oh yeah yeah yeah the league could tell more about that but yeah it wasn't always just in racing's racing and it can get ugly so you know somebody might actually sabotage something or fudge some numbers so nobody knows what spring you're running you know what your spring rates are or what carburetor you got or what cam you're running and so they play games with each other because everybody wanted to win i mean really they play games that everybody wants to win so you know you want your name at the top so you do what you got to do okay yeah yeah that's interesting but but i have to say home and moody was into so many more things than shelby was shelby was the mustangs and the cobras and then the gts as a team and carol shelby had one had ruined le mans and i believe one lamar back in the day before he quit driving so he had that experience but what holmen moody had was the technical experience and all forms of racing from offshore boats rally cars nascar the pit stops everything home and moody had had had tentacles about in every kind of racing and so they put all that expertise and all the sharp guys on it and make the cars go fast wow and a lot of the things you know i mean a lot of things were shared between home and moody and shelby so a lot of the concepts kind of became refined and you know this this is what works so we all need to do this so there were elements of that yeah so they they work together but yeah they're still competitors give me just enough information yeah so you're putting all this together in here i have put i started with like all these pieces laying in the floor yeah if we can flip the bonnet up here you know a lot of the stuff on these cars you refer to it like the british dude so this is the bonnet insert the bonnet's the hood does someone yell at you if you call it a hood no no no i just i like to use some of the the right lingo when i can of course the radiator goes right here i mean it's you know it's a work of art how we ended up here is joey over there he owns the stevola brothers former building which we just did a video in and he said hey you got to go up to home and moody and i was like they're still around he's like oh yeah that's what i make used for he's he makes the body panels for these from the original molds that you supplied right is that all that work yep yep the original molds from back in the day there's several different variations but we're using the mark ii style bodies you got one over here that's all put together yeah this car the uh the front ends at the body shop getting some little underneath damage fixed but uh this car has been done for a while it's the replica the or a continuation just like the the car they called the x1 which i believe won sebring at one point with ken miles driving and it's a roadster with an open top but um yeah we kind of gone through it it had a little bit of track time and eat some uh some tlc does it run yeah i might make it run for you we want to hear it i want to hear these headers real bad you have to give me a minute if you okay get you off and i'll just i got to fuel it okay put some fuel in it and we'll see if we might wow that comes out real good i like the colors look so good together like the the pictures you see of these doesn't do it justice it really doesn't no these i don't know that i've ever seen an original one like these in person before maybe at the shelby museum but that's it that's the only one i like these squares they got the lighting it gives it a real like old-school vibe in here i would not want to do spark plugs in this thing your hands wouldn't fit in there no it would not have to do with it so are these equal length primaries um they're not going to be per se equal length they're very very close so you can fudge a little on equal length and be okay but the trick is they call it the bundle of snakes they're um 180 headers so they're two from each side that cross over to the other side and they're tuned to help each other so to speak they like scavenge to help it scavenge the exhaust out and most people say it's the characteristic sound of the gt40 when you hear them howling but hearing them run like an idol is one thing hearing them that full song is a whole nother thing hope you witnessed that someday yeah it's incredible to hear them at speed so what this basically does is it takes the the way the pulses are in the firing order and exchanges them into the proper bank so that they all come out in a perfect line well well it's like a give and take so you got one firing and the other one is not there's a balance there yeah and the 180s are pairing them so that they're balanced most evenly to help each other and that's what creates the high-pitched sound it creates the sound the unique sound and uh tends to make power because you get that the signature v8 kind of ripping noise is from the exhaust pulses colliding with each other because they're not they're not organized and what these do is for lack of a better explanation organizes the exhaust pulses to be smoother that's a good explanation actually like merging on a highway with people who know how to drive versus ones that don't yeah and you know what you call these merge collectors these are these are specialized merge collectors much like on a nascar and if you see the internals and how they're made it's very efficient wow that's cool that is very different everybody smiles when i hear that yeah you got to be careful bro i'm just a carburetor's worth is all i really got for that oh it smells good did you fire that up on straight lacquer thinner or just use the container okay i was like you know it's high octane fuel i just use that for i'll be gonna say he's connecting a can of lacquer through this thing hey man back when i was a kid we had a go a mini bike and it ran on like a thinner straight pipe about that long ran on like a thinner and shoot a blue flame out about that long that was how i learned to ride a motorcycle right there wow so this this transaxle is like a quick change rear end also yep you got little gears in here to the gear set you flip those around and short track versus long track and that's part of the trick to making them go 200 miles an hour it's getting the gear gearing correct and this is all magnesium case the unique t44 box basically top loader four-speed gears on the internals huh what's all this um machinery over here like this pile of old headers of was that historical significance engine hot bench for running engines like uh not necessarily a dyno but we often call them hot benches where you can just run an engine and fine-tune the carburetor anytime and whatnot just just to make sure everything's gonna behave properly before you stuff it in the car get a heat cycle in and re-torque the heads that stuff yeah yeah that sort of thing and a lot of old original equipment this is a rio deca block so you set blocks up and your fly cutter cuts to surfaces you know how many nascar races had engines go through here hey this is an original piece and that book i showed you this is in it really feature a guy running this machine in the book really yeah and a lot of what this is engine building components just old school equipment for doing the motors we've had some 427 stuff in stock for the cars we build you know a lot of guys that know what they're know their stuff we'll see this is a uh saddle or 427 saddle or screw in freeze plugs cross bolted mains okay you actually got a bolt that goes in like this makes it a cross vaulted mane wow you know just a plethora of old parts from this i think [Music] aluminum ford head an original piece that was probably erased and run and damaged and here it's been welded up to you know try and repair it this is the transmission station yeah this one's i leave leigh's pretty knowledgeable and can build these things he's a really amazing individual but you can get an idea of what the gears look like on the inside and the shift mechanism pretty simple this is actually the quick change gears at the back okay so that to you right there is this top litter mechanism in here too this is unique it's just the gear sets that are like a top loader okay yeah and this is like the opinion gear that's the central part which will be your ring and pinion you're fine often called the final drive how long has that been there two nights a long time you know our our engine guy a lifetime home and moody guy jimmy tucker just passed away and it wasn't long ago he was still coming in and visiting and hanging out but uh he was there back in the 60s in the good old days that's a pretty neat item right behind you the mccullough supercharger cut away so what the insides of the supercharger look like what year is this from uh back in the late 50s early 60s i mean they were actually supercharging you know years ago people think stuff like that's a new idea it's not they were supercharging cars in the 30s i mean you know wasn't that kind of uh was it like uh like water meth injection developed in world war ii supercharged airplanes water injection and methanol injection all that stuff there was so much of this stuff that was developed through world war ii that fed on over into the racing industry like the am fittings all these pretty red and blue fittings you see on the cars that was developed that technology for those fittings was developed during world war two mainly for the aircraft doesn't and mean army navy i believe that that is correct that's what i thought yeah very standardized they're all precise and um pretty neat stuff you can go to like the air force museum and you all of a sudden you're seeing the same stuff oh i've seen that on a race car but it's on an airplane we actually did that and he filmed a video of that like literally just looking for car parts or like stuff like that oh yeah inside the planes oh yeah i've been to the air force museum numerous times it's just spectacular is he still cam grinding equipment over there yeah no he's grinding right now oh really we get a little little peek at a can getting grinded i don't think he'll mind too bad larry's been crying he pans it's the beginning you could say i've never watched this happen before that's an original piece of equipment too yeah so when mario andretti won the daytona 567 his cam probably came from that machine yep or that one yeah probably one of the two yeah and all of us all of us are all about it like this is larry's motor he's got a i believe a 68 or 69 cougar and i got a motor here for my old t-bird i like t-birds so what are these pieces of equipment they have these tags that's right that's the original tag for home and moody good identifying this is belonging to the company and a lot of this stuff traveled across country for the races and that those tags helped him identify [Music] that it was theirs so shelby didn't take it yeah hillary actually does can't polish his cams the final little spit shine on this machine wow yeah i think this is also an original that's been around for years that is this is just the…