I Crashed My Vintage NASCAR Car, Cut It In Half, and Rebuilt It

You're probably wondering two things right now. One, how did this happen? Second, how do we solve this? Well, my answer to both is: one, I'll explain in a second. Two, I don't know how to fix it, but we'll find out in this video. I know what I have to do to get started, and that's the most important thing. This old rear end has already given all it could. It's time for a new one. Basically, it will be the entire rear half of the car. I mean, that's the way to fix it, right ? The good thing is that it's early. It's early tonight, so we have a long way to go. We have... Well, it's race day at Dominion. I think this is the nicest track to go to. Perhaps the newest one, maybe. He is Mark. He is helping us today. What's your relationship with this car, Mark? Well, this was the car I shared in the East Series in 2007, the JGR. So it's great to see that everything comes full circle. I went out for the first practice and I didn't feel very well. I still don't feel comfortable out here. There's still a little water and I don't like it. It felt like I was playing marbles out there , but I guess it's okay. Yes. No, it's not, it's not that bad there. There are still a couple of leaks on the back straight, so we do n't want to go too deep with the car. But you're falling behind because you're not driving the car in deep enough, but we don't need to worry about that right now. Right now, we're just learning, making sure we're disciplined enough to take the line where we need to. It looks much better than the last session. It seemed very sensitive when going down to turn one, whether I entered it maybe 6 inches too low or too hard. I don't know which one it is, but if I do either of those two things, the whole car hits something and shifts a foot, and I don't like that. My excessive freedom at the entrance, the time it slid backwards was because I stepped on the brakes hard. I think that's why the car doesn't do it naturally. That was induced by the pressure of the brakes. Okay, can we put, can we put another turn in the front? OK. Yes, maybe we'll try that because perhaps I'll have more confidence to go deeper. My best lap was 42. Oh, so I did 50 and my best lap was 42. Okay. Yes, the turns are fine. You need to, I say, but you're up against guys with more experience. So, although in the last few laps, you started to look quite comfortable. Yes, it's just that they're overtaking you at the entrance to the curve, at the entrance. It looks good from the center outwards . But once you did it, it felt better when you got to this one and came out of the curve straight, like with less steering, like... like from the 3/4 mark from the center outwards. Yes. By taking the vertex late to level out here, if I didn't go all the way down , I could climb up better. Without actually hitting all the bumps, and it felt better that way. Okay, action. I've already started. Okay. Oh, I don't have my headphones on. God, turn it off. Mother, turn it off. When we started this, I said I would be transparent and honest and that I wouldn't hide anything, even if it was bad or made me look stupid. And I'm not going to change my mind now. Although it would be very easy to simply sweep this under the rug and say, "It never happened today." But I can't do that because it's not fair. And I hope the camera was on when I got out of the car and started throwing things because, no, if you know me, you know I don't get angry. This is not the wall. That's shaped like a foot, because of my foot, which is what I did after getting out of the car. And I would like to say that I wasn't angry about what happened, as much as I was angry about the time, energy, and sacrifices made to spend so much time working on that car at the expense of income and progress from YouTube stuff, which is our main job and source of livelihood. And knowing that more of that has to come to put this car back together really just made me angry. It's not like I could just take him somewhere and say, "Okay, guys, fix it." And then it comes out, but we're all too broke for this. Yes. It comes out of someone else's bank account and I can go play Fortnite and mess around and then show up on the track the following weekend and the car is fine. No, that's not me. It's the real situation where you ruin your car and it affects your livelihood. And even with that said, I'm not willing to just go out and wander around. No, that's what it's all about. To be afraid of that. So, we're here to learn, and that's what we learned. We learned what the limit is. So, from your point of view, or from the other side of the radio, what happened? What were we doing? I think we just did about 100 practice laps. I think we made very good improvements throughout the day , feeling comfortable with the car and the new track, and familiarizing ourselves with the information needed to get there. And I think we were trying to get comfortable and find the edge and the limit of how deep we can go into the corner , along with our arc in the corner and when driving in a straight line. So between just finding the balance there , besides the tires, and the only way to find the limits is to cross them, right? Yes. So, how were things up to that point? I mean , it was going well. I was excited, mate. In other words, we improved a lot as the day went on and it was consistent to do the laps we were doing with 100-lap tires, the 100- lap tires we started with and then 200 laps at the end of the day. Setting 90 lap times on 200- lap tires is pretty solid. I feel like , well, that happened to us two minutes ago and we took one last look around, and what are the famous last words? One more time, or one more turn, you know? No, let's just go out again. Oh, there are 10 minutes left. We will go out again. Okay, fine. Yes. I remember sitting there and watching him go into the curve. I thought: we entered the curve a little too fast. I thought: you try to catch him, you chase him around the track a couple of times and that crucial second was there, and finally he broke free completely, we lost him and crashed back to back. But, I mean, it is what it is. We 've all bumped into a fence at some point. So, we're still talking about feeling comfortable in the entryway and having that balance, right? And I was trying to get you to be a little more aggressive entering the corner, right? Because that's where we lose that little bit of time, since we're very good in the middle and at the exit of the curve. Trying to fill the void there, but I didn't know you were already at your limit there. So, we just pushed each other to the limit. And I wasn't totally, um...uh, organized in the sense that I could feel the rear of the car being light and so I hesitated to push harder, but it hadn't gone away yet. Yes. I didn't say I know now, I said there's a threshold between... it's loose at the entrance or if I press harder it will come loose. Yes. So when I asked you if you were stable, you were, but like we're talking about a scale from zero being perfect and 10 being very tight to 10 being very loose. You were already like a two-year-old on the street at the entrance, right? And then, instead of being neutral, I pushed you a little more and we didn't communicate well as we tried to figure out how aggressive that was already. Yes. So we found the limit and crossed it. I think your phrase was that they are killing you at the entrance. Go deeper with the car. Yes. I was trying to be nice, but yes, we had lost about a tenth of a point on the entry. So at that point we were close. I mean, we made great progress as the day went on. Dude, the way it ended sucks, but I'm really excited about the progression and you're a sponge for listening to things. Yes. You just have to...it's a shame, but it 's part of the deal, man. And never say, no one can say that I am untrainable. No. If someone with more experience than me said, "Okay, drive straight into the wall. It'll help." I'd probably say, " Are you sure?" Like, "Yes, absolutely." And obviously I wouldn't , but that's how I have to be with digesting my own information. And the way I learned to learn things in life, you know, is that it did bend the right side of the back clip a little. But the positive thing is that it didn't do anything to that side and nothing else is damaged. It's not bad enough to need replacing because we can take all this apart and take it to a place with the equipment to extract it all hydraulically. And all this does back here is support the fuel cell. And to make matters worse, the camera wasn't even on when it happened. In that practice session, we went in and out so many times that trying to save the video or keep the camera on for each entry, turning it off, turning it back on, and exiting was difficult. Well, in one of those movements, it didn't turn back on . And I don't have any recording of this, which, right after it happened, was a relief because I really didn't want to relive it, as I was still angry. But I do regret a little that it wasn't recorded, because I could have learned something by analyzing what happened. I'm still pretty sure it was something related to the brake distribution, so I'll leave that there and then we'll check the pressures to see exactly what it did. Returning to the present to give you information that we discovered after the events. And before the first race in Newport, we checked the brake distribution with gauges. It read 600 on the front and 400 on the back. That was fine. We configured it like this and loaded the car for the first race. I gave the front two adjustment turns in Newport. Moving on, when we finished reassembling the car, we manually checked the brake distribution , trying to turn the wheel in case the gauge had lied to me or something like that. I'm not sure. If I put the tip of my toe on the brake pedal, the rear wheel would lock up. And that simply doesn't make any sense. We probably had to turn the brake distribution knob six or seven full turns to get the front to brake before the rear. And I do n't know how that happened. I don't know how you could have 600 if your brake pressure gauge read 600 in the front and 400 in the back and it was so unbalanced. I don't know if someone drove past my car and made several turns towards the back while I wasn't there or what happened. Maybe the meters lied to me. Don't know. It's strange. Furthermore, I had no idea what compounds were in the brake pads on the car. I put in the pills that came with the car when I got it. I suspect there was also a temperature change in the brake pads, where as the heat increased, the sensitivity of each one progressed or regressed in such a way that the rear ones ended up being more aggressive than the front ones once they heated up. Because at first I thought it was the tires. Every time he drove the car, it would spin 30 times and then the rear end would start to slide. I thought, "Oh, the tires are just warming up." It wanted to slide as it entered the braking zones. But up until that moment he felt fine. So I think that maybe, as the brakes heated up, the front ones started to lose friction or the rear ones gained heat and friction, and then that problem arose. But it makes sense. Everything that happened makes sense. I certainly learned about that; The car no longer has those brake pads and the balance was checked in many different ways. The lesson here is that, in the last 10 years of learning and developing new skills, I have achieved it by listening to those who were good at it and trusting them completely. Many people have too big an ego to accept advice from someone else, even if that person knows what they're talking about. You tell someone how to do something and they say "no, I won't do it that way because obviously you've never done it before." You must know more than the person who does this all the time. TRUE? Well, some people think that way and don't do it. I am no different. I have those thoughts. If someone I consult tells me to do something a certain way, I might think it sounds silly. I don't understand. But the difference is that I follow the process. I trust their process anyway. And nine times out of ten I learn; Once I follow their procedure and reach the end, I say, "Oh, okay. I see why it works." Now, you can choose to view it in two ways. One option is to just sit here and get angry and throw a tantrum about it. Two, learn something from it. Use it for good, move forward, and be better. We will choose option two. One more thing to be sure. And something like this has definitely happened to this car before, because I was able to find old pictures of...all these hammer dents here, where this rear tray has been sunk in and pushed out, and this was already broken, already warped. How fast were you going? Like 100 when you hit the wall, maybe. Is that what it seems like according to your professional analysis? Yes. Yes. That's it...that's more or less the speed I was going. Yes. Do you like that? Yes. This is incredible, it's better than the original. Yes. It's three layers of 3K and one layer of 3K around the edge. So, there are four layers. So this should be about 40,000 and this about 30,000. 3K is about 10,000 per layer. And when you stack them, you get almost the same result if you use the vacuum bag. Well, there you have it. The first wall mount. Now I have to go here and mark these junctions. I'll leave about an inch at the seam when cutting everything. Then we will go in and surgically break the markings to preserve these pieces. Especially this one, I don't want to ruin it. This isn't that important. We can always trim this and readjust it. But it's worth preserving the seat posts. That's incredibly heavy. If you were a well- funded team, you'd cut everything and have your staff put in a new one, because you have 16 people doing that every day. We don't have that here. We have almost nothing here. I only have hand tools, tin snips, and a portable saw that only cuts to a certain depth. We have to do it in stages. A disc sander and a small Northern Tool bender about 4 inches in diameter, which isn't even screwed to anything. It's a bit primitive, but if you're creative you can make it work for most things. Not for what we're doing here. I do n't have, I physically don't have the ability to do this here. I would have to buy a lot of things and right now it's not worth it. Well, now we're in the workshop to do the industrial part of the repair and get as much of that out of it as we can. I don't know what will happen next, but we had to lift the car with a forklift and use these supports to level it. And now we'll have to move it a little so that it 's centered on the plate. It's not mandatory, but it will help if we need to verify any references . And, well, I really don't know. I'm just doing what I'm told to do because that's how you learn. Would you like to explain your assessment of the situation? Well, I mean, it's a bit worse than it looked, but you know, again, we could n't get on the trailer to take a good look at it. We had already had a couple of beers. So we can fix anything. So, it seems this blow was quite strong. About 2 inches inwards and downwards. Yes, that's what we thought we could do. I mean, you can try, but it moved too much. I'd be afraid that if we try to pull and push and half fix it, the next time it gets hit, it's really going to move completely. So I think this old rear end has already given all it could. It's time for a new one. So there are a couple of ways to approach this. We can install a completely new part; Bob is looking for one in his workshop. Maybe I have one. So we could do that. We already know we won't be able to straighten it. Basically, it will be the entire rear half of the car. That's the best way to fix it, isn't it? To finish this once and for all. It will be done when it has to be done, you know? I mean, you've come so far, it was a super nice car and it still is. Why do a half-assed job and end up with another wrecked car like that orange one over there we were talking about? Yes. You know, it's one of those things. If you have the time, we'll definitely help you, but I'm not going to do it for you. I didn't crash it. I'm not going to fix it for a while. I want to do it at least once. Yes. No, I don't think it's difficult. It just needs a new rear part . And to end with that. Anyway, that was the worst part about the car, because it had already been in a crash at some point in the past. Yes. There are many creases in the rear tray that were already there. And perhaps that's why he gave in so much this time when he was hit. Someone stretched it or mishandled it, and since it was already weakened, it simply collapsed completely. Well, you know, I don't think it's going to be a big deal. In other words, it's already decided. Everything is in order. I mean , I think the important thing is when you do these back clips, oh, it 's no big deal. Like the front clips, the entire suspension, all those engine mounts. There are just as many things back here. The fuel cell bracket, the whole oil filter or fuel filter, the fuel, you know, the fuel lines, you have jack bolts, crash doors. In other words, the oil tank hangs back here . The back is just as complicated as the front. So, uh, personally, I'd prefer to do a front clip because it's easier to work on. You know, back here , we're halfway up under the roof. You know, at least at the front, it's usually the hood forward and none of this gets in the way. So I think we'll end up cutting the seat support so we can get in and work on it. Then we'll simply put them back on. But now is a good opportunity when we hang up the bodywork again . We can move everything to one side. You know, we can move it. You know, I guess I have rules. I haven't looked at that yet. As much as you want, as long as you don't get there and it doesn't look like the wrong thing to say here. That is absolutely incorrect to say. Yes. How much of this do I need to cut before the clip comes out? As for the engine cover and stuff, do I need to take it? I think, well, just looking at it , this is pretty much junk here. You know, maybe you want to come here, you know, we come here. Sometimes they're better when you cut them. Sometimes they're worse. Unfortunately, this is worse. Uh, we started using these at DEI . Uh, actually I think these were for the RAD program. When they sold everything, I went, you know, and bought all those things for Randy. Oh really? I had to have it. Now I'm going to take a reciprocating saw and cut them all flush. They'll probably jump again. So we'll see if that makes for something fun. So I eat one of these four meat sticks almost every day. They keep me satisfied and they're great. They prevent me from having to stop working to go to lunch or something like that. And as soon as I open it, Bandit runs towards me. He thinks I'm going to give him some . It's as if he smelled it from the other side of the workshop. I can't give you any of that. It's important for my daily nutritional goals. My favorites are the original smoked one and the spicy jalapeño one. Teriyaki is good too. We have to take everything out to cut practically the entire back of the car. I'm taking the oil tank out right now because it's going to be cut more or less around here, and then everything from this weld back will be new. I just want to know why you didn't want to film anything when I was tampering with your driveshaft. Because I was thinking about doing my own thing. I wasn't thinking about you sitting there . Can I ask you to do something? Then I realized that we hadn't filmed any of this until now, so it would be worth recording something. Oh, I just thought it would be good to film something so people don't think I'm so useless. Yes. Well, I haven't filmed myself doing anything because I never have three hands to hold the camera and film and work at the same time . So nobody…