Legendary Engine Builder & Crew Chief Waddell Wilson Revisits Holman Moody! (NASCAR HOF Crew Chief)

And he's in the floor then. And I'm fix to come down on him. If you got your butt chewed out, you still won race. Oh yeah, John was on me about that. Dang. Wadell Wilson is one of the most legendary engine builders and crew chiefs in NASCAR history. He's a pretty quiet guy. He doesn't do these things very often. We decided we would go meet Wadell at Home and Moody so he could look at some of the stuff he used to use and it'd be a cool place to just kind of look around and see what stories come up cuz that's what we like to do. We like to jog memories with artifacts as opposed to just sitting down and talking. We were just at Harry Gance yesterday. He had one of those on his desk. One of those. Yeah. Same same card. You're kid. Oh, I remember we signed together. We two or three times we do we've rode all over the United States on a motorcycle together. Don Tilly and Harry Gner. Wow. Were you there whenever he went over the No. Thank goodness I wasn't with him when he done that. He was telling me about it. Wonder he's alive. Yeah. Like I don't know how he got so lucky to land on a mattress. Yeah. Yeah. How'd that happen? Good Lord put that down there for him. Let's get the pain over with. What comes to mind when you look in this thing? What comes to mind when you look in this engine bay? Yeah. I remember in ' 63 being down there at Daytona July race. Then we had to take the cylinder heads off of the the engine to check the horn the stroke. When I was doing that, Fireball was back on the workbench. He's always watching what we doing. I was putting the gaskets when I took them off the engine, throwing them in the trash can. Big trash barrel. And I heard somebody coming through the building, hollering, "Don't throw them away. They're competition prosman." It was Windell Scott down in that barrel. He went to get them old gaskets out. I said, "Well, you know, we don't run them over again." Yeah, but I do. Okay, I'll save you some gaskets and parts and pieces. And I did for hunting. He was a great guy. What's that story about uh John Holman and the cheating whenever he had that talk with you up to you? Oh, okay. That whole thing. Well, from day one once I was on that race car and I was building engines and he'd come up to me and he'd stick that big finger right in my chest. He said, "Well, if you ever get caught cheating, I'll fire you." And I knew dang well he would. There was no doubt in my mind cuz he he he told me our cars are supposed to be better prepared and we're supposed to have better drivers. And if we can't win like that, then we don't deserve to win. But he told me, that's what he told me. He said, "You're good enough to win without cheating." Well, I never forgot that. I never ever got caught cheating because I didn't cheat. He made a believer out of me, which I'm glad he did. Yeah. But I I never had the desire to do it anyway. I think he learned that from Strop. I think Bill Strop was was somebody that influenced my dad's idea of a race car. Stuff was always clean and nice and well prepared. Oh yeah. Um, and that's where dad was hired from Strops to come out and run Depollo Engineering. It made me work harder because he knew that we could win races of the ability that we had. A lot of people accused me of cheating throughout the years. Nobody ever proved anything cuz there wasn't nothing there to prove cuz we didn't cheat. You were good at reading the rule book and figuring out things that other people didn't think of. Oh, yeah. There was a lot of things involved there that, you know, if you if you knew anything about rolling resistance and aerodynamics and horsepower, it took those three ingredients to make the race car go fast. You know, different drivers would come in to work on the race car, and they'd have different ideas. You'd always pick up on their ideas, what they had, and and I remember one thing I learned off of David Pearson. He'd always wanted Gatorade, drank Gatorade, and he went down the backst he'd throw it out the window and it would go down the side of the race car and it would leave a stain and you could tell exactly where the wind was going. So that was a big help to, you know, help me with aerodynamics of it cuz I don't I never did say nobody else, but I always looked as soon as the race over how that air was flowing around the side of that race car. How did you use the Gatorade stains to make changes? Like what were you what was it doing? What did you seeing where the air was going what was how it was and what you can do to direct it another way if you want to to deflect there either want it to go down on the spoiler or run it off the spoiler. See a big critical area of these race cars is this right here called the A-post. You could work on this and and gain a lot. And then the roof here then back here you can gain you can make tire go you know put a vortex on it. You can pull it down and push it up. How did you determine what you needed to do based on how the car was reacting? Like were there some cases in the wind tunnel work with it? So you do it like or if you were like Kale at Daytona when he said this car is going to fly away. Did you ever change more than just the spoiler to get it to stay down? Well, he screwed up when he didn't think and run that car. You know, I don't know why he was holding back like he was. And I don't think he really felt the car was going to run that fast that it did. It was supposed to, you know, going down the backstretch at 203. I mean, it's doing what it's supposed to do. Did you ever get into making your bodies asymmetrical for side force or any of that? No. Later on, the people got into doing that. I've seen their cars. You can see they was doing it. And And if you had a knife edge around the back of the car, air would run off. You round it, the air would pull around it. So, it's pretty simple once you get to looking at it and watching it, observing what it done. Did you ever ask them to throw Gatorade out the other side of the car so you could see what that one was doing? Well, you know there whenever they built Talladega, we'd go down there and test and you know, they had ideas. There was seven engineers with Ford Motor Company that a lot of times be at the racetrack and they'd always say, "We can't build them like you can, but we can help you with the parts and pieces." And they were smart people. They'd hook everything up in the car and they had a tape read out then. didn't have digital, you know, they'd tell a car going around a racetrack, you know, the horsepower it was and how it accelerated down the backstretch and all. What was uh that story with the carburetors and spacers and when they started bringing restrictor plates in the first time? Well, that happened in in 71 whenever Bobby also driving our car and Pearson left and Bobby had come in and we just won this championship at Pearson in ' 68 and 69 out of Homeman had inch and a half restrictor plate they put underneath the carburetor and you need to have a spacer on top of that. So anyway, I got looking at it said a minimum, you know, or the max inch 11/16. It didn't have a minimum cuz it's an 8 850 carburetor with the sleeves in in the and it reduced it down to in to 830 carburetor. So what I done is put took the sleeves out and and tapered the sleeves down and found out 7 to 8° was ideal flow numbers. But they and that's what's amazing about when they had to turn up and looked at they actually know what they're looking at. They didn't know that I had sleeves in it. It wasn't heads. They just It was as legal as they could be. That's what I told John over. He said, he asked me, he said, "Why is that a legal carpet?" I said, "It'll m any of the rules. Any inspection, it'll pass." Now, here's a trick to get the air blades worked out in, you know, that sleeve cuz you had all the air blades in there and when you push it up in there as far you had, it was kind of tricky to get get it to where it worked. How did you iron that out? Did you like go in there and like watch the fuel on the No, I done it on the floor. No. I come up with 7 to8°, you know, I worked with it, you know, but 7 to 8° was perfect flow, you know, to atomize the fuel and then what I got through doing all that, you know, just about had the same horsepower did without without the restrictive play. So, you know, it it was one of them things that you could do because there was no minimum, but it was max. We won I don't know how many races with Bobby Austin that year in 71 when we done that 72 you know that's whenever Homeman Roody quit running race cars and then 72 the Wood brothers come to me want to know if I'd build engine for them they wanted me build 429s which that's an engine I didn't particularly like building cuz it had Koopa rings and O-rings and took a half a day to stretch the rod bolts in it. I went to work for home in the moody in 1963 and they put me in the engine room. First thing I know they getting ready to go to Daytona and they wanted me to be on fireballs pit crew. I've already told you about the Daytona got hit on pit road and all. But that morning of the race he come out there and sit down beside me. He said you always do the sign board. I said yeah. So we didn't have radios then. And uh he said now let me tell you something. when I come in the pits, he he said, "You go right or left and I'm going to follow that signboard wherever you go with it." Okay. He told me about two or three times. It's the last pit stop he come down and there was no pit road speed or anything like that. So he come down pit road and I seen him coming. I said, "That thing got them old Durham brakes on it. Ain't no way he's going to stop that thing where he's supposed to stop it." So he he got the pit away from me and I remember I jumped straight up and he run up under me and I landed back on the windshield cuz I knew if I went right or left he was going to follow me and that ain't going to get me out of trouble. I'm in trouble period. And you know after, you know, he ended up winning the race that day and run second to him. We go to Victor Lane. He never to this day said a word about that thing. He never mentioned it. You can bleep this stuff out, right? Yeah. I can move it around and I can scan cuz you're going to be doing it. But anyway, the 63 ended up and and Ralph Moody and Fred Lorenzan come to me and want me to be the engine or the jackman on the car. And I come to figure out that they was just wanting to get my engine. But anyway, it's from a lot of the guys in the shop found out that, you know, they was going to be a try out for that pig crew, you know, was a jack man. So I never jacked the car. I didn't know what. So anyway, we went and done it on Lorenza's car. There was about eight of us. And then they said I cheated because a little quicker than they was. Ralph said, "Well, do it again." I said, "Okay." Well, I had a little feel for it then. So I was very athletic in high school and in college anyway. So anyway, I done it and much quicker that time. They just all turned and went out the door. So anyway, I was a jack man on the car in ' 64. But it really was to get the engines that I was building what it's all about. And then we go to Daytona and that's when Richard Petty and the Chrysler people showed up with that Hemi. I mean we practice the first day Richard didn't even practice. The second day he practiced he was 4 mile hour faster than we was. Lorenzo took his uniform off went to the motel. Seemed to figure that enough of that. Whenever I was building for uh Lorenzan AJ Fort call Ford Motor Company come to know if he'd he said if you call home John Hman and have him have what Wilson build my engine I'll run Charlotte homeman come back there in the engine room in front of everybody and said you got to build engine for AJ Ford from Charlotte. Okay. So anyway the next day he come back in there and said well Dick Hutch's a company car and he wants you to build his engines. So I had to build the three engines. Lorenzan sat on the pole. I don't remember where the other two qualified, but in the race AJ was passing Lorenzan coming out of turn four and got in the wall, but he still finished the race, but he wasn't competitive in after that. But when the day was over, Lorenzan won the race. Dick Hutcherson finished second. Nobody ever said a word about it. But it was an interesting time, you know. And then that same year they decided, you know, NASCAR had lowered the weight of the race car and you could put smaller engines in smaller cubic inch engine. So they come to me about building a three a three a 396 engine. Got the parts and pieces and put it together and it was a ring combination of pistons we had never run before. And I went with the car rocking him and it and then that day I left took the bugs out of it and it was oiling down. The rings wouldn't sleep. Took the engine back to the shop. Went back Friday morning with it. Checked it out that day. Qualified and the engine still hadn't sealed up. Took it out, took it back to the shop, back to Charlotte, took it apart and changed the rings in again and Saturday morning it finally healed up. I'll never forget the happiest I believe I've ever seen that man. And that wasn't very often, but we was at at Rockingham whenever Lorenzo won that race of that 396 engine. And then they protest us. I figure they would protest us and they did. When we come out of Victor Lane said, "You've been protested." Well, homeman, your dad goes and protests the next three or four cars. One of them was Hutch. Yeah. His own car. And anyway, Rick White, what was his name? Not Rex White, but some real good race car driver run ended up running second to cuz Richard fell out of the race. He chased us. He chased Lena. They blowed his up or something. But anyway, we won the race and then we go into Victor Lane. Well, all them dang boys is out there in the infield celebrating and they left me with the car. So, I had to take heads off, check the board and stoke, pull the fuel line out, make sure it was legal. And when they finally said it was okay, two or three of them did come back and help me push it up on the back of the hauler. I get in the truck and I'm pulling it out of the place and somebody beating on the door and I look and it's your dad and I he said, "Don't you need a driver? Move over." He pushed me over, got to the other side and back to the shop we come. He I never seen him as happy as that that day. Wow. He was tickled to death. That wasn't the year that they brought in Jimmy Clark to drive in Rockingham, was it? He'd like to have an international player to the races. And he brought in Jimmy Clark. Jimmy got out of the car and said, "It's really a fabulous car. It doesn't turn, doesn't go very fast, and you sure as can't stop it. But other than that, it's a fine race car." I remember Bill France and your dad come up with some deal for somebody to run Tallaladega. I don't know who the driver was. There's some over these seas driver from someplace. Anyway, we had Dick Hutcherson and and Jake and all all them boys is down there. There's down on the other end of pit road. You know, it's a long pit road at Tallaladega. So, I'm on Bobby's car and we end up winning the race. They come back the next morning, drive through the night, come back 8:00, I'm going in home and moody and and home stay there. Here is that big thumb comes again that big finger. Why didn't you go down there and help them boys? I'm the home and moody car. I mean, I'm on the other end and I'm a front tire changer. Well, I can't leave pits. I think, dang. And and there's a couple of guys standing there. Travis Carter was one of them. And he still tell reminds me of that. You got your butt chewed out. You still won right there. Oh, yeah. John was on me about that. Dang. Yeah. They they they brought in a number of uh European drivers to try and do it. Jackie X was convinced the Woods Wood woods brothers were trying to kill him because they he tried to drive the car at Riverside and and at that time that was an idiot. they they just couldn't didn't know how to do it and didn't know you know the NASCAR field the NASCAR cars had a different suspension setup to them and and the Europeans didn't didn't ever do it and u uh in this Ireland was invited to run a Daytona at the super speedway at one point and he made the mistake of of going to the press or getting an giving an interview about how Mr. France asked us to come in and show these boys how to get around the track properly. He couldn't qualify. We had to put in a substitute driver to get the car fast enough to make the race cuz he wasn't quick enough to even get in the race. I'll tell you one thing, they found out. But to come and run against these guys and these mechanics, that was a whole new ball game. Mhm. Cuz they were the best of the best. Period. In ' 67 going to Daytona. I was still building engines for Lorenzan. Mario's down there and we was down there a couple of weeks or three and Mario kept telling John Holman, he said, "My engine is not nothing as good as Lorenza's engine." So, finally John came to me and said, "Why don't you build an engine for him, too?" I said, "Okay." So, I'm back at the shop and I built the engine, built the R's engine, put him in the truck, and drove it through the night. Got there the next morning and uh was unloading. I went and told Ren and his engine number and I told Mario his engine number and three or four years ago when they put Mario in the Southern Motorsports Hall of Fame, he said, "Come over here. I want to tell you the rest of your story." He said, "Whenever I went to get that engine, they wouldn't let me have it. They said, "No, I'll take this engine." He said, "No, I would not give in to them." And I made them let me have that engine. He said, "But I hit the racetrack and I as soon as I hit the racetrack, that thing picked up 400 RPMs." They said I knew I had him covered then but he had he didn't have a good pit crew. Lorenzan I was on Lorenza's pit crew and we would beat him out of the pits by a long ways and he'd run us down to pass us and then we the two cars lapped the field that day. They going back to lane and them boys and we was loading our stuff up on the car and all of us mad at me and said you gave him a better engine you gave us. They were identical. What um what were your engines different than the other whoever else was building engines at Hol and Moody back then? Like why were why were they asking them for yours? Well, you know, we're all going to get the parts out of the same department and why my engine was better than other people. I can't answer that. I wondered myself why are they better? What are they doing I'm not doing or with vice versa. But I put a lot of emphasis on it. I want every piece perfect, you know, and you know, like honing the blocks and ma measuring everything and fitting it and you know, I was a perfectionist and that's how I build an engine. Yeah, that's how you cut your head. That blocks right here. Put it on here and put it on. Now, I've run this machine. I'll bet it's the same one I run. The tag, I think, is on the back over here. It is. This is one of the original machines. Yeah, I remember. That's how you cut you you'd uh put the engine together the bottom end of it and all and then you it always had taper in the blocks would and then and then they was never level anyway. So you get it to where you wanted, you know, you got the shims, cut it to whatever you're looking for. Then you'd always make sure that you had your cubic inch figured out. I mean not cub compression compression ratio is on your nose. when things don't want to leave. They gone on my nose after that. I don't know. That's a weird fly. Boy, that's an old piece. Probably used it when I was here. All the pistons and rods in. Yep. That's got the uh original tag on it. You probably did use this thing. What does the foot…