Mark Martin Shows Us His Personal Racing Museum! (Every Car Has an EPIC Story)

i never saw the car until it showed up here like this hand written journals for 1974 and 75 here when i would hit i've seen those ripped things away over there like that and i told them do not clean it in 1975 this car sitting on this trailer i wouldn't be the person i am today if that hadn't happened so we're here in batesville arkansas at the mark martin dealership museum with mark martin who i guess is strangely enough a frequent viewer of the channel that's how we ended up here what do you got going on here well we've got uh kind of a museum 40 years of sort of my stock car racing history is here come on in let's have a look all right how many of your fire suits did you keep how did that did you keep them knowing that you wanted to hang them up someday or did they just have them kind of kept them uh try that try to have one of ever flavor whatever it was obviously if it was just a one race deal or something like that maybe i didn't have but that was one thing that i did try to collect where a lot of the trophies i gave away back in the day just for instance when arlene and i got married in 1984 we moved seven times in the first five years we were married wow and after the third move you know and some of those were apartments and stuff and after the third move all my trophies were broke and broken and everything and i had them in the under crawl space underneath the house in north carolina i think it was and i was just pissed and i threw them all in the dumpster wow and that was 1984 and so i don't have anything that predates 84 and going forward from 84 anytime i won a race all i was worried about is getting the check you know i wasn't worried about the trophy i didn't have any place to put the trophies they were a burden to me at the time i always gave them away you know friends owners somebody threatened whatever well let's walk if you want to see the very beginnings the most embarrassing part of this whole place to me is my journals the first two years i raced we had a lot of things going on a lot of issues in the pits a lot of interesting things and so i i had my hand written journals for 1974 and 75 here the feature race we were in second um that might have been i don't see the date there but that might have been like the second race i erased said nolan grabbed the plug wire and got knocked out of them yeah yeah or uh blew up second lap heber springs april 13th yeah so this is the very beginning of my career less maybe the third race but you can see i'm running second and third right out of the gate with the feature races they usually had three uh three heats and a feature around here back then but here we won 33 dollars at heber springs so we get just a little deeper and we we start winning some races and getting first place how did you keep all this stuff i i don't know exactly how we did that uh i kept the journals somehow or another they were piled up with i think my mother's kept a scrapbook which if we move over here you'll see the pictures and she did this and remember though you don't know you're too young the polaroid you know instamatic or whatever photographs of my very first race car in our first trailer that we built and we'll talk about the trailer a little bit more later she kept these scrapbooks all the way up until i made it to to nascar this is an interesting one so we built the car uh in the trucking company shop uh just drug a 55 chevy out of the woods and gutted it out and put a roll cage in it and we're going to race the six cylinder class so the 90 cams in memphis we took the motor to lanati and had them you know build up the motor i remember that and so we went out to practice the first night and i maybe made four or five laps and broke a rod and you can see the the shop towel hanging out of the oil pan so we were in deep deep trouble uh weren't going to be able to race and we went to the local hero hero here wayne brooks who won everything at the time and he had a old wore out standby backup engine and we made a deal with him uh on that engine and uh so it was reliable and we got a lot of experience with it uh and wayne brooks was kind of the save of the day from your dad's uh trucking company desk oh wow yeah see i don't even look at this stuff i don't even know what i have here to be honest with you it's invisible to me so the third yard raced we built a late model and my dad was all about horsepower so he had lennati build a 496 cubic inch big block and i'm uh 16 years old and 110 pounds is that the car that didn't have power steering yeah it was a beast it was a beast uh and we quickly had to figure out how to junkyard uh go to the junkyard and put power steering in it but it was a pretty cool old car pretty neat it is good looking is that kind of like the origin of your signature bird paint scheme to evolve yes it now that's pretty much that's really it when it was orange and white the first car was just orange but all my late models after from 76 on were orange and white yeah with the white on the roof um one of the things that's interesting if you go back to the podcast is the the trucks each year i think the story is as interesting about the tow truck is it is about the race car itself um and this is the third year evolution the first uh the first two years it was just a pickup truck and you know whether with towing a trailer but then we did the four-door truck with a ramp truck part and of course my dad was all about speed so it had a 454 in it uh and then he put a double stick transmission some kind of two-stick transmission in that thing and of course we it was all hopped up and then it wouldn't then it wouldn't stop so we had some crazy stories about about our haulers in our podcast but before we skip too far forward i want to take you back here and show you uh we were not able to get our second race our first race car our very first race car i think wound up going to a crusher but our second car we were able to get our hands on larry shaw was able to locate the car and was able to restore it uh quite a few years ago and so we we had that car sitting here in the museum and then in 2015 somebody shot me a picture of of this old trailer out in the woods that was all rested up and said hey isn't this your old trailer and i'm like yeah i gotta have that so in 2015 i went got this trailer and uh restored it and put the car on it and there's a picture around here somewhere where in 1975 this car sitting on this trailer with my trophies in front of it 40 years later i was able to get the trailer get the car on it put it in here and uh you know the trailer is really cool because free house trailer axles and and uh some angle iron and some wood uh boards and that was our that was our trailer and just used uh my dad's everyday pickup truck to tow it so that's how we that's how we went racing the first two years did you restore this yourself i did i did uh uh now i did send it out to be powder coated so i didn't do that but yeah i took it all apart personally by myself really with no help and and redid the the axle the wheel bearings and everything and uh yeah i did it i did it all myself i needed something to do i was retired uh so i really did enjoy it do you remember uh your routine with this thing where you strapped it down pulling it on there what you looked at like you know all that stuff i i vaguely remember it i vaguely remembered i remember more because because i was as young as i was my dad and larry shaw did the heavier more important mechanical work um and as i because i was still going to school they would work on the car at night and a lot of times i'd go out there in the shop and hang with them and as as we progressed through the years i got more and more mechanical by uh 78 i was doing you know 78 was the first summer that i was graduated from high school so i was out of school so i was in the shop every day and we worked every day in the shop so i became more and more hands-on starting at 78 i have total photographic memory of 1980 and 1981 and quite a bit on 1979 as well those were the years that i was in full sort of command of the car and was doing you know i was doing all i was hanging all the bodies i was doing the painting i was doing all the chassis setup um you know we were designing and redesigning and chassis and development and building trailers and that's really the meat the real pride of my career is 79 80 and 81 those those three years you know i love the cars you know nascar cars are okay i didn't build those cars i didn't hang the body on those cars i didn't do the setup on those cars uh or in 82 maybe i did but i wasn't successful so that's not really important to me because we failed in 1982 but in 1981 uh we really did some cool cool stuff and those again are in in the podcast yeah i really like those uh those episodes you remember everything down to what springs you had around the whole car and all that stuff and we're like how do you remember that did you write that stuff down too no no i could in and each year in 79 when i'd go back to the same track in 1980 i'd remember what year we ran what setup we ran and if we needed to do something different i didn't keep notes didn't keep setups didn't write them down it was all in my head and i went from track to track to track to track i don't know how i did it but and i still remember you can show me a picture of a car actually all the way back from 77 because you can show me a picture of of a car on the track and i'll in that track it'll jog my memory and i can tell you the springs the shocks the sway bar the weight distribution within a half a percent uh you know all those those details and people ask me how do you remember that and i just my answer to that is it was important i mean it meant the difference in winning and not winning surviving and not surviving in in the business i mean in 77 when when it dawned on me that i was going to be able to make a living racing cars dude that was that was crazy i never dreamed that when i first started driving race car it was i was pretty good at it and i loved it because i couldn't you know i couldn't play basketball couldn't play football wasn't very good at baseball you know i wasn't going to make it in uh nba you know and so i found something that i was good at and it really felt good to be be good at something was that you're like a turning point for you as a person did you have the attention to detail and work ethic that you have now when you were younger or did it was it like a light switch it wasn't it was developed it developed so the first two years i raced and really three the first three years i raced larry shaw and my dad worked on the car every night and you know i'd come in or or or i wouldn't but i was a junior in mechanical skills and no fabrication skills um so junior to them so i did more watching and listening to them uh you know talk then i did uh you know work itself and as you know as i progressed into i really say 78 was the first year that's when i was full time on the race car um you know i was out of school wasn't distracted with that with school or homework or whatever and i had seen the light that i was going to be able to do that for a living so that's really when the work ethic began and and then when we went into 79 i moved from here from batesville up to dylan's shop in north liberty indiana and it was just me and banjo grimm and david levindog just three of us and we i mean we had to work we worked from you know seven seven in the morning till eleven o'clock at night every day and it was like a vacation to go to the race to race because you know a lot of times you were driving instead of working in the shop or or whatever so um the work ethic was something that developed kind of over over time and really hit its peak there in 79 and 80. when uh when you were listening to your dad and larry shaw work on stuff were they actively trying to teach you things or did you learn by listening to everything they did i learned by listening they didn't you know they didn't talk to me directly and they spent a lot of time talking about how good they were how good our cars were and you know uh i mean they were real talkers oh man they just one would try to up the other one and you know how you know because it was just insane they were real talk talkers i'm telling you it was unbelievable and uh it was and it it rubbed off on me some because you're a product of your environment so i was fairly you know cocky in my earlier years uh until i really had the humbling experience in 1982 that took me completely to my to my knees and that changed me but to give you an idea of how bad it was this is an uh embarrassing story um we were going to go in 77 we were going to go out to las vegas and run the craig road speedway big race out there and new newspaper guy got ahold of shaw somehow or another i don't know how and thought it was me and shaw you know they were larry phillips was the man i mean hall of fame man here out here springfield missouri and he went out there and cleaned their clock every time he'd go out west he cleaned the clock and so they were talking about oh larry phillips can you run with lyra for that he said we can outrun larry phillips on four flat tires so which was you know insane so evidently there was an article or something was said that i was the muhammad ali of stock car racing so yeah you learn your lessons as a young one as you go go forward i became very humble especially after that experience and the experience that i went through in 1982 well that's really interesting probably got like a bazillion more questions oh yeah i want to show you uh over here this is probably the biggest milestone in the museum this is jr10 when we started at jack roush uh racing in 1988 we started numbering the cars from number one this is the 10th car that we built it was the first uh mike laughlin front steer car that we ever built we ran second five times prior to finally getting our first win this car we we got our first win with jr10 in 1989 at rockingham you know it's so cool uh that you just did a video on rockingham speedway uh and it's fitting that you're here now yeah with the car that got me my first win but this is some of the footage from uh you know victory lane and you know i didn't even remember there's ryan pemberton as a 19 year old tire tire changer in the in the photo and you know it's just uh there's my dad right above the trophy looking away there i didn't even remember remember my dad being there you know it's just so crazy to see some of this stuff the story on this car and why this car is even more important than just getting our first win is we retired this car in 1990 because you know we continually built new cars and thought we were building better cars after it was retired for a while we learned some things on the hanging the bodies and couldn't get a chassis soon enough to get a new body on it to get it on the racetrack like we wanted we're gonna have to wait so we grabbed this thing cut the body off of it put another body on it and we did that after a long drought you know where we hadn't won any races for a you know we're in a drought period brought it back out won a race again that happened three times and uh i think it was 93. we re-bodied it again and been parked and retired and we re-bodied it for phoenix and went out to phoenix and i think we think we either sat on the pole or outside pole and you know won the race out there i believe that i believe that was 93 you know so this this car out of my 35 i haven't been able to prove it exactly for sure steve neal and i think that this car won probably five of the 35 races that we won at roush racing together so this thing is uh you know was very important to to my career wow so wasn't wasn't your first win jack's first win as an owner too oh yes so this is like an important part of him too yeah yeah see uh yeah i don't even know how i managed to buy it from jack but i was able to pry it out of his hands somehow or another uh but yeah you know when it was in our it took us two years to get our first win we were really close to winning uh bristol about our fifth race together but then after that we we weren't really in contention to win the rest of the year but the following year in 89 we were running second and third all the time and really running good and it was just a matter of time until we got our first win do you remember any uh interesting details or dents or holes or anything in this thing that have always kind of been there anything cool like that or has it been restored to the point of only knowing what it is from a number you know i just know it as as jr10 um but i could tell you you know we ran us at rockingham when we won that race in 1989 we had a 1700 in the right front and a 1200 in the left front a pair of 325s in the rear and i think that i think the track bar was nine and a half ten and a half so it's weird you know i can't remember what i had for lunch today but you know i remember crazy things like that this thing's cool so this thing was ran from 88 to 93 in various on and off configurations it ran from 89 to 93 with various different bodies on it yeah i mean the same style body but we were learning all the time to push this over pull that up you know you could do a lot more in the gray areas back at that time you know there weren't as many templates and so we were we were making more and more downforce through the years oh this one's awesome it's like straight off the track too yeah this one right here uh is my final ira championship car uh from 2005 and i told them i wanted it do not clean it i wanted all the rubber marks on it and uh and everything just straight off the race track and they've been warned here to not clean it it's still got the rubber uh thrown up you know underneath the hood from the tires and everything and you can see here if you look really close you can see i did just a slight amount of pushing uh this is from the atlanta race uh but if you look in the back i got a lot of push pushes i did a little bit of pushing but i got a lot of pushes from who oh who knows i don't even remember but that's pretty serious oh yeah we did some battles uh iroc was really really really good for me it's the pride crown jewel of my career and um and this this was one of those million dollar paydays for me um in 2005 i won my fifth uh iroc championship uh i think we won like i think it was 13 races and they only had four a year and i didn't get invited every year i wasn't in it every year that i was in nascar because some years i didn't either win the champion the champion always got uh invited back but if if if you weren't the champion you had to run about top three in nascar points to get invited so i had some off years where i wasn't in that so i wasn't wasn't in it all the time but uh it's the only thing that i was able to one-up dale earnhardt i think he won 11 races and probably four championships so um it's definitely you know the cars people ask me you know why i had so much success and i said well the car never runs out of gas it never seems to blow up and i never have a slow pit stop because there weren't any pit stops so it was more just you drive you you go out on the race track and you you leave it all right there there were less things to go wrong and i had a lot of things go wrong in my nascar career i mean so many races that we coulda shoulda but you know every you know stuff we we had a lot of problems believe me um there were a lot of races that got away from us it's really cool that like you're the winningest driver of all of iraq history aren't you yes yeah that's that's why it's the crown jewel in my career without a doubt that is really neat knowing that um does it like help you be less angry about those bad things that happened knowing that when those variables were removed that maybe weren't even in your…