Mike Skinner's 1995 Goodwrench NASCAR Truck: The FIRST Ever Truck Series Champion!

you know, don't don't come back with that. And the next week it'd be in the rules. When we started the rule book was about uh that thick. At the end of '96 the rule book was that thick. We're here in the mountains with Mike Skinner and Angie Skinner and they got this pretty cool truck in here. What's the story behind this thing? We were lucky enough to win the first championship in the uh NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series. Ran '95, '96 in trucks and then went to the to the Cup Series in '97. Richard kept two trucks. One of the trucks was the very first truck, the one that we we were sideways off of four at Phoenix and beat Terry Labonte for the first points race. That truck was really heavy. They they It was a sled and I started like hammering and like we got to get lower, lighter, left or you know, we just start Let's Let's build short track stuff. I was a late model guy, so my stuff was all full of holes and tricked up and and we worked hard on on very conscious about weight. We built this truck. It was probably Well, it was probably well over 100 lb lighter than the first one. What about this one was different than the first one that you said was heavy? Like the specific areas you worked on it? I mean, you see everything's skated out. You know, all this stuff's lightened up. There's a lot of stuff that you know, that we always tried to hide back in the past, but not now. But underneath the tonneau all the reinforcements all hollowed out and you know, we just we went into savings mode on on on weight. And you know, we still had to weigh the same amount, but when you can put it in the frame rail instead of the roof, it's big and and it was just technology moving along and I tell you the cars that Dale Earnhardt Sr. was driving and winning in, they were heavy compared to stuff like some of the Hendrick stuff and some of the other other teams and it just makes me respect him all the more because he didn't have the best cars all the time, but he still winning races. and when all this came about, we hired some really smart people, guys like Jesse Coke and Johnny Sailler and Todd Barrier and Rich Burgess was was a late model guy. He ended up being my crew chief in '95. Um those guys were all smart racers. Richard Wat- you know, who do you want to hire? We we got together about who we were going to hire, who's going to be the crew chief, and we put a team together. Will Lein was the team manager, which worked on the three car for 100 years. Through all of Dale's championships, Will Lein was there. David Smith was was uh involved. All these people were all really really good racers, really smart racers, and it brought the whole RCR up. It not only brought the truck side up, it brought the cup side up. And uh I think it made RCR a lot more competitive. I was thinking if with the truck series being so new and you're starting out to get creative with stuff, you got a pretty light rule book, I would imagine, because they're not exactly the same as a car. And it hasn't really been exploited and bolstered up by people, you know, coming up with stuff saying you can't do that anymore, add this, add that. Did you have any rules? It was basically like a cup car chassis and suspension, motor, everything, with the truck's with truck sheet metal on it. And so that's basically how it started out. And when we started, the rule book was about that thick. At the end of '96, the rule book was that thick. And it was just from us, you know, you can't put light roll bars in anymore. You can't do this, can't do that. We They really um we never got busted, but we got our hand slapped a lot, and and you know, don't don't come back with that. And the next week it'd be in the rules. And then and we started moving the tails over on them and the nose over that way. Don't do that anymore. Okay. Well, we just kept pushing the envelope as hard as we could, and the rule book just kept getting thicker and thicker and thicker. It's just innovating. It wasn't cheating. It was like you read the rule, you interpret the rule, and you go, "Okay, well, it don't say anything about this. Well, hell, it don't say anything about that, either. So, let's do this and that." And if, you know, I've always told my boys that they were they were racers and and it's not There's no magic wand that you can wave over a race car. Kyle Larson's car North Wilkesboro. The 24 car is the same car, you know. He just had it figured out. It's the hundred little tiny things that you do from bumper to bumper, from top to bottom, and then the engine shop, same thing. It's not always the engine that makes the most power on the dyno that's your best race engine. You have to It's a big package. Like at Martinsville, we used to detune the the the bottom end of the engine and put it on the top end, so I could like a dragster uh motor because you'd just spin the tires off the corner with all the torque. So, we would kill the motor a little bit on bottom and let it haul ass down the straightaway. All those little bitty things add up to success if you put it all together and and make it work. So, that's just kind of what we did, and it's evolved over the years, and you know, aerodynamically, this truck in the wind tunnel actually had about 50 lb at a 130 mph wind of lift. You know, and everybody said, "Oh, they're going to be real light in the back." Well, actually, it had so much pressure the first time we went to the wind tunnel, it pushed the back window in and caved in the tunnel cover because the air hits the spoiler, curves back, and hits the cabin. You get all your downforce, right here. Which is wonderful. As time went on, we learned how to shift it so we could balance the front and back. And um you know, nowadays, it's it's it's you know, they got a lot of downforce. Uh later as as it evolved, we just got more and more and more downforce with the trucks, and we found out how to balance it front to back. And we went did a uh what I wasn't in the three truck at this time. I was in the five truck when I started driving for Toyota. Went to Dover one time, and Jimmie Johnson owned Dover. And we ran the exactly same time as the cup car. And I went, "How in the hell's that happen? The truck's got all that drag in it." We were 9 mph faster through the corner, and Jimmie was 9 mph up straightaway faster than we were. It was because of all the downforce. And um but like I said, this particular truck, they drove terrible because it actually had lift. So, it wanted to push the front wheels getting in the corner, and then sideways off the corner, and just it made you had to manhandle it and drive the hell out of it. And um it's it's just insane how it's evolved over the years. Is that why when the cup guys came down in the early years of the truck series, you would just stomp them cuz they weren't used to that? I don't know about stomping them, but we'd beat them. One of the day beat them, and you know, couple of my iconic wins was you know, beating Terry Labonte, passed him on the last lap at Phoenix, and then beating Ernie Irvan for the lap for the second win at Phoenix. Um those guys were pretty pretty big time, you know, they they they were big names and they were they were champions and run good in the sport. Ernie won a bunch of races. Terry was a champion. Um it it was it was just we drove and I don't know that it's ever changed. We drove like our life depended on it. And you go watch a truck race now, and those guys in the front, man, when they're they're on their game, when that restart come, boom. You know, they they William Byron has a hard time keeping up with those guys on the restart. It's just that intense. And they they beat and bang, and you know, the difference is nowadays, we would push each other out of the way a lot and beat and bang, but we wouldn't just go in there and wreck somebody to to win. And nowadays, that's that's a given. They're they're going to do that to win a race. They're just going to wreck you, and uh that part of it I'm not crazy about, but the rest of it was just uh amazingly fun because we had rivalries. Like we Ron Hornaday and I would beat the hell out of each other. I'll I'll show you a a setup I have in my trophy case over there. I still razz him about 20 minutes after the race. I wanted to kill him. 20 minutes after the race, he'd be at my motorhome or I'd be over at his we'd be drinking a beer together, you know, like that. You know, like the the the damn uh coyote and the damn sheepdog, you know, kind of watching over the nest. So, that was, you know, a lot of the guys like Jack. Jack would hold a brick grudge. If you touched him, oh my god, he wouldn't speak to you for 3 months. But Hornaday and I always just gave each other so much hell and worked each other over every week, but we remained friends, and uh it was cool last weekend to go and hang out with him at the racetrack, and he got to uh to be the grand marshal, and you know, gentlemen, start your engines, and I got to wave the flag. Coming back to Wilkesboro, 27 years ago, I was on the pole at Wilkesboro. So, it was uh pretty darn cool. That was the truck. I'm just looking at this thing now. You said they had the seat in there the way you had it and stuff. Is it just my eye, or is it kind of cocked a little bit? Oh, it's definitely cocked because when you slam into the corner, you want it to push you down, not over. And that that's still pretty common. It does it doesn't have the head and neck safety, the ridge the ribs support right there. Um you're a big guy. I'm a big guy. If you hit with that thing, it would just straighten that out. And uh it it it'd break your ribs, and you know, Steve Park broke his femur because of these little cheesy little leg braces. Now they go all the way down to the front. You're you're basically in a capsule nowadays. Over time, tons of crashes, tons of data from the crashes, tons of sled test that NASCAR did. Um you know, it it was it was pretty loose, but when we lost Dale, that woke up. That woke NASCAR up. It was like we we just lost our Elvis. We lost the biggest name in the sport. And they started pouring money into technology, sled test, crash test. They were taking things and making every kind of crash you could make, molding the seat and the cockpit around the safety for the driver. And then as time went on, they started putting soft walls in and making the race tracks safer. So, um kudos to NASCAR for for making our sport where um you know, I I kind of had to retire in 2012. I just had so many concussions and my body was so beat up. And my doctor said, "You can't take a whole lot more. If you if you want to, you know, watch your grandkids grow up, you need to probably get an exit strategy." And nowadays, these kids can hit big wrecks, step out, go back to motor home, and go play golf the next day um because of the safety. Back in this era, were these frames built symmetrical or were they offset like the front clips, the frame rails, that kind of stuff? No, it's a it's was then and still is it's a what we call a perimeter chassis. Like the Pro Late and Super Late, it's offset chassis with a straight frame rail down the right side, and then a perimeter frame rail on the left side. Um these are still perimeter cars. They're they're they're um you know, they're the weight balance. You can only have 55% on the left, 45 on the right. Um where the Super Late models like 58 or 60% left side weight. They they don't they don't allow the NASCAR vehicles to do that. So but it's so it's a perimeter. The the perimeter chassis it's harder to get left side weight percentage because it's you have all this framework out here but it's a ton safer and I think that's NASCAR's goal there and their their reason the reason behind the perimeter chassis is the safety. So the front clip was symmetrical also it wasn't like offset to then they start doing that in later years they'd have front clips that were more favored to turn left or until they well no they're still not allowed to do that. They still have to be symmetrical in the front. Now there's a tolerance and so of course everybody pushes the tolerances as far as it can go. Nowadays with the with the new the new car the next gen car that they're racing now they're all the same. All the frames are the same. We used to have this truck not this truck but we had another truck that was really super light that Todd Berrier built. The team built it Todd kind of engineered it and it was so light that you'd have to even if you didn't hit anything you'd have to change the front clip about every four races because it was so light it would just flex so much it would just the chassis would go to hell. So you just basically had to it was good for about 1500 miles and then you had to you had to re just cut the frame off and put a new one on but it was hauled it hauled it hauled ass. It was it was lightweight and went good. NASCAR really watches that stuff now. It's it's a little harder to to get by with stuff like that nowadays. Does this truck still have an engine now? Yep. Still got it in there? Yep. Yeah it's just like it came off the track, basically. This was the one year they had this stupid rule um they had this air cleaner like that and these deals came up to the headlights, these hoses came up to the headlights and you got your air from that. It was a dumb rule. It didn't work. I think they only did it one year and they outlawed it, but this this was the particular year when they did it like that. When the truck series started, were they uh 9:1 engines? Mhm. Nope. 12 and 1/2. Huh. I wondered how that worked cuz uh didn't they go to 9:1 at some point or talk about it? I think they they might have talked about it. I don't think they ever did it. So, it was just the Bush series that went 9:1? Yeah, they they did a um they did um a what they call a tapered spacer to pull horsepower out of it. Once we got to about oh heck, 850, 860 horsepower, we were going to racetracks like I said on the pole at Martinsville in the truck series and would have been third in the cup race. And NASCAR went, "Whoa, hang on. We cannot have the trucks faster than the cup cars. The cup cars is cup cars the premier series and they've got to be faster than the trucks." They pulled about 75 horsepower out by putting a tapered spacer underneath the carburetor. And um it didn't slow us down very much. We still We We got them We got them going so good through the corners that um the straightaways just On short tracks, you weren't on the straightaway long enough. So, we we were still pretty close to the speeds of the cup cars. It's interesting to see like looking at these older chassis versus the newer ones is how tiny the sway bar tube is compared to the more modern Oh, yeah. That sway bar you couldn't put no no more than about an inch and an eighth sway bar in this thing and nowadays it's like 2 and 1/2 inch sway bar that I'll have in there. They'll have a 3-in tube on it. And look at the size of the springs. I mean, that's probably a 1,000 lb spring or 900 lb spring. Now you'd run a 350 350 lb spring there with a bump stop or a 400 lb spring there. Did they ever get into doing bump stops in trucks when you were still running them? They were They were not allowed. They are now. Or coil bind? Uh they We coil bound. Um you know, Jeff Hensley and I when I came not never we never coil bound in the three truck. When I came back in 2004 and drove for Toyota, um Jeff Hensley and I we we would coil bind the left front spring and we wore them out in a bunch of places and everybody started In the Cup Series they started coil binding the right front. And we were kind of we were having a lot of success doing what we were doing, but it was hurting the arrow platform so bad the thing go down straight away and the nose would be that high off the ground. And when you was on the right front it would keep it sealed up. And so we eventually had to to to go and and figure out how to do it on the right front. And we did and you know, it just um nowadays the delta the difference in the the travel from all the way down to all the way up is very little. As a matter of fact, the Goodwood truck that we built, it was about 500,000ths of an inch. These things are probably still a couple inches, but um it's big the difference in travel. We hardly had any travel at all in that thing. It was just like an Indy car. Huh. Or a Formula 1 car the way it was in the whole bottom was pan you know, all pan totally illegal for NASCAR. That's the Goodwood the special. Yeah, the special. Which that truck you might have to come back and check that out. It It might be up here. Our friend Jimmy Walker purchased year, so yeah. Yeah. And it's right next to the park where you saw those big man caves. Yeah. He's got a collection of some old stock cars and Big time multi-million dollar collection. It's crazy the cars he's got. A lot of Corvettes, a lot A lot of really historic cars and Well, pretty much all of them are restomods though. Is that the truck that was in the viral video of you doing Goodwood? Yes. That all the European people were like, "Oh my god, I can't believe a a NASCAR truck can do that." Yeah, well, that truck 10 was in one of those viral videos. Yeah, we won There's two of them. my own record four times. Yeah. Every year we We had to go go faster. the record. But the the special um took it to a new level. It was a couple seconds faster. That went 47 seconds. It was in the 47s, which is That's a good That's hauling butt up a 1.2 mile driveway. When you went up to the Cup Series in the Lowe's car, who drove this truck? Jay Sauter. Jay Sauter took my place and he had a lot of success, did good, won races, and then they had two or three other drivers and then the Dillon boys got old enough to drive and they started driving in the truck series and um But Jay Sauter was the one that replaced me when when I left. And they And they, you know, some of the trucks they they kept and they redone for Jay. But this truck was special. So, Richard kept kept in the barn forever. It's just all kind of crappy and And Gandy kept working on it. Said, "When you going to give Mike that truck?" And so, one year for Christmas Richard decided for your retirement. It was for my retirement, but it was a Christmas present, whatever. Um why don't you tell the story? Well, Mike didn't have one of his trucks that he raced. You know, a lot of NASCAR drivers have one of their favorite cars, the car owner usually gave them something and like Rusty Wallace, Penske gave him a bunch. I know Harvick even had some cars from Childress and I'm like, "Dude, we don't even have a Lowe's car. We don't have a truck and we really like to have one of those trucks cuz that's where Mike really honed his name in the Craftsman Truck Series being the inaugural champion of the series and he kept going, "Well, it's in the Hall of Fame. Don't you want it in the Hall of Fame? It's in the Hall of Fame. I'm saving it for that." And I was like, "I don't really care, Richard. I just want one of them trucks for Mike." So, I was constantly harassing him for one of these trucks and was I think it was in 2012, Mike had decided he wasn't going to race cup anymore and so or trucks or anything. And so, I was actually working for Ryan Newman at the time and Ryan was driving for RC and I had to have a meeting with RC and I'll never forget it was at the Kansas racetrack. And I walked in his bus and we had our meeting about Newman and I'm like, "Now, when you going to let me have that truck?" And he goes, "Angie, I'm just hold on, you know." And I go, "Whatever." And I kind of got mad. Not mad at him. In the meantime, he got the truck that was in the Hall of Fame back out, put it in his museum. This truck was still sitting in the barn. I don't think it ever I don't think his truck was ever in the Hall of Fame. Yes. Anyway, go on. We need to research that cuz this…