My Third Race EVER in Vintage NASCAR Monte Carlo! Mike Wallace is My Spotter

Have you ever wondered what would happen if you took a normal guy with no racing experience and stuck him in a legitimate NASCAR Bush Series car from 20 years ago against some of the same people who used to race him 20 years ago and said, "Have at it. Let's see what happens." This right here will be my fourth race ever in these cars. Mike Wallace is going to be my spotter. >> Mike Wallace, two years in a row, is going to win THE FIRST RACE IN THE NASCAR CRAFTSMAN Truck Series and the inaugural Daytona 250. >> What are you doing here, Mike? I come to watch you race. No, you didn't. Yes, I did. I read all about it. You're going from YouTube internet superstar to race car driver. But yes, you're right. I'm lying to you. I'm here to watch my daughter Chrissy race. She's driving one of the cars for Don Doster and um Jeremy Mayfield. >> Who's got to twist your arm to get you in one of these things? >> Uh this nice looking young lady right here. >> Huh? Can we use that as an excuse? >> Yeah. >> What do you think? >> Shoes. >> Huh? >> Those are cool. Those are cool. >> In case I forget my name. >> How was your car off the trailer compared to how it felt last week? >> Mine's good. >> You didn't have to change it? >> No. I mean, we're we're like a few rounds away at Shy. You know what I mean? But I'm good. I feel like I'm I'm going to raise my tri bar a little bit. I was a little bit tighter this practice I was the first practice. >> Oh. >> How about you? >> I felt a little loose on this exit. Yeah. Once I when I touched the gas and rotated a lot. >> That's kind of way we were yesterday. So, uh, put, uh, put like two rounds in the left rear, two rounds out of the right rear. Now, we're getting ready for the first practice, or my first practice anyway, cuz we just got here a little late. Letting it warm up. Let the oil fry full of fins oil, the platinum. Let me see your camera a second. I'm retired. You're starting. You're telling the world about all this. Maybe everybody respect us as drivers because there's more to it than just driving the car. There is. And I I already had a deep admiration for everybody of your generation before. I I understand work. But now that I am physically doing it and trying to balance, you know, living your life and buying food and paying rent, all that stuff with it at the same time, how those guys, you guys did that back then under those circumstances is really, really impressive. >> It's a hard life to live. >> Next superstar right here. Daytona winner ride the horse. >> I think trucks are pretty cool. >> What are you two talking about? about you two recording each other. And I said, "For all all he knows, he's probably like cutting y'all's heads off." She laid up the camera. We were impressed. It's perfect. You had everything in place. >> He does. I can see it. He's doing good. >> Yeah, he's doing a good job. >> There's a debate going on cuz I have one set of black wheels, one set of chrome ones. Some people hate the chrome, love the black, or >> I love the chrome. You're talking to a chrome guy. So when we had uh when Geico was a sponsor of the car I ran in ' 07 and 08 that's dating you a little bit but we had chrome wheels on that. I thought it was badass. We put black on it and it just look everybody had black. I I think the worst thing that actually happened to race cars >> is the black wheels come about. >> I think like chrome wheels colored car. >> Yeah. >> You know teal on teal would be different. You know >> the color of the chassis matching the car. Black wheel guy. He looks too plain to me. >> So, leave a comment. Are you team chrome or team black? >> There we go. >> Chrome's going to win. >> Just take your time. Get yourself focused in there. Get your seat belts on. Don't rush. You're the leader of the deal. They're not going to they're not going to move to you. So, just make sure all your safety gear. and run as hard as I can and let them figure out how to pass me or evaluate if I am in the way or not as it goes. How about you do the best job you can believe me that I'm going to help you a little bit? Do you want to race? Do you want to finish? One thing that you know you got to do, you got to gain the confidence and trust of everybody. It's very difficult to judge how fast you can go into the turn at first cuz you don't want to overdo it and slide up into the car next to you. And I've never done this before. So, I had no idea what I could and couldn't do. Right. Clear it out. You're clear up. >> I was not the fastest qualifier put on the pole from an invert. I was expecting cars [music] to pass me, but I thought there would be more. Now I've kind of settled off at third and I'm thinking, okay, I'm going to make it my mission to stay here behind Mayfield. A very small car. He's supposed to stay in the top. Not only am I still learning how to drive this car, but all the tracks we go to are places I've never been to before. So, I'm learning this place on the fly. I know these things look like they would be nimble and agile race cars, but they're not. Honestly, it drives like a Chevel with big sticky tires. It's heavy. You can feel all the weight, and you really have to manipulate its momentum and the weight transfer to make it do stuff. Check out Hey, Mighty. What do you think? I'm thinking it's pretty okay. I found a bump going into the one that auto up the car real bad and I just figured out how to avoid that. So that's good. I can tell the police 15 and uh I six of you are in the line basically. So you just hold nice and smooth left. This is a competition caution. You're doing a good job. All right. Looking straight up off the corner. Just got to keep it driving straight off the corner. We're going to drive you a little bit getting in the corner. But you want to rotate the corner. Get off the corner. Do you think I'm driving in too hard? We're not rolling it enough. What are you seeing? You can probably roll your entry a little faster getting into the corner. Don't overdrive. Those cars got a charge. You're the only one that knows what the steer wheel be. You're coming to the green. That's ready. You're coming to the green. Green eye. You saw [music] me just turn that knob up there. That's the brake bias knob. And I put around to the rear because when [music] I was going in, it didn't want to turn until I took my foot [music] off the brake. Then I've learned that that usually means you have too much front brake in [music] the car. So I put around to the rear to try to help get it to rotate better, and it did. The brake bias adjustment is about the only tuning tool the driver has that can be changed [music] during the race. Everybody lined up. They're lined up behind you. I'm starting to see some a little bit of smoke come out of the back of Chris Burn's car, the 18. I don't know what that is. I don't know if he's got a tire going, like a tire rub. I mean, his blood tire or what, but I'm kind of keeping my eye on that as a potential, [music] you know, issue waiting to happen. And I think that contributed to some of my apprehension to stick my nose in an X to the 46 because at the front of my mind is the knowledge that if I tear the front of this car up, I do not have time to fix it before the season ends. 40 to go. Now, what I'm working for here is to stay tight to the back of the 46, hoping he can clear the 18 on the inside and I can follow him. This racetrack is really small, really narrow, and really bumpy. So, if they're too wide [music] up there, I don't have anywhere to go. You can't go three wide here. I have to pick one of them and go that way. And you will see the 46 right here is going to take advantage of the pick of the laped car to get in front of the 18. I haven't seen the haze out of Burn's car get any worse or any better. So, I'm kind of thinking now if he had a tire up, if there was going to be a problem already, it would have gotten worse or something would have happened by now. So, I'm not really too worried about it. Time to go. Time to go. My car was too tight in the center. I didn't really have any way to fix that cuz [music] we didn't show up the day before for the practice day like we have been sometimes to where you can have an entire day to iron this stuff out. We showed up the day of the race and ran the two 10-minute practice sessions. Made a couple changes and that was it. That's why you can see when I start pushing harder to try to catch up [music] past Chris Burns, the uh I'll get loose on the exit. Well, that's not cuz [music] the car itself is loose. It's because it's too tight in the center and I have a lot of wheel in it and then it snaps loose because I have so much wheel in it still [music] at that point on the exit. You're flying. Check. Good job. You You finished. That was a good race. You raced right there with the leaders with your car still in case you need to make some changes. Good night. I didn't want to overtalk you. You were always clear. He was never to your in your right rear or anything. He was up high. And sometimes people run that because it'll get you looking in your mirror hoping to that you'll no help. But you did great. Race is clean. Your car is good. Take a little break and you get to go around 50 more laps later on. You did great, bud. >> We're waiting for race two. Went to check my tire pressures and my left rear was at like 8 lb. It should be around 12. And that valve stem was a little weird. It went in farther than I felt like it should when I put it in. And uh took it out and the seal was ripped. Put some packers in the right front. Hopefully get it back up where it was. Put the air in the back. Should be a lot better the second race. Now, >> you probably seen our little dog running around the toy. That's Shelby. We bring her almost everywhere with us. And Shelby is picky. She does not eat dry dog food. She just won't eat it. She'll go on hunger strikes for days. So, our friends at Mave sent us over a couple bags of their human grade dog food. >> Are you ready? Oh my goodness. Are you so excited? Come on. I thaw it out a little bit for her. She likes it uh less frozen. >> It's super easy. You keep it in the freezer. It's made out of real things. You can look at it and see pieces of meat, pieces of vegetables, and things like that. It's not just generic pellets of crushed up whatever that they feed to dogs. >> So, now we're going to open up some of these bars. She loves these. Oh my gosh, she loves these. I confiscated her bowl so she would have room for this. Oh yes. Oh yes. I'm so happy. Give it to me. Give it to me. Please give it to me. Please give it to me. You can check out May with the link in the description or the QR code on the screen here. If you got any good stories about upgrading your dog's food for a better diet, let us know in the comments. We'd love to hear it. We're big dog people around here. Restarts are my greatest weakness right now. And I'm pretty sure I figured out why. In the drag racing I used to do, you would do roll racing sometimes where you would hold a constant speed and then you both go at the same time. And I had the muscle memory from that built into my subconscious. And it doesn't work like that here. You kind of creep forward faster and faster as it changes every time. Well, I need to undo that roll racing muscle memory in my head and pay closer attention to cheating the restarts the same way everybody else does so I don't get left behind. Even though I fixed the air pressure and put [music] a packer back in the right front to keep it from burying itself into the racetrack, the car felt worse [music] in the second race than it did in the first one. And it felt worse in practice. It felt worse in the first race than [music] it did in practice. And I would think that that's probably as a result of the track temperature cooling off cuz it cooled off significantly from the time we got there to now. It's actually kind of chilly outside. And that's just stuff I need to learn about how the car and these tires behave when temperature changes [music] and all those things and how that factors into your adjustments and how you want the car to feel during practice knowing that the temperature [music] is going to be dropped because you can't put the car exactly how you want it in practice. Cuz if it feels great in practice on old tires, when you go to the race and the track [music] is cooler and you're on new tires, it's going to be completely different. So you have to figure out some kind of translation to what is the wrong right feeling I want to [music] find in practice that will be the right feeling when the race comes. Something a lot of you probably don't know with these cars if you see a power cord and plugged in behind the seat there. That's not to charge the battery. That is going to the heater on the oil tank. These cars hold about 5 gall of oil. This is a real R5P7 Dodge engine from the truck series 20 years ago. The tolerances inside them are so tight. If you start them with cold oil and nothing is expanded yet from the heat, you can cause damage to it, premature wear, all that stuff. So, what you do after you let the oil heat for about 20 minutes, you have to do this every time you start the engine or you will hurt it. You have to slide the oil pump belt off, which takes a little bit of work. Then, I use this angle drill here with a 1/2 in bit and spin the oil pump over to prime the system because the dry sump creates a vacuum. Eventually, there's no oil in the engine. run it until I can put my hands on the lines and feel that all this is hot, you know, from the hot oil that came from the tank. You also might be wondering, well, there's probably not actually Pens oil in that car. Oh, it's race motor. It's like, no, there actually is Pens oil in this car. It's ultra platinum 0W40, and it's the same stuff that you can go buy at the parts store. And when I keep saying [music] a car is tight in the center, that means it does not want to turn. It wants to push the front tires. And that means I have to slow down more to make that turn [music] to not push the front tires. Because if you get to the point of turning where the front tires are pushing, [music] you have no grip. the car is sliding. You've exceeded the mechanical limit of the tire and it just makes them hot. You don't go any faster. Around this time, I remembered something [music] that Ron Hornadyay told me to do with my feet when we were putting the seat in this car. And I started doing that and it helped a lot because with [music] uh my car my own carburetor as a a progressive linkage [music] so I can kind of work the primaries before the secondaries come in. And with this carburetor I have on here now it is [music] one one so they all open at the same ratio. So when I would touch the pedal [music] it would hit the tire a little harder than I wanted it to. And by implementing [music] this different technique, I was able to smooth that out and it really helped my drive off. This track was a little bit interesting. The bottom groove had a little bit more banking than when you move up when it kind of the banking kind of falls off a little bit. And when I would try to go up there, the front end would just push. It wouldn't [music] it wouldn't rotate. It didn't make the turn. So, my car was really kind of being [music] bandaided by that extra banking down there, and I couldn't make it work up high. I think if I had given up on trying to get under her on the bottom on the exit, I could have figured out how to make the top work. But that's hindsight being 2020. Just part of learning stuff. Heat I know she [music] you know, humor [music] and you, you know, it takes a while to do this stuff and you do a great job and you fall to death and uh go to the church. >> Thank you. Appreciate it. >> It's cool to see the younger folk getting into this stuff. that uh makes me feel good that uh they're watching and I have a chance to positively influence them cuz there's too much bad crap, negative influences on the internet now. And I don't want to be that. I've never wanted to be that. I want the young people and everybody watching this video to think, "Well, that was time well spent in my day." whether you learned something, you were entertained, or or both. That's my goal. So, I'd like to know if we're achieving that goal. Thank you for being here. Anyway, back to the present moment. That was fun. That was uh I learned a lot about different ways to do things. I knew she wasn't going to be easy to pass. And her car was definitely >> Oh, yeah. >> coming back to me. But man, any chance I would have at letting the horsepower help me out is not going to work here because the straightaways are so short and she's so good at taking the bottom. She's running basically the same line that works for me, which I felt like was the only line that was working for me. So, I'd try to slide in there up there, but when I'd come through and the banking would increase when you're on the bottom of that banking would increase. When you're a little hot in the center, it'll catch you and then you can get on it and get out. Well, over there, I felt like the banking fell off a little bit or I was up in the marbles or something, but it just that push from center never went away when I was on up there. When I was on the bottom, it was stuck. It was It was funny having Mike on the radio with his daughter in front and he's like, "You're going to have to make a move to the outside cuz she's she's going to hold the bottom. She's not going to let it go." And I'm like, "For some reason, I think you know what you're talking about. >> Thank you for the spot job. >> You're the man. You did a great job. Proud of you." >> Thank you. >> And yes, it is a conflict of personal interest when you're trying to tell somebody to pass your daughter. Position yourself to drive around the outside of her. It's like I've never done that before. That was weird. >> But but I was trying to be the coach. I was trying to like position yourself. You know, she's not going to give up the bottom. [laughter] >> You did good. I believe when you said that, I believed you. Like this man has watched her more than anybody. And he knows what's happening. Except I don't know how to pass somebody up high. I don't know if I could even do that here. I I don't know where my car didn't really wasn't go doing it right or it just didn't it felt like there was only one way I could really go around the track and be fast. You know why you felt that way? >> Why? >> Cuz you're new to this. >> Yeah, that makes sense. >> You haven't been put in that position to run the outside and that's sometimes as you're racing along, which I need you to do. You need to run the top just to run the top. Like the next race you run when they know you're going to have a 20 lap break, run the top wherever you go just for a lap. What's it feel like up here? >> That's a good idea. >> You might find out, holy, my car drips good up here. I might go faster up here. I learned that first time at Texas Motor Speedway running a truck. We run wide open down there in a truck and I'm peeling around the bottom. Peeling around the bottom and maintaining. I went to the top half a lane and all the that thing picked up speed. It's like I drove. It's like this is cool. >> But you don't know it until you go there and you're kind of You don't want to try to force yourself to that be your last alternative. You want to know what it's going to do. You want to challenge for the last five laps when you That's a position.…