Robert Huffman's Race Shop History Tour: Toyota's ORIGINAL NASCAR Champion!

I said, "You know what? I'm gonna call Toyota." I know they had dabbled a year before. We got a lot of things going on here. [laughter] How did you make sure yours was the best? Was it hard? Always the best. It's like hard to do. Up there where our race shop is now was once a tennis court. Every one of these trophies are late model trophies or limited light trophies. Mickey Mouse tablet. Oh, thanks. So, this is the building you ran the your dash car out of. It is. Yeah. So, and a lot of people don't know, but in 1990, I drove a dash car for John Paige, which we won the championship and rookie of the year in it. And just [clears throat] coincidentally, it was number 75 at that time. I had ran it previous a year or two, won at Hickory and raced at Daytona, I think, before we decided we was going to race for the championship. So, 1990 in the dash series, I drove for a different fella. I actually didn't start my dash my dash team I think till 90 95 and uh we actually built that car from scratch right here. Um we had a old snout that cut off of a Prolate model car and we narrowed it up and had a jig back there in the back and built the chassis on the jig and cut the roll cage off of a car friend of mine had totaled at Hickory and run our late models out of here. We had a couple infinity cards and I turn that off and take a minute to lighten around. But but all this this is our trophy room at that time. It's now became a storage. Still has a lot of our trophies and stuff in it. We're going to go in there. Yeah. So, who do you have to lock the thermostat to keep from changing it? Listen, when I first put this shop got this shop back going, obviously the furnaces were uh out of commission. And so my grandpa helped me tear them apart and we figured out a game plan on what we need to do to put those back together. And once we got it going, uh you know, everybody was shocked we had heat. So naturally, the heat was running uh last winter quite often. And I got my first propane bill and it was $2,200. So I uh [laughter] at that point I put the thermostat at that point I put locks on the thermostat and told everybody they come in here they were not allowed to touch it unless I touched it. So when I started racing my dash car we uh naturally we wanted to make a business out of it and we started hanging bodies. Got in with Scott Weaver. Scott Weaver built our chassis and we would hang bodies on the cars. You know at Daytona we might have 18 or 20 bodies. I had a guy working for me at the time which we'd hang the bodies right here and do all our sheet metal [clears throat] work and at that time we were painting you know I was painting the cars chassis and all do that was our paint shop there. Think about that Mitch for a second. He uh he was hanging 18 to 20 bodies for Daytona all while also hanging his body for Daytona. So do you feel like uh all 18 of those bodies were equal? I mean how many cars were in the field? Uh well there' be 40 down there. So, you were responsible for half of them. Well, we would. There just wasn't many people doing the bodies for them. And uh one more day than he did. How did you make How did you make sure yours was the best? Was it hard? It was always the best. It wasn't hard [laughter] to do actually. Uh so, as a funny story to that, my Speedway car through all our racing I had worked on it made it better and better and better and finally got it to where we were pretty good about every time I went down there. any of his uh restrictor plate tracks with the Pontiacs. And when I built our Toyota, I didn't want to tear it up or didn't want to sell it to anybody cuz it's cheated up, you know. So, I actually traded it back to Scott Weaver to build me a new Speedway car. So, just cuz me and Scott shared everything we had anyway. But, uh it's interesting stories to that. Yeah, we uh [clears throat] learned a lot through our dash racing, you know, and that was probably the the highlight of the this shop was being able to have a business, ran out of here that we raced and supported other people, too. Uh yeah, the boy worked for me actually. We had a car that turned over at Daytona down through the infield. Had a bunch of grass, sodrass in the floorboard. When it come back, Astro took it home and planted it at his house. had actually come up a little spot of Daytona turf. So, really cool. [laughter] Yeah. Well, everybody used to say I'd wreck them down there cuz I got to put the bodies back on, which they would nine times out of 10. They would come back and had the bodies put back. Just [laughter] interesting. It's good for business. Yeah. Just, you know, that's the way we race. I mean, I relied on that. We paid mine his salary and, you know, with White House Apple Juice sponsor, we could race off of that. So, uh, it was good times back in the late 90s, early 2000s. And then Toyota come along. Actually, how that happened was just a whim on my part. I was sitting around here one day and it had to be 90 99, I think. And I said, you know what? I'm going to call Toyota. I knew they had dabbled a year before. Called [clears throat] them. First thought, you know, maybe they'll give us a motor or something. and went out and met with them and they called back and said, "Listen, this is going to be more than that. We need to sit down and talk." So, we actually wound up, our engine guy got involved and he was the most negative one towards it to start. I ain't going to spend no money. They ain't going to go nowhere. You don't need to mess with them. Well, he's wound up working for them till up about a year ago building motors and stuff and their G GT cars and off-road trucks. At that point, you had what three championships in dash before? Uh, three counting my 1990. I had we had one championship in 98 and 99. So you might have had you [clears throat] only won one for Toyota, right? 03. 03. So you would have had more than that. You'd had four. No, not by then. I wanted nothing in 2000. By then? Yes. But I was we were already talking. We were trying to get to Toyota in 2000 and it didn't work [clears throat] out. So we ran Pontiacs through 2000 while we worked on the Toyota program. It was kind of a neat situation for me. NASCAR wouldn't let them run their new Celica body and that's what they wanted to race and Pontiac or Chevrolet V6 was uh odd fire motor even fire whichever and the Toyota was opposite of that when NASCAR was making them make their motor the same firing as the Chevrolet. Well, it's a 60° V6 and the Pontiac or Chevrolet is a 90°ree V6. So I'd go to the racetrack with them practice and I mean this shaking and vibrating and they were like throwing stuff off at the dyno. They'd throw the balancers off and stuff. And and what Robert's talking about with the odd fire versus even fire is that relates to the bank angle of the engine relative to the degrees in the crankshaft at which every cylinder fires. The oddfire V6 has to fire at 901 150. So the pulse spaces of the firing sequence are not even which makes a deeper rumblier sound. Chapman though has not run regularly for four or five years. He would love to get a big one at Daytona. We've already our engine guy went to NASCAR and said hey this is why you know this is why they need to change their motor to Oddf fired. [clears throat] Got them to do that. And so we got their motor approved for them. I took I actually still had the paper around here somewhere. I took all the templates from NASCAR and drew them off. Then drew took brought a Celica down here from the Toyota dealership. Made a template off of that and showed NASCAR how it's all the same and got their Celica body approved. And still got one of those motors in the wrapper [clears throat] down at your shop. I still have three of those motors and unfortunately they're not worth much. Tried to sell them, but they're not worth a whole lot. But all that was a a good start for me. You know, I had a really good relationship with Dave Wilson. Uh, got to go do the pro celebrity race with Toyota. Uh, that was an awesome awesome thing to get to do. I never had road raced. Uh, got to road race in the rain and got to road race on the streets of Long Beach. And then 03 won them a championship, you know, got to win some races for them. Got to run the truck series with them. Would like to have ran my own truck team, but they didn't think that was the correct thing to do. If could have done that, maybe it'd still be a truck team owner today. I don't know. But it wasn't the path it was meant to be. So, I think it would have worked out a little better than the the situation that unfolded, but you never know, I guess. Yeah. Unfortunately, this sport's a moneyhungry sport, and you know, all them teams, they knew I had access to the Toyota money, so they were all trying to court me, unfortunately. And, you know, they were courting Toyota, too. in in their ear a lot. And I mean, it all worked out in the end. And Toyota was is really good to me. You know, Dave Wilson still remembers what we all done at that point in time. Dave wasn't the president of TRD. So, you know, I got to see him come up through the ranks of all that. And just now retired. Yep. Just retired this past year. Got to [clears throat] go to his retirement party. That was pretty awesome. Their company plan is a lot more laidback than you'd think. You know, I was aggravated at myself for not winning races when I thought I should. And, you know, I think I was leading a race at Charlotte and steering shaft come off, which was my fault. And wrecked on the last lap and, you know, they're like, "It's all right." You know, it would have been my first win for Toyota. And they they're the kind of people that don't want to win too soon. They want to make a big splash, but they don't want everybody to really see how big it is. You know, they've kind of proved that with what they've done in the cup racing and trucks and Xfinity stuff. So, they did a good job setting the bar low when they came to Cup in 2007. If you remember that fiasco correctly. Yeah, I can see the floor does that in here. Yeah. You can see one thing about it, when the roof leaks, the water definitely runs out of the building. Well, that's that's a big plus. It won't hold water. It's easy to tell if you look at where the uh wood paneling is, like the difference between the wood paneling and the floor all the way up here at the front of the shop. And then if you walk back to the paint booth, which is now like setup build area, uh cuz we paved that or filled that in with concrete, so it was actually level. But you can definitely look at the difference in the shop and see just by by that. But a lot of the stuff that he had in the shop naturally when we cleared everything out, it was trying to figure out, okay, are we still going to utilize that space as what it was utilized before, or are we going to repurpose it, which we kind of used the scale area, which had grain scales and stuff. We used it as a scale area last year, but we had rolloffs in there. When my dad done this here, we poured the floor where you could set grain skills. Most racers today don't even know what grain skills are. I think they're still in the back. They're four basically four scales like you use in a grain old grain barn or something to weigh the grain and they had little weights you set on one end and you slide a little thing back and forth and that's how you weigh them out. But they set in here car roll back over it. Everything [clears throat] was level and we kind of just adapted it to what scales we had. It's just so hard to get back in here and under the cars nowadays as low as they are. So we've moved that down there to the paint booth. At one point, my grandpa had wood covering the open space like plywood. I feel like that might be the direction to go again. That way, you can at least store a car back here or something cuz really this this spot is kind of useless other than that if you're not going to use it for [snorts] for scaling. I guess you could potentially just fill in these and use it to where you could get under a car, tear down or something. But yeah, if it was a little deeper, you could have a pit, but it's not quite deep enough to be a pit. It's a pain in the ass to get under the car. Yeah. Trust me, I got bitched out a number of times from him while we're uh working on setup that he uh can't access things properly. Two, part of the reason it's so messy in here now, it's off season, so everything's tore apart naturally to modified. Looks like a bomb went off. Yeah, we just got the motor back. Got better. But it definitely There's times where this place looks really nice and there's times where it looks like it does right now, but it's been a slow process. It's been in a lot of garages. This is not a bad one. So, we had a frame we had a frame jig set up here, which was a set of I beams with some cross beams welded to it that you fasten the chassis down to and put a snouter or clip or, you know, fix something. a track right here. We had a little hoist on the hoist up, roll it back over and set it down on the on the lift. That's where we built our first dash car and I actually built a light model for [clears throat] six tire center here and uh we snouts on stuff and repaired stuff. Can you see any of the tennis court on the floor still? Is this is this This is the asphalt floor. It's just painted over. Yeah, it's just painted. Yeah, this it's hard to believe. So, so and my my dad in the pool business done a lot of trading. We never had heat. We never had air in our house till like 1990 and we traded a swimming pool to get air in the house. So, we traded a swimming pool for this tennis court. You know, a guy down here in Maiden done tennis courts and stuff. So he traded a swimming pool for a tennis court, which uh later worked out for this floor is a little aggravating because it's asphalt, but it's actually held up probably better than it should be asphalt. I mean, and all the stuff that's been in here. I mean, nothing's ever been done to the floor itself. This is the exact same floor. And I'm not quite impressive. I thought like, well, you could really save a lot of money building a garage if you didn't cuz concrete costs so much now if you just needed a garage to put cars in. There's nothing wrong with this at all. No. And it actually painted and held up better than I figured it would. Yeah, this is when when we built the building, they sprayed this floor. It's actually held up a lot better than I thought it would. And a lot of the spots on the floor, that's probably uh because of me and uh my help because we thought we were going to pressure wash it whenever I got in here, not thinking that the asphalt was softer obviously. So, it needed to be pressure washed cuz it was a disaster. I mean, that was this much dust and mud and on the floor. But once we started pressure washing it, you know, it started chipping up pieces and we didn't realize what was happening until we got it cleaned off and realized that we were also chipping the asphalt. So, I don't know. Some of it's natural that's happened when people drop stuff, but also a lot of the divots and stuff are from self-inflicted wounds. Do your jack stands sink in or do you have plates weld with the bottom? They're square plates in they they don't, but I think keeping the sun and the heat off of it, keeping it from getting hot and then being painted has helped that. I learned something today, bud. Naturally, if you drop some fuel Oh, yeah. on it, it's going to turn soft. [laughter] And we've had some burn. We've had some fuel uh we've had some fuel ignite igniting. It's right here. I think we had some fuel in a pan. This had to happen back, I don't know, mid to late 90s. We had some fuel in a pan. when we were welding and needless to say, it flamed up there a little bit. [laughter] Torched some stuff. We've had stuff like that happen. Well, up there there's plywood where the uh ceiling used to be. That's because I think he also caught that on fire at some point and burned a lot of the insulation. So, now there's just plywood there. [laughter] They were doing some kind of commercial for a had to be like a sweep stakes thing and Ned Jarrett was part of it and somebody had told them about our garage. So they used that wall and we hung stuff on it and the coolest thing was they brought one of Ned Jarrett's original cars down here and asked me to back it out of the trailer and all. Man, that was cool. That thing had the original like steering wheel on it like 17in steering wheel and old stock, you know, and roll bar pad and duct tape to the to the bars. It something that had been restored, but it it had pits in the welding. And the roll bars were, you know, you could tell it was an original car. It wasn't something somebody built like an old Ford Falcon or No, it had to be a Fairlane, I guess. Galaxy or Fairlane. But they filmed that commercial right there and it ran for I don't know six, eight months or something before they had the giveaway which I thought was cool. Have you been able to find that commercial on I didn't even know that was a thing. So I must I need to look that up now. [laughter] You didn't even know that. I can't remember who I learned that today. I can't remember who the company was, but uh I knew the guy that had the car. He was from up here in Asheville that had the the car they used. So it it was pretty cool to get to sit in it. And man, the seat was like a just a basically a house seat. Felt like Yeah, I have a I mean, we went up in the attic and stuff whenever I was doing the restoration. I think I put it in one of my videos, but there's like an old stock Buick Bush Grand National nose up there. So, like or I guess new old stock. So, it's brand [clears throat] new what they would put on from FiveStar, I guess, on a 90 probably two Bush Grand National Buick. still up there and uh some pit signs and stuff, but I'm not going to go up there now cuz I don't feel like falling through the roof. But I wonder if there was an attic in here cuz the ceiling is tall. I actually have So in 1990 when I won the championship, we had a short track car that we raced a lot. Won a lot of races in it. Well, I say a lot. That year we won four or five races, I think. And I won Well, all of them would have been in that car, I guess. But I have that body at my shop at my house. It was the whole body is up here in the in the attic, but we took it down and I cut the top off and put it on the side. It's hanging on my building in the shop. Still has the original decals on it. It's pretty cool. We can see that. Yeah. Look at it. It looks like you barely snuck this thing in here with those. It was Oh, yeah. Well, see, I was a little worried that the the ceiling would catch on fire doing that as well. But actually, I think we're going to have to hold the stack shut to get it out because we found out once we got it in here, it had an exhaust leak underneath and the stacks wasn't opening very much. So, I think we're going to have to hold the stack shut to get it back out. Yeah, they weren't opening coming in. But, this this is our newest purchase here at Huffman Racing. We sold we sold off some race cars to get a new tow vehicle because we had a GMC blue van and a 2500 15 passenger van. That's what we towed with tow vehicle for 10 years. Is it a six liter Duramax? Oh no, it's a just [laughter] a Yes. 350. Yeah, it's Trust me, [clears throat] she's getting all she's got [laughter] up the road. I got her out here being serviced right now. That's funny. Those flaps you if they were touching the roof coming in backing out the way they would it would be like a ratchet you get stuck in here. Remember the further we go back the more head clearance we get. So okay. Yeah. Remember [laughter] cuz you know the floor gets farther away. Yeah. The further we go back the more clearance we get. We…