Skip to main content

Post-Racing Life and Retirement

2:28
44:36
324.5K views

At 2:28 in

Rusty Wallace's Legendary "Midnight" NASCAR Race Car is Track Ready Again! (Ford C3 Engine Sounds)

What happens here

The car was stored between its final racing period and the 2013 restoration, always carefully watched over. For a time in the early 2000s, it was displayed as a show car, but with an incorrect '98 Taurus body and 2000 decals, which was later corrected during the full restoration. 'Midnight' eventually stopped being used in competitive racing because, despite its dominance, the competition caught up, and the car's aging chassis couldn't keep pace with newer designs.

Goal: Document the car's history between active racing and full restoration.

What they say

Hide

even cooler what happened to this car from when it stopped racing until 2013 because that's that's almost 20 years of where's midnight the car was in storage and it was just uh we we knew exactly where everything was at we've always kept an eye on her always had it undercover and then when it was time to do something like I said for the Hall of Fame that's when we got it one got it back and this this was the most famous chassis ever in the history of Penske Racing when it was a single car team so we got it and that's when we we had to have a reason to restore it and get it going and the reason was me being inducted into the Nascar Hall of Fame why did it stop uh getting used if it was so dominant it got it stopped getting used because it was a dominant car we led a lot of laps like I said but it got to a point where it just wasn't as fast as it used to be competition was catching up you know it was starting to show its age it was around for a long time and finally we start becoming where you know it was top fives and top tens instead of dominating leading laps like it did so it ran its course it took a long time for it to run its course because it was a really fast car but uh the neat thing about the car I think anybody is a fan of mine you mentioned a word midnight they knew exactly what I'm talking about they definitely do those those little

Auto-generated from the video audio.