The Car That Changed NASCAR: Sterling Marlin's Crazy Sounding 1995 Daytona 500 Winning Monte Carlo!

until we got to daytona we really didn't know what it sounded like folks to listen to this four car this you hear him as he goes by yeah that's a different sound there is that ball valve still in here you could have like a lot more things than black and again we're going under i wanted to see underneath this car for a very long time we're here near bristol virginia in the mcclure brothers shop that is sterling marlin's 1995 winning daytona 500 car you know the one that had the crazy sound this is just his first clap the i guess the big thing about this car was this difference in the sound and i wish we could get a microphone down for you folks to listen to this four card when we unloaded in daytona that car sounds a little bit on you sounds like an indy car almost what our first lap practice lap on the racetrack we were told that everybody in the bush series who were going through inspection on the backstretch at daytona ran to the fence to see what kind of car that was it sounded like an indy car it's a different sound than you're used to hearing it sounds like an indie car here's a quick back-to-back sound comparison to show you guys what everybody was used to hearing or expecting to hear whenever this sterling marlin kodak car went out on the track stations on uh the first lap a couple of miles an hour i was standing around there at the nascar trailer with bill franson and he went by and he went by he said what in the hell have you done now prior to the 95 season that in december the gentleman from salt lake city his name was dr gass that was his stage name or his name that he marketed his product with called and said i think i can help you with four or five horsepower are you interested and i said we worked the deal out and i said yeah send it so we he sent it we dynoed it and then after we dynoed it we had to of course fit it to the car until we got to daytona we really didn't know what it sounded like really yeah i mean it looked different but we didn't know what it sounded like you couldn't tell with a dino room and and we really didn't have a we just ran the x-pipe we didn't know what it sounded like with the tail pipes and everything so our first when they went on the racetrack the first time is first time we had heard it so you were just as shocked as everybody else was well i was real pleased i know that but all week long people would photograph this car and try to catch us with their pants down just to see if they could determine why this car sounded so different they didn't know if the engine they didn't know if it was exhaust they didn't know if it was the intake they didn't know what it was and we wanted to keep them in suspense so we took the qualifying motor out and changed motors i think once they never did see what it was we had blankets on the car we had to cover that pretty good and nascar would let us put it in the trailer at that time anybody could put their car back in the trailer at night so this guard did not have 180 degree headers no 180 degree headers they're just regular headers just regular headers okay well then everybody's collectors just uh a different x-pipe and tailpipes were they uh try collectors or four to one they were uh trial-wise okay i think we'd have to look and see but i think we ran both of them with the same exhaust did that change the sound much not not a lot okay what does the engine look like in this thing so this this is not in its as race form what what happened to this car between daytona and this car today was wrecked and rebuilt it was involved in an accident at talladega with dale earnhardt and ernie irvin so we rebuilt it and put it back as close as we we could to the way it was when it was raised when it was last race so the interior of the car is exactly how it was when it was wrecked oh yes it wasn't changed nope same seat man that window was tiny he was tiny sterling was tiny sweater so this is all how it was well i guess how it was a talladega how much of this did you change from talladega 96 to or what was that yeah daytona 95 to talladega 96 that did the inside of the car change at all like the same stickers and everything yeah that's pretty much the same and how did his uh daughter's hair bow end up tied to the roll bark well that's sterling did that prior to the race oh we did yeah yeah so we left it there so in that picture he did he take it out of the car and give it back to her because she was wearing it in victory lane wasn't she or was that different that was a different that was a different picture i think i think that may have been prior to it it could have been yeah yeah yeah and then the two lucky pennies on the dash so he had dash pennies before daler and hart did yeah i guess because he won 98 with the penny on the dash and this was too early yeah yeah so that's a fun fact didn't know this is neat i like noticing all the little like quirks of the super speedway bodies you try to hide this and hoping the air will come out here you temporarily had to go like this huh so did you pull this out we pulled that out okay what are the other uh like little things like that that you did well just finishing the corners just positioning things i mean this car went to wind tunnel several times and just a position of most things and then you try to get this you know have the right shots on the car and i think i can't remember at this time if they were dictating uh i think they were dictating the springs that you had to have in the car so you had to try to get the back of the car down and this is it wasn't this in a museum for a long time it's been down in the museum in greenville for 15 years 10 to 10 12 years yeah let's look at these these headers in here you can see them a little bit they definitely got some some length to them it looks like the yeah well let's jack it up and look under it i want to see what this what these pipes look like for the real deal firsthand it looks like these boom tubes were handmade like they this is so this is before they were being mass produced you got one of those one of those slow jacks yeah that jack is whack you're getting like a quarter pump out of we're that get to see the underside of the real car [Music] this is intense you're gonna lay down or you wanna do the other side too no i can see just fine like this isn't okay we're going under i wanted to see underneath this car for a very long time what he was asking me i can't remember yeah those are pretty big long primaries with a four to one collector so the the x-pipe says 2003-80 car not tested 2004. okay that's all we had i guess so this isn't like the original pipes but this is what it would have looked like back then okay hey it looks like they were running on something that's got scrapes on the bottom yeah there's some some spiders we'll deal with it for the for the glory here yeah a little bit we can handle it though not every day you get to crawl underneath the daytona 500 winning car look at it there's not too many of these just floating around you notice how much better that paint yeah that's really cool looking smooth have you noticed a difference in this car is black inside yeah instead of white yeah yeah what's the story behind that you could have a lot more things than blacking again white happens every day underneath the car was imran if you'll notice it's not flat it's shiny yeah why is that slick because the air moves faster across it was that actually a noticeable difference in the wind tunnel well larry would probably know remember there painted him around underneath black yeah yeah what kind of paint is this i like this imran this car they tore us down in daytona it's firecracker race we had a line suffering through the door online hello lines so we could check turn it on and head off yeah yeah so we can pull back or let it or not pull back yeah had an open closed lever in the floor down there what was that for why would you want that build it more vacuum huh set more oil keep oil sucked out of the engine that was more power was that something for qualifying or during the race so how did how did that work like situationally what was that we ran into race we we had not on this car but prior to this they outlawed it on this car we had an oil pump that run off the rear end instead of being a single stage oil pump you know that would circulate the oil right through the cooler we had like a five-stage one five-stage oil pump and we sucked the oil out of the oil pan and we got away with it uh for a couple years and uh they caught us well we cut it cut one of the oil lines and we started licking oil so they outlawed it after that so you were the engine's oil pump was driven off the rear end not the engine both both so when you were at speed you would you had another one that would pull more vacuum on the engine right interesting yep and there was a ball valve that the driver could reach reach they found that and they said oh we've caught what they've been doing gary nelson got in there with his tie in his suit and then they determined well it's nothing anyway so they thought that's what you were doing but yeah was it just one that was a big deal it helped us a little bit but it wasn't a big deal he didn't know how much it helped so there was no it wasn't like a big deal there's a bunch of little things a bunch of little things you have to pay attention to detail we worked on these cars 12 months out of the year we worked after the last race from daylight to dark on restrictor plate motors we had one nasa engineer ex nasa engineer from up here in blithfield that helped us um okay our intake manifold did you ever run these heads again after daytona yeah like did it did this did this in here hurt power if it didn't have a plate what was going on with the intake manifold well we just said some design changes inside uh that helped it changed the signal to the carburetor you had to have the right oil pan you had to have the right scraper in the engine you know she bolted on before the oil pan to keep the oil from you wanted to rob that engine of all the oil that was splashing around you didn't need that all you needed was oil going bearing some of the rings and suck out the rest of it overnight was pretty smart you've heard of him have you yeah yeah everybody brings him up when they when the sound of this thing comes up yeah because people still don't know there's people who know and then there's people who think that it was 180 degree headers or they think ron had something going on with the engine where they're like oh it sounded like that because it was actually a v6 because they had two cylinders sucking air and supercharging the other ones so i'm like what are you talking about now we didn't even have a we our engine was wasn't a lightweight engine it's a pretty heavy engine uh during this time did this car have like two floor pans in it to no have better under air grow or anything like that yeah it had a good balance you could run it wide open and uh even when the tires got round wide open people were lifting he was going on was the there was the axle offset in the rear end to get more spring compression uh somewhat has ever heard of people doing that because if they had the mandated spring rate you move the axle back and then it gets a little bit more leverage on there is that ball valve still in here it's not but you now you mentioned the window look at the wind on this one that one there this car in that car versus the the downforce car yeah yeah the windows like i don't know if i can fit through that window i can fit through that window so you can fit through this window i don't know like i don't know how your helmet would fit through this window getting like if you had to get out of the car quickly you'd have not a whole lot of room for error so they didn't have to worry about that yeah that's true but all this this is just like how that kind of fans in to be flat that's just really neat yeah all aerodynamic tricks right here see all that right there rolls and this is where the window net would have clamped in right yeah all right go ahead you know how to do it one foot second foot slide in right foot okay next one and yeah there's no way i could fit in there i get stuck halfway in the car because my body would not fit in that seat then bobby because they were black and hot what did bobby hamilton say that caused you to paint them gray inside he said they were so hot they were hotter inside he didn't like it so then he started did you tell him that you can't hide things in great pains easily yeah he didn't care he said he was complaining he said it's not accelerating you know when you have to let off over run said what do you mean let off you're not supposed to let off in that car keep it wide open that's what we told all of our drivers so bob didn't complain about that anymore i asked him if the car ran and he said it would but they've never started it since they've restored it 15 years ago so it has no oil in it it probably need to be you know carburetor might need to be cleaned out or primed or something basically it was not ready to start on the spot but if we could get sterling to go there we could get it ready to start and have him start it if that's something you'd like to see leave a comment maybe go comment on sterling's facebook pages if he's still out there racing you know like let's make this happen i think it'd be awesome to hear that car and to have it fire for the first time since talladega 1996 and have him be the one sitting there poking the button would be pretty special we also went to larry's house where he pulled out the cylinder heads and intake manifold from ernie irving's 1991 daytona 500 winning car and like they just cleaned it off there it's all exactly how it was we get to look at it explains everything the little tips tricks all the weird things they put inside there for the restrictor plate intake you know to make more power he explains how people cheated all that kind of stuff you're going to want to watch that video so if you check now and see if you're subscribed if you're not make sure you are and click the little bell so you get notifications too top of that we wrote around with larry and he showed us every single building that morgan mcclure motorsports ever raced out of except the very first one when they bought the stuff from gc spencer used his garage for a few races they had three different shops they were all still in avington they're all still there we went to all of them and he explained all of that so that's going to be a separate video too you can find all that stuff on the racing history nerd zone playlist among all the other classic nascar related things we've done and this thing right here is a little bit of an experiment related to this particular x-pipe car um we're building equal-length primary headers for it and using uh an x-pipe system that actually came off of one of morgan mcclure's cars that's a real one it's just like the one on the 95 car we're building these headers to fit so we can do a sound test see if we can make this uh this car sound kind of like that you know it's not gonna sound just like it but we can just do that x-pipe howl sound that's what we want oh this is part of it too here that's the real deal stuff in addition to that uh there's video that explains more technical stuff about why the x-pipe sounds the way it does in that whole era of super speedway plate racing that the cars sounded like that and why they stopped sounding like that boom tubes everything if you like that stuff you're in the right place there should be all kinds of different things to feed your thirst for this kind of knowledge so we will see you over there so what are these what is this right here this is the winning uh intake and set of heads off the 91 daytona 500 car that ernie irvin ran won our first daytona 500 1991. the heads and the matching intake