The Miami Brothers Who Invaded 1980s NASCAR: Rahmoc's Race Shop Time Capsule

I think I probably have everything from the 80s, cuz I've never thrown anything away. We could go back to restrictor plate wars. I went to Daytona with $7, came home with 188,000. I got a degree in racing. >> [laughter] >> That's all I have. Is it degree or disease? Both. So this video is completely spontaneous. I was actually riding around with Tony Furr doing a video about the history of race shops and everything in the Concord area, which you will see posted after this one. And he decided to pull into Ray Mack and see what Dick and Bob were doing. They were like, "Yeah, we'll film something right now." So we did. Yeah, that was his landing strip or his airport. Mile 75. >> Yep. That was their their car number. See, back then a lot of people planted uh pine trees. And then it would uh let them grow up for so long and then it would sell them. Oh, is that why you see like perfect grids of pine trees around here? Exactly. Interesting. Yep. And they still build engines here, don't they? They do. See, here it is. Some truck team runs out of here now and I like I said, they build quite a few modified motors. Got a couple of pack rats that don't ever throw anything away. These are the best ones. That means most That means it's still the same as it was in the golden era. We built this building in 85. And believe it or not it was like the biggest team when we built it. In fact, Childress come down here after we got it done, walked through the whole place, measured it up, upscaled it about 10% and built his shop. Hm. Because before that, everybody was just working out of little warehouses and garages and what have you. We've never been anything but blue collar, so we built a lot of stuff, but it we never had the funds to just go in there and bang go. Yeah, it was everything's done incrementally. Like people look around here, "Oh my god, Bob, how did you get all these machines? How did you do all this? Blah blah blah blah." Well, hell, I've been working at it for 50 years. >> [laughter] >> You know? Oh, yeah. So I mean, Jesus, I mean, you look at the Yeah, look what you can collect in 50 years. So, you know, the big money came in being a nothing but a blue collar guy. I couldn't I could compete with them guys on the track, but I couldn't compete with them in the boardrooms. Right. And so and I you know, I got tired of you know, the big teams coming in and pushing out all my employees and you know, you train these guys, you get them out the time they come to where they're an asset to you. You know, Penske calls them and next thing you know, half your team's gone. Right. Yeah, that's what I was saying about me leaving Cale's. I mean, you got I got the rest of my life I want to stay at Cale's and then Rick Hendrick's coming. What do you do? Yeah. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I yeah, I don't fault any of my guys because I mean, if somebody if I'm paying a guy all I can pay him and somebody offers him double his money, I mean, what kind of fool would he be not to take it? So That was the airport the money got doubled or more. Yeah. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, yeah. And then all the way up really to about around 2000. I don't know. Yeah, yeah. And I mean, look at look look what's happened to pit crews. Pit crews used to be volunteer or guys that worked on the cars. >> Yeah. How does this place work in 1985? Is it like take us through it. How did you >> Okay, well, this this part here is always been the engine shop. Okay, this is it. You know, Bob and Dick were always over here with the engines. And then the fab shop was next door. I'll take you over to the fab shop. We got everything we need to do engines over here and we still that's how we still make our living. Uh so we we build a lot of engines. I mean, we're really just a two-man shop. My brother and I were both in our 70s. So we're we're not uh young men and we're This was always the parts department. And uh this all these goodies from forever. >> [clears throat] >> I wish this was my fault, but it's not. I just leased this spot to a guy that uh But this is where the fab shop began. This wall was an afterthought, but the fab shop basically started right here. We had a room over there for magnafluxing, a little office, uh room where we built the rear ends and the spindles and everything else and all this was segregated out in uh so we could stack up like six cars along this back wall. And uh now we just kind of collect stuff over here. So uh So who was in the car in 85, 86? God, now you're stretching me. Well, let's see. I started in 83. Yeah. Was our banner year with Neil Bonnett. And then uh 84 we had a great deal. Uh Richard Petty was going to leave Petty Enterprises and drive for us. A legality not of mine or Richard's making fouled it all up. So that didn't work. Um kind of knocked us down. Dave Marcus drove for us in 84. Hm. Came back with a vengeance in 85 with Lake Speed and and uh Nationwide Auto Parts. I went to Daytona with $7, uh came home with 188,000. Lake Speed is here and he's probably the only fellow in this place who's just as happy as Bill Elliott. You've been down here three times for the 500, never finished one until today. Here you are home in second place. Yeah, Mike, I tell you what. I just can't thank the good Lord Jesus Christ anymore cuz I mean, he made it all possible. This but this team, the people circumstances, everything. We're something that nobody could keep their hands on. I mean, it all came together in a strange way at the last second. I mean, like sponsorship Nationwide Automotive Parts came on with us last night. It's been you know, we just been dragging it out. Had to have faith and just hold on the whole time. THANK GOD! IT HAPPENED. WE'RE HERE. OUR CAR owner Barbara Hillias also in tears. You ran all last year without a sponsor, didn't have one until last night as Lake said. You guys have got to be thrilled. We're thrilled and I'm just I'm like Lake. We had a lot of things working for us today. The Lord is obviously on our side. It's coming together for the team. Lake came into our lives and that was a big plus and we've got a new sponsor that we're working real hard to show them what we can do and I think we gave a good accounting of that today and I think we're back to where we need to be. Can you ever see a second place team that was just as happy as the winners? Here they are. That 100,000 let me buy this piece of property. Which is Oh, really? Yeah. Yeah. We knew we had to come up here, but had to find a spot. Needed the money and it all fell in place. We bought this property from the farm bureau on an auction. I paid $100,000 for 88 acres. 1,100 bucks an acre if you can believe that. Wow. And what once we owned the property, we borrowed you know, $350,000 and built this building. We started Miami which was crazy. Right. >> And we ran out of Miami and it became apparent that you know, it just wasn't going to work out of Miami and uh too much on the road. You lost two days just getting getting up here. Right. And not only that, it was back in the days when they had the 55 speed limit. I mean, it took you 13 hours to get from Miami to Charlotte plus about three tickets along the way. So yeah, I lost my license for a year just driving back and forth. I've driven back and forth before I moved up here in 85, you know, I made like 300 trips. We knew we had to be here, so we rented that building up next to the Stones. It did end up being the Buck Baker driving school later after we left there. But we were there from like 81 to time we built this building which was you know, we started building this in the uh February of 85 and we finished it about 6 months later. Been here ever since. But anyway, all this is where all the race cars were. And uh >> [clears throat] And we stack them all this way, built our own cars. Uh put surface plate in. Steel rack. Uh we built everything here in house. 91, I guess, when I did threw in the towel and said I've had enough. So but there's body shop over here and uh you know Bondo room and and uh all the stuff we used to have because nowadays they don't even paint them anymore. Everything's done with a decal. So has there been a race team of some capacity operating out of this building since you built it? Yes. Uh couple of them. Uh when I decided to quit in 91 92, I guess. Butch our agreement was I was going to stay here, Butch could have the race team. We split up. It was a good split. And I he took his the cars and all the racing related stuff and some money that was left on the sponsorship we had at the time. And he moved up to Mooresville cuz that's where all the big shots were and he wanted to be a big shot. So I stayed here and first thing that happened was when the Elliotts split up with Harry Melling Melling still wanted to race. So uh we leased this fab shop here to Melling for maybe a year or two. And then when Kyle had his own team, the Hot Wheels PE2 team >> uh he was in here for two or three years. Oh, really? Yeah, so those were the last two big teams that were in here. We just got some ARCA cars and some trucks we maintain Dick and I maintain for a couple different owners. And we just race them infrequently just just kind of for fun. When did you put this wall up? I had a guy uh probably I don't know 10-15 years ago after you know the two cup teams moved out I had a little late model team that ran locally that wanted some space but not the whole thing so I leased him this part and then the other part I leased out to another kid that had a late model and some other smaller operations and we just had to split the building up. So when you were running the the two nationwide cars they were all in here. Oh yeah they just we had bays like you know here here here all the way down like so we could have six cars. Interesting. Which nowadays they have 20 but that was a lot of cars back then. Yeah yeah yeah that was I think the most I ever had at any one time was probably six cars but it's all about budget I mean the biggest budget I ever had was a million and a half dollars. These guys can't get to Daytona for that. That's what I was telling him back to RCA deal with Cables on the two million dollars. Yeah yeah. That was large for us. Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah I get it I mean but I mean the difference is I mean we we could build the engines our own engines I could build an an engine for 15,000 dollars and now you got to rent one for 90,000. Is this all the same as it was in 86 pretty much other than that wall over there? Yeah yeah pretty much. This used to be the bondo room where you made all the templates fit and cuz you know we built [music] all the steel bodies it wasn't the prefab bodies. That was a paint booth. That's why I like coming into places like this because I didn't get to live through that era and these buildings are the closest thing that I can access to a time machine. That's a paint booth. This is the same paint booth that we had over at Cables. Yeah. Same time. This paint booth here actually Kyle Kyle's team put this one in here. This AFC. Can we turn the light on? Yeah. Well the other difference is you had your emotions. Yeah you had individuality back then you know I'm trying to beat him he's trying to beat me and nowadays I mean a lot of these teams I mean you think these teams are building their race cars and doing this they're getting them from the big guys the only thing they do is put the decals on. That's it. Yeah they come up with some huge figure of money to have you know RCR Penske or you know any of these big outfits basically prepare them a car and all they they got a three-man team that puts the decals on. That's right. So they don't they don't really get the they didn't get the joy to we had to to make. I built my first truck for Toyota in 2006 2007. 2007 I think it was. Anyhow it was 19 degrees we didn't have a paint booth. >> [laughter] >> I'm outside 19 degrees and the Toyota big dogs pull up. What are you doing? I said I said I'm fixing the pole winner for Daytona. Okay. >> [laughter] >> It's 19 degrees out here. How are you keeping the [clears throat] air going? I said man it's tough that's all I'm going to tell you it's tough. Went down there and sat on the pole and won the race. >> [clears throat] >> They couldn't believe it. That's the way it is. To dismount the tires and nowadays you you don't even do your tires and wheels they go to a place that does it for you. An outfit that does it for you. And I remember taking liners out every Monday morning. Yeah we used to have a liner party before we go out. Everybody at break time get through we're going to have a liner party out here everybody pull the liner out. Yeah. Yeah. Headroom. Do you got any cool old parts and pieces left over from the 80s? Probably I I think I probably have everything from the 80s cuz I've never thrown anything away so but yeah a lot of this like I said we kind of built from piece by piece by piece by piece until we had everything we needed or we thought we needed. You can tell what where your priorities were cuz most of these older shops the engine room is like a corner but this is like half the building is for engines and then you just like the engine's the star you just throw it in the car over there. These guys were engine oriented people so. Yeah I think we looked down on [clears throat] the fab guys. >> [laughter] >> We when Dick and I were down in Florida building the engines of course you know the team was up here since since 1980 81 the guys just couldn't quite keep the cars reliable and of course when you you're an engine builder everything's about reliability so you look at things through a little bit different lens and I remember Dick telling tell me one day you know Bob we got to get up to North Carolina because we're building these engines and then you know it'll run 100 miles and the right front shock mount breaks so you know we got to get up there and and tidy up what they're doing with the cars and and we did and we we finally got to the point where yeah we [clears throat] could produce reliable race car and reliable engines which you have to have you can't finish you can't win a race till you finish it. Now y'all y'all definitely had a lot of good people come through here. Yeah yeah we did had a lot of people I did you know Jimmy Pettergrew? Oh yeah I knew him real well. All right well Jimmy's you know started with us. Him and Robbie Robbie Hoover. Yeah Jimmy started with us and and are these all the same machines that you've always had in here? Yeah. Everything is I'd say that the balance machine would be about 1978 the Mauser Brown and Sharpe and the four Cincinnati mills that all came from IBM plant that they had in Charlotte. I got to go everybody I got to get back up to my office good luck with your video. Thank you. That was about 19. You got your wallet handy one of our business cards if you need one. That was about 97 we got that when BSR went out of business I got got that crimper but the main home line homes and all that stuff if you they all have a plaque of their own 1977. Wow. Well this is this is teardown like right here so there was you know oil mist all that and just just isolate the machines from the teardown and just just a little little space. You want to compartment middle eyes a little bit but still want to be able to wave at each other. When did you add the other buildings? The building the first building all the way down that that was originally prefab that was that's where Steve had prefab started his header business. Really? And we actually built that business for a guy by the name of Chuck Cece who was an engine builder in Miami that was wanted to leave that area he was going to start building engines up here so Bob built the shop for him and he decided not to stay here he went up to Ohio instead and he does all all the dirt modified flyer cards you know dirt stuff from Syracuse and all that Cece's performance and then Steve added the second building because his header business expanded but before that was built the brick building directly behind the shop before people had tie pull down rigs Bob and Butch decided to build a pit there's a pit in there and it's you run the thing up on a maybe 12 16 inch I-beam and they were going to put eyelets in the floor and pull the car down that way and that way we could check you know the surface on the front facing see if things were bottoming out A-frame angles trailing arm angles all that sort of stuff. Unfortunately Bob and Butch got to arguing and never never finished that job. The only reason those slow changes was probably because of Bob and Butch. >> [laughter] >> You think think somebody might have slammed a door once or twice around here? [laughter] I don't know where you're coming from. I had the mistake of telling my wife she needs to work here cuz I think she could take some pressure off them and she's very very good with the books but one time when she came down the stairs and and Bob and Butch were in the fist of cuffs and rolling around on the floor it just freaked her out so that was she didn't come back and she's been mad at me ever since for putting her into the environment. Welcome to my world. Yeah right. So you guys almost had the first pull down rigs. Well yeah well we had a lot of ideas you know I Bob and Butch were really so close but they didn't intertwine with people with the wealth I mean big wealth and and you know just a little bit too blue-collar and and we're comfortable in being blue-collar and really didn't fit in the sales world. If you've been watching us for long enough, you know that we value our privacy just like everybody else does, especially in this digital age where data brokers and all these sketchy websites and stuff just have your information out there. It's uncomfortable knowing that that stuff is out there and that it can be accessed, but the flip side of that, there are places that can help you deal with it. And Incogni is one of them. That's today's video sponsor. I've been using it and it works. So, what happens is there these data brokers where they collect this information and then they make money by selling your information to other places. 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And you know, so you know, I I think that, you know, happened to Bud Moore, you know, that happened to the Woods to an extent. That that that It's a different mindset between the Penskes and the Hendricks and and the Nashes than the world of racing when you and I entered it. When Rick Hendrick called me, I went over with tennis shoes and a chain drive wallet. And short-sleeved shirts. That don't flush here. Take that off, take put nice shoes on and long-sleeved shirts. You're not a redneck no more. It sent me to about four or five schools. Well, you know But that that that was the beginning of you know what you what you just said. But I also even though I'm redneck or whatever, can't something just be…