The Most Overwhelming Racing Collection on Earth: 100 Years of History

If I told you one of the craziest racing museums in the entire country was located in Lincoln, Nebraska, you might think I'm crazy, but I'm not. Where did all this Smokey Yunick stuff come from? Never know what the truck's going to deliver. They may have been sitting in somebody's barn for 50 years. Oh, by the way, this is Jeff Gordon's car. You have a car here that Louis Chevrolet drove? Yeah. Of course you do. This museum deal's going to be a little bit different. We got two resident experts walking around with us, so they're going to notice things and pick up on stuff that even I don't know about. There's literally so many things here that are mind-blowing, incredible pieces of history. What, over 500 engines here? 575 engines on display. Yeah, by the way, this is Greg Nickle. First way motors. Our entire industry, like and I have real jobs. We all have real jobs because of the work that was done by guys at Stream. When Harry Miller was building these engines, there wasn't a aftermarket. There wasn't any of these, there weren't Edelbrocks, there weren't Winfields, there weren't Iskenderians yet. He made all of this by hand, basically. So, all of these engines, when you think about, you know, "Ooh, double overhead cams." This double overhead cam engine was built like this. All of these are unique. Like, these engines don't have head gaskets in them. They would actually have to come up from the bottom and machine the valve gas seats in here because they when they boosted these, they had made so much power, they'd blow every head gasket. So, they're like, "Okay, we'll fix that." I got yelled at for that in the last video. I said, "Is that an Offy?" And they're like, "You don't know Offys don't have heads." I'm like, "No, sir, I don't know that. I'm not 60 years old." Here is your Offy. Yeah. That is the little 110. Here's your 270 Offy. When did they realize that maybe making the head removable would be easier to work on? Um, mid-50s. think the gasket The gasket technology had to come around. Like, you know, there's a lot of things that go on here. They, you know, carburetors, they weren't good at metering fuel back in the day. So, they had these updraft carburetors. So, as everything got hot in here, it made the fuel more like lighter and vapor, and it'd be able to just distribute better and burn better. You have to realize, this is really before gasoline was gasoline. You know, these early motors were low compression. Pre-tetraethyl lead. Right. Now, there was nothing like that. So, you have to understand like you have people like Rockefeller who were big on prohibition to get the bootleggers out of the gasoline market so the oil guys could have more of it. So, everything that we take for granted that just existed, it didn't exist back then. But, I mean, think about these guys running the big superchargers on the front. And, you know, what would you say? 10 times today or 20 times today? That no ideas are really all that new. We just got the execution better. Well, like this engine right here is a 1953 Studebaker with four valves per cylinder, overhead camshafts, hemi-headed. I mean, what's your Hondas and Toyotas today? Four valves per cylinder, overhead cam, hemispherical combustion chamber. This was 1953. Yep. Right. Packard engine. That's a familiar name, too. We just did the My Car Museum. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. And, it's the same people keep coming up over and over again. Yeah. If you look at this, I mean, check out this draft table from I mean, imagine the talent it took to go in here and be able to conceive what's going on in three dimensions. There weren't any CAD at the time. They weren't able to to rotate it for No rapid prototyping. They had to do this by hand. I mean, when it came time to make it, you made a sand casting, you poured it, or you had to machine it out of billet. So, these guys were, man, they were just so so good at what they did. Miller developed outboard boat motors. He did not have enough time to produce them. He gave it to his buddy Evinrude. Well, there you go. What's that that How many stages from Kevin Bacon? We could do it from Miller. You know, oh yeah. Exactly. And then it'd be like your number would be your Miller number would be like two or three if you're in there. Well, the reality is there's no Robert Yates, there's no Smokey Yunick, there's none of those guys without him. And this is Al Unser seniors Johnny Lightning. That has been a model, that has been a Hot Wheels car. That is the real car right there. How was all this stuff acquired? That's a good question. the owner Bill Smith and his wife, they collected their entire life. And we've gotten known now that we have a very high-quality museum, so people want to get their stuff in here. For you Mopar fans, this is a Plymouth powered Indy car, and it won Pocono in 1968 with a Plymouth Westlake head conversion. Check it out. We have one of the engines out of the car down here. This is a tribute to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. These are the only doors that we know of that have ever gotten away from the Speedway. They show the three stages that the original Gasoline Alley went through. We were able to get these, and then we did a car representing the appropriate era for the garage. From the two-man Chicago Rawhide 1930 five Indy car to Bill Vukovich's, and here's that Offy engine. And we go down here to Jim Hurtubise's, used Frank engine turbocharged Offy to try to run the speedway. We have the Judd, the Brayton, the Orbitorfer. Here is the Westlake Plymouth out of the IndyCar. Those are some interesting looking heads. What gives? No, I mean it's everything about trying to get the air to go as straight down. If you look at this, you know, a modern engine you can open the throttle and look down and see the valve basically. These guys were getting this, you know, 20, 30, 40, 50 years before it came to be modern the way this way you did things. And these are slide port injections. They have a plate that slides back and forth, so there's no butterfly Mhm. to restrict the flow. That's a straight down. Which one of these in here gets you fired up the most? Our resident cam guy. I I mean, honestly, when you look at some of the really early overhead conversion stuff, that's probably my the thing that You know, these engines were designed as flatheads, and these guys figuring out, "Hey, let's get it and move the valve out of the way, get the pushrods out." I think those are my favorite, but all of them, I mean, there's every one of them. I don't You know, this this engine, you know, um I know a lot about this guy, and I love it. There's a whole bunch of these things in here. It's impossible, you know, it's you know, Which one of your kids do you love the most? a whole day just in one little corner of this place because there's so many details that you would never catch if you just kept kept on looking. And so, there's a Smokey Yunick engine right here. Yeah. We have several Smokeys. Mhm. We'll show you those upstairs. I've actually got this microphone. I'll say. Yeah. Where are you guys going? I want to look at this one. This is Yeah. Old Joe. Old Joe Camshaft. What is Old Joe? You can pause and read these things. That's why we'll show them for a second and then like the color gold though apparently. Yeah, he painted everything gold. Black and gold and something gold. Yeah. You said about favorite engines. Um Harvey Crane you know along with Moser decided to do a small block Chevy overhead valve conversion. So this is their idea of how do we take a small block Chevy and put a cylinder head on it, intake system, everything like that that um that somebody like Harry Miller would have been super proud of. And so Harvey owned that to his death, owned all the um prints and layouts and patterns for the cylinder heads that they developed for that. Just to uh preface if you probably know who Lake Jr. is. If you haven't seen the Comp Cams factory tour video yet, if you're watching this video and you have held a camshaft that was aftermarket, Billy probably designed it. Thank you. Now Is that Does that sum it up good enough? I mean that I've been involved in more than my fair share and I'm very fortunate. I had 27 years at Comp Cams. I got to work with just about everyone in NASCAR and Pro Stock. It's been an awesome ride, you So you know a thing or two about some of the stuff in here. I've gotten to meet some of the I I got into it while I was still young enough to meet a lot of these guys. This is the first sprint car to win the first televised sprint car race on ABC Wide World of Sports. Jan Opperman won the Terre Haute Classic in this car. And Jan Opperman also qualified the Viceroy Indy car for the Indianapolis 500. That was when a sprint car driver might have a chance to get into Indy car. It's kind of crazy back then that these guys could jump all around. I was reading the other day uh about Jackie Stewart that back then you weren't just a Formula 1 driver. You wrote Can-Am, you did uh sports car racing, you did every kind of thing. So, week after week you'd be jumping in from something like this, something like that. Those guys had to be great drivers cuz you they were literally in something completely different week after week. When we say completely different, it's more completely than you think because although they're both open wheels, a sprint car is totally sliding the whole way around. The way the tires were done in Indy, they don't slide well. Now, you're sliding and you're going slow. The last The last guy that was like a sprint car, I remember is when Steve Kinser qualified and he was When he qualified at Indy and he gets the car all sideways coming out of the last corner. Yeah, it's crazy. Do you want to go over these real quick before we get to the Penske car? Yeah. Yeah. What is this a Jimmy Johnson Herzog car in here? And behind the Jimmy Johnson Herzog car is this original safer barriers. They were developed at the University of Nebraska at the airport here about 2 miles from our museum. We are working with the Herzog Motorsports and this is one of the Jimmy Johnson cars that Herzog had. And we will have a large display of all their racing opening up this summer. Are we going to get to see that? Not today. We'll see a few cars. On the outside, we just added a new building that's 66,000 square feet. So, we're just getting it finished up. It'll open start opening this summer. This is the original car that David Pearson was driving for the 1976 Daytona 500 when he crashed with Richard Petty coming to the checkered flag. David Pearson was able to keep his running, Richard Petty's died, and he went on to win the first televised Daytona 500 in this car. Can I step over these? Yes. Okay. And you know who's in this Right, as engine an engine guy, you have to understand that the Holman Moody Group, they created a whole different like we say this competition created by Holman Moody. Holman Moody, if you've seen the movie Ford versus Ferrari, they built the engines for the Fords in that. They also created they also spurred out a few of the best names in NASCAR. Yeah, Waddell Wilson. Waddell Wilson, Robert Yates. I mean, how do you get better than that? So, Holman Moody is one of the foundational things that we talk about. It's one of the neat things about this museum is getting to see all this stuff that make your hair stand up. You know, it's like this is where it all started. It really is. And we have videos of Holman Moody stuff, too. It's like the longer we go, the the bigger the library gets for like we have seen this, we've been that. We've shown the Herzog building before. Like all this stuff. And you interviewed Lee Holman. And that that's just his dad's company. They built these incredible historic iconic engines. Unfortunately, their old shop is underneath the airport. Douglas International Airport. Jimmie Johnson with the Ricky Stenhouse We're in our meeting room. We call this Bill's Garage. And every time you come in here, there may be a different car on display. Today, we've got a lot of the Herzog Motorsports team's cars before we move them into their final location. Then we got Jimmie Johnson's cars right here. I'm drawn to this one. And it is the famous Pennzoil yellow you've heard me rant about so much. This is when paint ruled the world and not everything was wrapped. Oh, yeah. Yeah, pre yeah, definitely pre-wrap days. Yeah, most people probably didn't know that at one point Jimmie Johnson was like Steve Park Jr. And in the his car was like Steve Park's car in the ASA series. I got to show you guys something real quick. Speaking of Steve Park, look what we got. A whole side from one of the I believe it's a 2000 or 2001 car. It's harder to tell, but it's the same awesome metallic yellow as the Jimmie Johnson Herzog car. Because back in the '90s, Pennzoil used the same paint code across all of their sponsored teams, and it was freaking awesome looking. They've been involved with motorsports for a very long time. As you'll see lots of Pennzoil logos on these cars in the museum. I also got this really cool old jug. Saw this at a swap meet. From Oil City, not far from where I grew up. Had to buy it. All these race teams you've enjoyed watching over the years or learning about in the past do not function without sponsors. Pennzoil has been deeply involved in sponsoring racing teams for a very long time, and I don't see that changing anytime soon. I can sit here and hammer you with technical facts until I'm blue in the face about why Pennzoil Platinum is a superior motor oil, but that's not the point here. The point is it makes sense to support brands that support things that you like, so those things can keep going. Unless you have a time machine, you won't be able to find one of these in the parts store to put in your car, but you can get some Ultra Platinum in the right viscosity for your engine and feel good about doing it at the same time. And that Rambo Liberati was his crew chief at Herzog, and we just did a video with him in the Bahari Motorsports building, too. There's Rambo right there. And Todd Bodine. That's not even a Jimmie Johnson picture. Todd Bodine probably drove this car, too. Absolutely. Probably so. So they These guys moved into the building after Gibbs left. Yeah. Yeah, they did. The way we were saying this is a perfect example of what these cars were back in the day, that every one of those templates would fit this car if you put it on one at a time. But you look at the roof. Just look right here. That left rear corner of that roof is so bent down. Well, that's so we can actually get air to the spoiler. You come over and you see the spoiler's actually kind of moved over to this side, that way you can get downforce. Well, that would push, you know, the uh right rear of the car down really good, but the problem is then the car won't want to turn in. So, what you do? You take the nose, you move the nose way over. That way you got a giant fender up. Yeah, this giant fender over here. So, now you get this twisting effect where I got left left front downforce, right rear downforce. That way I've got downforce to get into the corner, and now I've got grip so I don't lose it coming off the corner. And this is this was race cars. This was good stuff. Mhm. Then the You know, like the engine stays they say, "No, whoever gets the most rules added to their name." That That means they win the award for that. Well, I guess the Childress guys win the award for aero stuff. Because the whole idea of the common template and fixing them all together and that stuff came after Harvick uh went to Indy one year and they had a car that was so twisted. There's some pictures of it you can see online. Mhm. You ought to go and look at it. The car is like completely twisted, but it fit every single template. like it'd been in a wreck. If you looked at the top, it looked banana shape. There's one flat shape, there's one all curved shape. It looks as goofy as could be, but it ran like crazy. Oh, it was awesome. I mean, I think Stewart ended up winning the race, but it was uh one of those things where we had really great engines, had pretty good oil in it, pretty good camshafts in it, too, by the way, back in the day. So, we had a good combination, but they they didn't win the race, but after that NASCAR said, "No, never more." No, no, we have hit the limit. Yep. What is this? This has got like a Trailblazer front end on it. It would be a Baja. Cuz that's what was Jimmy's background, right? He was Right. He was desert off-roading. He was desert off-roading for Herbst Motorsports and they brought him into ASA. And at that time it would have been Bush. Yeah, it'd been Bush back then. Yeah, exactly. These are the things that you measure the suspension travel in feet. Yeah. Earlier we were walking through the hall, I saw something down here that relates to our our good friend Ed Pink and the NASCAR history, the Ford Cammer engine right here. Mhm. The 427 never raced in NASCAR but was built to be the Hemi beater but got banned before it ever hit hit the racetrack. And this engine tight platform actually became one of the early top fuel platforms that Ed Pink was building. And so the last engine he's ever putting together is one of these. Stay tuned cuz he's invited us to come be part of that historic final build that it's going to be one of these, but this ain't no small block Chevy. Look at all this stuff. Mhm. What is all buried behind this cover? Uh Billy, tell him. That's all in the drive for the camshaft. So what they have is they have the sprocket going up to a dummy camshaft in here that they use also for a pump, drive the mag. Then off of that they had to drive these camshafts up here. So there's a sprocket up here, sprocket up here. There's all kinds of way to phase this. And it's funny, these things have four different cam designs in it. So they have to have the left intake and right intake are different from one another to get the same valve motion. They don't even get exactly the same, they just get really close to the same. Same thing on the exhaust. You got really weird looking peanut shape lobes in there. Is that cuz the chain and And that's cuz the rocker arm on it, the way it follows the rocker arm pivot doesn't have the same geometry on it. So to make the valve move right, you have to make a camshaft that looks weird as you can imagine. Huh. That's crazy. I had no idea. Yeah. It's the same thing you see on the Porsches, too. If you look at If you ever look at a Porsche cuz they have the left and right, they have the gravity or camshaft and the spray gear camshaft, but they're different lobe shapes, too. But a lot of early overheads you had to have very asymmetric camshafts to get close to symmetric valve motion. You see, this is why I told Ed when he asked, "Hey, come out you can help me put it together." I was like, "No." I am not qualified to put one of these together. You need to get somebody else that's qualified to help you put it together. Now, this thing is absolutely Swiss watch sophisticated. Oh, yeah. And all the holes in the splines are getting all degreed in and Ed could do it in his sleep, so that's kind of cool. And we're actually running the fuel pump. That's an old Hilborn fuel pump off the front of the motor here. And it is neat is is the these things were very common in Indy. And what you would see is that they'd run fuel pumps, they'd run different pumps off the camshaft. And what it kept is bringing slack in the camshaft. This was a dampener to keep the camshaft turning nice and smooth. And I think they knew they were doing that. It's kind of neat that over the years you see with the sprint cars they run the oil pump off the camshaft. Yes. And it's a cam dampener. It's really kind of cool that they Two birds one stone deal. Yeah, whether they did it intentionally or not, if you go back and look at…