This Paint Had a Purpose You'd NEVER Guess! (Holman Moody's Breakthrough Ford GT40s)

started to jump out of the way and it hit me in the butt and sort of launched me over our tool boxes lee holman's dad john was the co-founder of holmen movie with ralph moody lee grew up to see the formation of this company and live through everything that it did including up to now so he's got some pretty crazy stories about just about everything including the origin of the random neon paint on these gt40s that until he just happened to tell us about this had no prior explanation the diglo thing was was interesting because i had made a couple of signal boards bit signal boards because at daytona the drivers come down off the banking and go into the sports car center of the track and right there was uh where the pit signal boards were this before they had radios in the race cars and everybody else was using either chalk on a blackboard or there were some professionally made numbers and letters but they were hard to see and the drivers are going by so quick i came up with the idea similar to the old psychedelic posters that kids had in college where they had ultraviolet lights and the dayglow colors on the posters would just glow in the dark you know you just that was really bright and interesting so i did some dayglow pit signal boards that had little battery packs and they had two black fluorescent lights on them and the drivers really love the the visibility of the pit signals and we found that in our night practice that you couldn't tell which gt40 was coming down pit road because all of the headlights were so bright and there was no real track lighting to to light the track up itself so the the pit bull um the pit fellows couldn't figure out what what car was on pit road until it actually pulled in and of course you wanted to go out and motion your car into the pit and get his attention so we took a magnaflux light which is very like a 400 watt um black light that you used to check for cracks in metal and uh duct taped that up to one of the the uh columns that held the pit roof down at the starter pit road and i went to every hardware store around that area and bought all of the spray cans of dayglo paint and brought them back to the track and they the different crews would grab a collar and just paint the nose of their car or make some sort of shape on the nose of the car some of them ended up with with just a day glow panel in front of the radiator and some of them had um something like this on the fenders just depending upon which team did what and who had time to to paint what but at night you could tell what mark two was coming down pit road because of that dayglow and they kept it on the cars and um at our pits um we used a black light always to help at night so you put that big magnaflux light at the beginning of pit road yeah did you ask anybody before you did that or you just go take that just got typed it up there yeah and no one was like what is that for yeah well it's funny it's a little handheld thing that's about this big around it was more like like you'd have a fog light on a boat or something it was about that size but it was a really high wattage bulb typically for for magniflexing you were you had a fluorescent material that was magnetic and you'd put the the piece of metal in this machine that would put a magnetic field around the part and that would suck this fluorescent goo down into the cracks and you'd then take that into a dark room with this magnaflux light and you could see where there was a line or a crack it just so happened it that it it works with deglo paint as well so how old were you when you were i was 21 wow well actually yeah 21. now that'd be kind of kind of turned into part of the iconic look of these cars to have the the like the cars on the table the panels yeah the right fenders the one trouble with dagger paint now that the the guys are vintage racing and maintaining the cars it is very susceptible to the sun yeah and it fades rapidly if you put fresh uh on the gold car they'd put fresh pink big glow paint on the nose of it and in 30 days it would turn chalky white because the uv light and sudden sunlight destroys that paint after you did that the first pit board thing at the daytona race did other teams see that and start copying you i don't know because we only did um we did 66 and 67 and then we quit but right along in 67 they started coming up with the number dots that glowed they came out with the um fluorescent panels that you could pop rip it on the side of the car and paint your number in black over the the dot like they have now um and so uh our our period of having an advantage went away pretty quick when he started doing the fluorescent um emblems on the side of the car huh what what was your job on pit road i never got on pit road because i was over on the pit signal area and wes moss um our engineer for holman moody he and i sat over in in the little pit signal area for the full 24 hours and it was memorable because that year it got down to like 28 degrees at daytona and we froze our butts off it was absolutely miserable but you know we were doing it for the race so we were there for the 24 hours where was the pit signal area relative to pit road um really kind of behind pit road because pit road is on the front straightaway or the dog leg and then they come in the track and go down so we were probably 200 yards 300 yards away from the pits but kind of behind that area so it's like in that first left-hand turn it actually it's kind of a two-stage thing and we're in the third or the second stage of that turn did somebody walk over and tell you what to do because there was no radio or do you guys have radios in the pits um no we didn't have any communication but somebody would run a note over to us to say this or that and would pull the numbers out because the numbers had all been pre-made that all been die cat die-cut and then painted and so we'd pick out the numbers for the car and and what you wanted to tell them the lap time or come in or um you know what position they were in on the um in the race or whatever oh so you're in my head when you first told the story i thought when you said pit signal board i thought you were talking about like i'm thinking about nascar with the thing on the arm that comes down to like it signified the pit stall yeah no we're gonna go hang it yeah we'd go hold it up and let the driver read it as he went past okay so this thing was to relay messages to the driver not to tell them where the pit stall was yeah okay i thought it was telling where the pistol was no no we we were around on the back and and um it's it's same thing at le mans lamar they did it a different way um the only place on the track that they were slow enough to read was what they call pit signal corner which was at the end of the mall saying straight away and there was a telephone in each pit that was connected to a telephone a landline telephone in an appropriate box at pit signal area so that the ford team could call a guy and he would do the numbers or do whatever and then hold it up as the drivers went by because at le mans the cars would come over the mulsane jump get airborne or unweighted come down and they would have about an eighth of a mile to go from 220 to 35 miles an hour for a hard 90 degree corner at what was called pit signal corner and that's where the cars were going slow enough that the drivers could actually look at a sign and read it so they were having to take the the tightest most aggressive spot on the track and read aboard well yeah pretty much yeah yeah but once they were set up and and slowed down they they could look around a little bit um and it must have been confusing for the drivers because it was hard to see and and they were fairly busy trying to gear down and break and make the corner um and there were a number of people that didn't make the corner and the french had piled sand burns uh on the outside of the track that were about as high as this table you know you know 30 inches off the floor so there were there were occasions that that cars would pile into the sand and just get stuck up on the sand on the far side of the track from pit signal area and there's there's a lot of videos of of um guys there with shovels trying to dig their ferraris out of the out of the sand you could put a pin at any point of time where the world and the climate of motorsports racing in general was the best like when did all of that peak in your mind from the all the decades that you've witnessed or been involved in racing in uh to my mind um the 19 um late 60s would have been the heyday for for all of that it was it was very competitive in nascar very competitive in drag racing and there was enough driver safety that the the chances of the drivers being severely injured or killed and the racing was had been diminished greatly because you think about the early 60s or late 50s um they didn't have seat belts they didn't want seat belts because they didn't have fuel cells and it was better to get thrown out of a flipping car than it was to to be stuck in it with seat belts um because it was you were sure that there was going to be a fire because the gas tanks the fuel tanks and all those things were just aluminum containers welded up and the the safety of it suddenly having seat belts and fuel cells and and that made racing so much safer and it was kind of nice being able to have drivers live through the event and speaking of seatbelts in the last video we did with you in this room you showed us fireball robert's seatbelt yeah that was sitting on this table so anybody listen to this needs to go uh look at that you know you got a lot of crazy artifacts in here it was it was um funny at le mans um because um you had the horrible accident where the mercedes went into the to the crowd on the main straightaway directly across from pit road and killed 40 50 people in one accident spectators it's one thing if a driver or a mechanic is injured um but you you know the spectator safety is is the primary importance you you can't um injure the fans you know they're just just not to be done um and so it was a learning curve um lately on youtube last night in fact i watched a number of the old uh 1920s races in france and they had the first le mans in 1906 um the french grand prix and they had videos of all that and there there were spectators standing on the racetrack it seems to be a bit foolish or standing on the outside of a corner um that the race cars would get out of control and flip up onto the onto the track um uh it was uh pretty educational to see i thought what we did was scary compared to the safety features they have now when we were a mom there was no there was no pit wall um the the safety barrier between the race track and our car and the pits that we were working on was a painted line and you had the racetrack on that side of the line and the pits on this side of the line and so right over here a car is doing 180 and we're working on a car fueling a car um that stopped on the road you know and and heaven forbid they should cross that painted line you know it's just not much of a safety barrier did that ever happen oh yeah your watchgate cars get plowed on when they're sitting in their pit stall oh yeah at darlington i was i was helping uh hold the gas cans and stuff and and a car wrecked and spun into our pits and i started to jump out of the way and it hit me in the butt and sort of launched me over our tool boxes um so yeah in all forms of racing there was there was a hazard and that's why suddenly you have pit walls and barriers and speed limits on on pit road um they tend to do the least amount of of thinking about it until somebody's injured or somebody dies in an accident and then suddenly we've got to change all the rules and get some protection and get this sorted out and that's how innovation comes around um we had one driver hopped in a drag car uh to do a test run and he sat on his seat belts and lost control of the car and it killed him but he was running the car at full speed he you know all he had to do was put on his seat belts and he just couldn't be bothered just sat down on top of them and and went out and did a run and the tire blew and and he was lost um so some of these guys think they're immortal and that they're not about to get get injured if you really thought you were going to get injured you probably wouldn't get in the car but most of them don't think that that's going to happen to them was it a big i don't know culture shock to change from racing in le mans versus racing in nascar um it it it was i enjoyed the sports car racing because i thought the racing was more challenging and even in nascar i preferred riverside or watkins glen road courses were more fun yeah that that you had more talent and the driving itself was more difficult um and um but it really is a case of there's a mindset that you're a racer and there are people that that just have to have that competition they have to have that push if you will to to go race and it's funny um fred lorenzen is mercifully still alive and and in a nursing home because he has lost some of his memory but the last time i saw him he might not know what he was had for lunch that day but he could tell you what tower blew at what lap on what race track his memory of the racing was still there and so many of these guys um can tell you that yeah on the 50th lap at darlington or whatever what rates and what year everything in their mind is logic by um the racing because that was the important part of their life sometimes there are things that you never had a question about until you have an answer for it and then you're like wow i i never even thought of that didn't know how they never did that's really cool it's just one of those fascinating things you wouldn't even think to ask for then a guy like lee just tells you and that's awesome if you enjoyed that make sure to 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