The Dale Jr. Download - 347 - Jimmy Means: Racing to Survive

Episode Date: July 6, 2021

Dale Earnhardt Jr gets an opportunity to sit down with his favorite driver of all-time, a scrappy independent NASCAR driver named Jimmy Means. Growing up as a child Dale Jr was friends with Jimmy's son Brad. While running around the track, Dale became a huge fan of Jimmy Means and still is to this day. Dale finds out so much about his hero from his humble beginnings through the dirty-fingernail journey of a weekend warrior low-budget driver and car owner in the upper ranks of racing. How humble? His racing story started as a paperboy.The Alabama driver discusses his start on the local short tracks and how he took a junkyard car to the high banks of the Daytona International Speedway. He discusses what it was like going wheel to wheel with some of the sports' biggest stars while on a sliver of the budget as the big teams. That created challenges on and off the track that included buying what he stillthinks was a "hot" car, rooming 14-guys in a hotel room, sharing pit crews, and putting a racecar engine into the hauler to make it home from the track. Jimmy tells us how he got the nickname Smut in the first place and how it stuck.Jimmy opens up about his big opportunity to fill in for an ill Tim Richmond at Charlotte Motor Speedway and the disappointment that followed his one-and-done chance in top-notch equipment. Dale Jr. also reveals how emotional of a moment it was for both he and Jimmy's son. Means discusses how he filled in for Richmond but couldn't fill a certain area of his driver's suit. From that chance came real tears then relationships that helped Means along the way. He explains how Rick Hendrick, years later, was as generous of a person in the sport as any.Means towed on the road with a volunteer crew much of his racing career. That led to many fun moments and some that could've been really bad. He tells a story of a headache powder remedy gone wrong that has Dale and co-host Mike Davis in shock.Dale Jr. comes into the studio hot with a lot to talk about. Does Road America work a 4th of July replacement for Daytona? Were the cautions too long and should NASCAR make changes to lengthy road course yellows? Dale and Mike disagree about possible solutions. We also learn that Dale Jr likes "supportive emojis" and that he set off a fire alarm in his house at 1 AM.In AskJr presented by Xfinity, we get insight into what shooting an episode of Lost Speedways is like and answer fan questions about specific episodes of the Peacock TV Original show. We also learn who Dale's road racing mentors were helping him learn the nuances of left and right turns.That and a fun extra Jimmy Means story that we were able to squeak into Last Call. This episode of The Dale Jr. Download is packed full of tasty treats. Check out Dirty Mo Media on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@DirtyMoMedia  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Leah, give me a level real quick. I'm in the middle of beyond. Hello. Check one, two, three, four. That was my favorite, favorite mic check I've had. Good job, Leah. All right, we got to roll. I do wonder what we can do about the temperature in here.

It is controlled by the retail store. Are you all fine? So we probably just need to ask her on Tuesday. I'm usually freezing, but it wasn't today. Today I'm comfy, but usually it's pretty, last week was brutal. The heat from the, but. The bow biscuits. They probably radiated some.

More shorts and flip-flops like an idiot. I forget this, 40 degrees in here. I forget it too. You want to borrow my blanket? Right. Give you a snuggy. Oh, anyway, let's do podcast. This is a production of Dirty Mo Media.

Dirty Mo Media. I want to know. I'm feeling down. Hey everybody, it's Dale Jr. Welcome back to another episode of the Dale Jr. Download. This is going to be a fun one. I have Mike Davis with me, my co-host.

Hey, Mike. Matthew, Leah, is in the house. Matthew, are you here? Sort of. All right. So this one's going to be great, Mike. I have my favorite race car driver coming on. Long time coming.

We've been anticipating this one. Yeah. And it's not Dale Earnhardt. It's not. No. Your favorite driver of all time is not Del Arndar. It's Jimmy Means. I grew up being a Jimmy Means fan.

and I've been wanting to get him on the podcast for a long time. And so here it is. It's going to be great. Mike, you probably didn't watch the race because I know you were in New York City. I was. You went with your daughter? Yeah. Both one.

Just one? Both daughters? Just my oldest daughter. Okay. Yeah. Looked amazing. It was. Well, they had a race.

Road Atlanta. Yeah. Road America. Road Atlanta. Well, it's easy to say they're on one. They're both road. And they begin with a day. Let's begin with A.

Road America, there's a ton of conversation going on right now. We had a 23-minute caution, Mike. I heard. Yeah, the yellow comes out with about three laps to go in a stage. Masked car decides, as they typically do at racetracks, that that's the end of the stage. But they're going to run the laps out to get to the checkered flag, the green and white checkered flag, that signifies the end of the stage. And then they go through the caution protocol of opening the pits and doing the things.

and then, you know, a caution lap there is about five minutes, and so it adds up and you have about a 23-minute caution. All for a single-car spin, right? I don't know. I mean, it doesn't really even matter. It doesn't matter if it's a 15-car pile-up or a piece of paper that they thought was metal. Half-hour caution is not acceptable. No.

So this is great because a lot of people think that the, you know, a lot of people have a lot of opinions about the cautions at the road course. They should just do away with the stages. They should just stop throwing yellows. I don't think that they should do away with the stages because we have them every other track. I like continuity. I like things being similar.

I don't like to figure out just like start times for races. I don't want them all over the board. Start time should be the same time every week, just like in the NFL. You've got a 1 o'clock and a 4 o'clock game. I know that. That's etched in my brain. All right.

So if we're doing stages, let's do them every week. Let's have the same sort of So I can understand what's going on Right, I don't want to have to do homework or have a flow chart On what this week's rules are or start times or anything Perfect. So what I think they could do though to track like Road America Or any road course is do away with the yellows.

Do away with the yellow flag. Still throw the green and white checker flag That signifies points are being awarded on this lap Just like every other week But don't throw the yellow. Don't throw the yellow. Let the cars continue to roll. race into the following stage.

Got it? I'm tracking. I'm trying. I'm picking it up. Keep going. I'm following you so far. Yep. And so that's the answer. So no yellows, not even local cautions. Well, Mike, you're not understanding what I'm trying to say. So instead of throwing the yellow that signifies the end of the stage and opening up the pits and doing all of that and having a 23-minute caution, don't throw the yellow at all,

throw the stage flag that signifies the end of the stage so that points of reward. just like every other week. But keep going. But keep going. Keep going. All right. No 23-minute caution. But then isn't that mean that there's no stages? You're talking about want consistency.

There is a stage. You're throwing the checkered. Here's the end of the stage, guys. Oh, so you want to do away with the intermission. How is it so hard for you to understand? No, because I'm following you. Because I'm coming off on vacation. You're not following me.

I'm trying to follow you and I'm coming off vacation. Matthew, you want to have this conversation? Hold up. You're saying no intermission then. You're saying no, no pause. No intermission. I'm just saying no caution. Right.

Yeah, that's it. Just on road courses. Yes. Just at Road America? Just road courses. Yeah. But go back to the normal places on the other stuff. The normal stuff.

If they want to continue, if they need to throw the yellow and get themselves a green flag restart. Why stop the race? What do you want to do, Mike? What would you propose? Well, listen, I'm still trying to process all this stuff. But so far, I don't feel like I like I like it. But that's okay. I mean, I'm just sitting there going, I want consistency.

I want the same thing that you just said. You started this whole thing. Well, then you're going to have to deal with a 30-minute caution at Road America. No. No, I don't want that. That's true. People turn the channel. Yeah, I know, I know.

And, you know, the fans. Why did they have to throw a full-course caution for a single-car spin? They could definitely probably be a little less. If that car was in the gravel, why couldn't he just sit in the gravel until the end of the segment? Yeah, that's a good point. The guy was way in, the guy was deep into the gravel. I think it was a 78 car, had a left front tire flat. They might have been able to finish it, yeah.

I mean, the gravel is a trap. It's a judgment call, but NASCAR's full of judgment calls. We know this. This is what they have to do. But imagine, Mike, that it's a car destroyed four flat tires land in the middle of the racetrack. That's different. But next time, right? Say we're back there again next year.

Okay, when he goes in a trap, we're not going to throw the yellow with three. to get with three to go in the stage but now next year it's a car laying on the racetrack with parts everywhere okay let me ask you this then you know how back when they used to throw the competition cautions like at indy and all these places after 20 25 laps but they're okay I knew that I just was making sure you still knew they did that and you pass the test without the practices and all that do they not sometimes make a judgment call like if there was a caution right before that they're like okay we're waving the competition caution so why can't Can they not do that?

Like, why can't they just say make judgment calls based off the situation and, but still keep the consistency of the format? The inconsistency of the format would be my only issue with your idea. He's not saying stop the stages. Like, he's consistent. I know what he's a caution. You just don't need that break. I'm just saying, I want unnecessary yellow is what he said. If you're going to have to yellow at Daytona and Martinsville, he wants the yellow everywhere.

I understand that point, Mike. I think there's your, there's just a few people in that aisle of you. I honestly you know a normal caution there is still 15 minutes of yellow flag with no action

that is not a product that's not good no but you would have to throw the yellow if you have a car crash though so you're going to do that it's going to be a long yellow at a road America I don't want a long yellow

to road America I don't want any it would be long enough to have to clean up the mess yeah I think what I'm proposing would go green right after they've cleaned up the mess. I don't want. All right. So,

but you're, I guess my, I guess. They would just say this is going to be your. I'd say there's no, say there's no caution, or say there's no crash. There's no crash.

All right. Here we come. End of the stage. What are you doing? Stay consistent with everything else. Throwing the yellow flag. Go on the yellow flag. You have a 15 minute caution.

Hey, I'm not in love with yellows. I'm in love with consistency. So like, that's my point. I don't understand how this breaks so far. away from the norm of throwing the yellow and throwing the flag to signify the end of the stage giving out points you're just not going under caution at the road courses you still have the we can

you know the broadcast can still tell you hey the end of the stage is coming up points are being awarded okay see that checkered green and white flag that's the end yeah stage two begins you know we can help people like you through that process all right i got let's Let's move on. I got a lot of other topics. I know you do. Real quick. Just for some insight, I know that NASCAR was looking into the other year when they were

running Xfinity there trying to get a cut through. So the caution. I hate that. I hate that. To shorten the cautions because they have to open pit road. And it would, I'd love that. I hate it. Got to shorten those cautions.

Short cuts on a racetrack, please. Under caution. I don't know. I get it. I don't like it. I don't want any shortcuts. Then you're going to always. have,

you're always going to have those 50 minute cautions then. That's the worst idea. That is the worst. I'd rather leave it as it is. Oh my gosh.

Shortcuts. Are we kidding? Oh. Oh my God. They couldn't follow them. You know, no, why don't we just put a ramp and they can go over it?

Do you know what kind of bonkers craziness that does the fuel mileage and the guy trying to figure out the fuel strategy and how far they can go? I mean, when you do the shortcut, there are a lot of dominoes that fall.

I don't like a short, I don't want a shortcut. I don't want, I feel like I'm cheated out of a half a lap. Of caution? Of anything. I don't want a shortcut. Shortcuts shouldn't be allowed in racing. All right, let's shortcut to what you wanted to talk about instead of me. I wish you wouldn't have brought that up.

That made me want to vomit. That made me want to throw an nauseous mic. I'm going to mute my mic. That idea made me physically ill. Now we know. Don't bring up shortcuts around Dell. All right, so Daytona Beach was the tradition for the July 4th. I am really against all the changes.

You know me, man. I hate changes in NASCAR. And so when they changed... So we used to have an off week before Daytona going into July 4th. We'd go down there early, hang out on the beach. Lots of fun. And when they took away that off week, I was like, huge mistake. Apparently, I was the only one.

that enjoyed that. Yeah. And that's when Dale retired. And now, you know, now we left Daytona. And what did we do last year? We had the Indy. Indy, right? Yeah.

But, you know, we had Indy in the middle of a pandemic. So I don't think we got a good understanding of just what Indy would have been like in July, but we're not there anymore. Now we're at Road America. And I'll be honest, man, it was awesome. It really was. It was awesome. So the tracks four miles in length, and we rode around it in a rental car to understand a little bit about it when we got there.

And that's when you can really pick up on just how many people are there, how much camping's there. This place is beautiful. There's tons of shade trees and places, just really great spots for people to camp. So you're having, I mean, you would go and enjoy that experience, even if there wasn't a racetrack, right? You would, you know, a weekend with your family and barbecuing around like-minded people that are doing the same things. You know, it seems like a fun time. And there's a race. There's a racetrack.

And you get to see a lot of great action all weekend long. There are three different events, maybe more. I don't know. Was there anything besides Exfinity or Trans Am? But so I'm sold, man. This Road America was, I was a bit taken aback by it. So I think that Daytona has kind of reinvented. it itself as the regular season finale.

It's got this, I like that. I'm not, I don't know if I'm in love with it, but I think it's pretty cool. It may be the place where I, where I, you know, it may be growing on me. Plus, Daytona in July is hot. Oh God. Miserable. And rain. And the rain.

All right. We forget about that. We're standing there, you know, we're all watching Road America and it's a great, beautiful sky and great weather. And you can race in the rain on the road courses. So we're not going to have any kind of like, you know, we're not going to be there Monday or Tuesday. Well, at Daytona, I mean, it's more, I think it's more than 50% chance that you're going to get rain. It seems like anyways, the last several times we've been there in July, it rains all the time.

It was 90% on what would have been race day in Daytona. And NASCAR doesn't, you know, doesn't start. NASCAR just seems to know exactly when to start the race so that it does rain. Right? They won't start at 10 a.m. like it was built, like it was made to be started, you know. Like it was, it was, literally that race was born to start at 10 a.m. What, 10 a.m? I didn't think you were born to start before noon.

We were on the beach by two. Anyways, I'm good with it. So a lot of people, when I posted about, hey, man, excited to be at Rhode America. Hope it's a great weekend. Everybody be safe. They were like, oh, man, I miss Daytona. Well, please, go to Road America for July 4th and watch this race and go experience it. not only is that, you know, at track experience pretty cool,

but also they, when you drove into the racetrack, there's tons of third-party vendors all in the interior of the track, like different, like food vendors, people selling things. I even saw like, there's like a, they have the, they have a gift shop, the track sells a bunch of old, cool looking retro gear. Oh. But I'm just, I'm saying the fan experience on the interior of the track, brats. I mean, great food.

And then outside of the track and the surrounding towns, there's all these great little pubs, dive bars, restaurants, and it's a racing community. Like that part of the country, they are passionate about motorsports, all kinds of motorsports, because you know that there are several different types of organizations that have experience at that racetrack and have been there and got history there. So it's a motorsports, I don't even want to say town, because there's a bunch of surrounding

sort of towns and cities around. But anyways, I was impressed. I think it's a great place. Signed a 10-year agreement. Let's go. There you go. Nothing to add to that.

All right. So Sunday night came home from the race, went to work on my 66 Nova wagon project. I bought this Nova Wagon from a buddy of mine, and it is full of rust, lots of rust. I thought it was rusty, but it's worse than I thought. I am soldiering forward, patching all this up, and I was home for a bit.

Work past midnight, work on the passenger side floorboard. Put a bit of that on my Instagram story. So if you want to see what I'm doing with the Nova, I'm probably going to be posting it at my Instagram story. I will not be sharing this on Twitter. I will not be putting this in official posts on Instagram. Okay, all clear? Ins of stories where the Nova updates.

I got it. All right. So, Lee is shaking her hair like, why? Why not? Why just there? Well, I think it's not important enough for an official post. I think your Insta Story Views,

what are you that? No, no, no, no. I agree with him. You want to find it? Go to the stories. That's where it's at. Because I like that it's there and then it's gone a day later. Yeah, and you don't have to hear what people's feedback is.

If somebody wants to sit there and dog, you're not doing that right. I get some cool emojis. I do check to see what. emojis I'm getting, you know, like the hearts and the fire and the 100. The claps. I love that. So thanks. Those are very supportive. It keeps me pushing. Keeps me moving on to the next floorboard. Motivated by emojis. Get those on a commercial break. All of a sudden, his producers sending them a heart emoji. Right. At mid, right, a little past midnight, I get home. I got a smoke

detector that's beeping, right? Way up in the ceiling, so I get the ladder out and I replace the battery. It's still beeping. All right? When you replace the battery, to it stops, right? And my side ain't what it used to be, so I'm looking at this thing, and it's got this little button in the middle, and I can't quite read the lettering, it's raised, and it's all white. The detector's white, and the lettering is raised, and it's white, and I'm like, oh, what is that saying? It's in an arch, and I'm like, oh, you know, it's hard to read words in arches, right?

And I'm like, is that reset? Push that button. It was a test button. All hell breaks loose. The alarm's going off. It's freaking 1 o'clock in the morning. and I set the alarm off. I'm coming down from the ladder.

I'm punching in codes and trying to do things. Still, I couldn't beat it. Here comes the fire department. Man, my bad. They come to the gate, check things out. We turned them around. We actually called the service and said, hey, this is a false alarm.

We're good. Okay, we'll talk to the fire department. They talked to the fire department. The fire department still came. got to. They were like, man, we have to come. We got to check it out. So we turned around, so sorry. I felt like the other day, so yesterday I was driving around and I almost went over to the fire department just to say, sorry, my bad, because it was 1.30, 1 o'clock in the morning. Anyhow, that was, and my wife wasn't home, nor were the kids, which was good. Oh, see,

that could have been, that would have been big. That could have been big. Right, right. And it reminded me, so I did, eventually figure, I eventually figured out of get this alarm to turn off. I still got a beeping detector, so I think it's either the detector's bad or I don't know, but I got to work on that. But my detector is still at the house beeping right now. I slept all through the night with it beeping.

Can you give us updates on your Insta story on that? But it reminds me, man. I remember one time back in, when I lived across the street from DEI, we got, I had that bar downstairs, and I had that smoke machine, and we got real crazy on the smoke machine, and it set the fire alarm off in my house. I couldn't figure out

I'm pretty far into the party if you know what I mean I don't have my senses I go upstairs can't figure out how to shut this alarm off so I climb into the attic

and just rip the wires out of the horns right and the fire department comes and we're like man you know we're we're no problem with a smoke machine

and they hung out and drank with us till four in the morning yeah geez pretty fun ended up being a great night. Did you put the, did you put the wires back?

Did they put the, who put the wires back? I don't know. I haven't worried about that. I don't know. I know. But the, smoke machine, smoke machines tend to, you know, we got a little crazy. Get the smoke alarm going off. Yeah. Yeah. We tried to smoke it up in there. Anyways, uh, the Nova Wagon, 66 wagon, rust bucket. I'm patching the rust. This car is not a frame off, even though it is literally being built from the ground up because I'm having to fix all these holes. But I'm going to make this a driver and it's going to a beach area. So I'm going to rhino line the interior and the roof and the rocker panels. I mean, it's not going to be a dime piece. It's not going to be this beauty. I'm going to make it a crank every time you want to

turn the key. Just make sure it runs. It's dependable, right? And it's going to be getting us from point A to point B, but otherwise it's going to be pretty bulletproof. There you go. So just so you know that, I think as you're going forward if you were tuning in and checking out the updates. Managed your expectations, I always say. This is not going to have any chrome on it. It's going to be just a beach cruiser.

This isn't West Coast customs, guys. Just the bare necessities. I am thinking about putting an air conditioner in there, a vintage air system. But otherwise, I'm fabbing everything. It's got a ton of problems. You could take the AC out of this studio if you want and put it in there. Certainly enough to spare. Fine with that.

You certainly have enough to spare. You could put buttwisers in there and be good. All right, man. Jim Means is a veteran driver from back in the 70s and 80s, and he's a car owner as well in the Xfinity series. Still today out there, up and down the road, trying to make a living off of NASCAR. and racing and NASCAR.

So he's an independent, what you would consider an independent, not one of the funded teams, not one of the manufacturer teams, really has to go around to a lot of these companies like Hendrick Motorsports and Junior Motorsports and so forth and use parts that maybe they've set aside or that are mileage out and so forth. But anyways, he gets it done and he makes a living doing it. And when I was a little kid back in 19, probably 84 or 85 I went to my dad took me to north of Wiltsboro on a Friday or Saturday

up to the racetrack for the race weekend and I'm hanging out at the back of the truck trying to stay out the way dad's like sit here don't move don't go anywhere so I'm hanging out and and right next to dad's car is a red number 52 got eureka vacuum cleaner as a sponsor had a black hood and that might be a familiar paint scheme if you remember the streetstock car that I started racing when I was about 15, 16 years old. So, anyhow, Dad, I'm watching and looking at this car, I'm watching this guy work, and I can see the stark differences between Dad's team. It's got all these guys running around.

Everybody has a job to do, and everything's looking great. And this other guy right next to Dad's team, a few people working, everybody maybe in a different colored T-shirt, and just a few spare parts here and there. Not the same thing, you know, it was a stark difference between the two teams. Anyways, Jimmy worked as hard or harder to accomplish what he needed to that particular weekend. Well, that day, middle of the day, dad's out of his car. Maybe there's a break in practice.

I don't remember. But he comes over and says, you want me to introduce you to Jimmy Means? And I said, heck yeah. I was nervous. Jimmy's a driver. I've not many drivers besides Dad. And so, Dad introduced me to Jimmy Means. And from that moment on, I have been a Jimmy Means fan.

Me and Jimmy's son, Brad, became full. fast friends at the racetrack every single race that i attended as a teenager the minute i hit the ground and got into town i was looking for brad what was brad doing where was he at and how are we going to go have some fun we ran all over these racetracks every race weekend there was nowhere we wouldn't we wouldn't we wouldn't figure out how to get into we wanted to go do it we did it and we moved we would run all over the place and so you know and then at the end of the day we'd go back to our dads and and go back to the hotels, and then we come back next day at the racetrack and meet up again. But I was always in Jimmy's hauler, or Brad was in mine, my dad's, or maybe another, you know,

we had other sons and Jason Jarrett, Dale Jarrett's son, Scotty Williams, who was Doug Williams, a crew chief, his son. A lot of us, Heidi Bodine, Brett's daughter, we all ran together and hung out. Anyways, getting back to Jimmy. Yeah, I just always admired. what Jimmy did with how little he had. And so we're going to talk about that. It's a really personal relationship and story for me.

I hope you guys enjoy getting to know Jimmy better. All right, let's get Jim Means in the studio. Many times, Ned, they're racing with used equipment, tires, engine pieces, anything they can get their hands on. And it means that they simply cannot run up front. Makes it off the tough on them. But Jimmy Means got a once-in-a-lifetime break at Charlotte. For nearly all of his 11-year winter,

Winston Cove career, Jimmy Means has labored in near obscurity. Car owners Rick and Joe Hendrick waved their golden magic wands, and in the most popular gesture of the season, granted means the wish of his NASCAR career. He only has one race to prove to you and to those people there that he is a race car driver. Jimmy Smut Means. You know, I think he's capable of doing a great job. And, you know, I think that it's a tremendous opportunity.

So sit back and enjoy Hello, my name is Jimmy Means, driving the Arkansas with plenty. They sit back and enjoy. There he is. Jimmy Mains, come have a seat, Jimmy. I watched your podcast last week with Jimmy Spencer. Yeah?

I think I'm going to be bored with me. Well, I don't. I don't think that, but how are you doing, man? Good. Make yourself comfortable. Can you hear us all right? I do. All right.

So Jimmy, I was telling people, Before you got here, a little bit about what I know of you and how I know you, how we meant. So maybe you remember this, maybe you don't. I was at North Wilsonboro Speedway. I think it was around 1985, 86, and Dad and you were side-by-side in the pits. It was like a Friday or Saturday. And dad took me to the track, and he said, sit right here in the holler, don't go anywhere. I didn't know Brad or anybody back then.

I just sitting there trying to stay out of trouble, and you were parked down watching you, and I must have asked Daddy a couple questions about your car or you or something, and he goes, well, you want to meet Jimmy? And I said, yeah. And he introduced me to you, right there on the, before, like, before Whiltsboro had the wall and all that, but way back. And from that moment on, man, I watched, I watched every race she ran. When we went to the racetrack, I was watching you, and I was watching Daddy. and then I got introduced

Do you remember that day? Vagely, vaguely. And you introduced me not long after that to Brad. I mean, Brad, become great friends, and we ran around all those racetracks from, I mean, we covered every acre, just running around, having fun, and trying to, again, stay out of trouble

and not get our dads upset anything we did. Yeah, I think you went around and picked up lug nuts for me. We did. I thought that would be helpful. So, well, we were at Talladega one year. This was probably 1980, 87 or maybe 90 or something like that, but it was, the race is going on. And me and Brad, we just do whatever we want to do, right?

We want to watch a little bit of the race. If we want to go in a turn and watch it, we run down in the turn. If we want to go in a holler and eat some candy, we're just moving around, right? Race is happening, and we got the whole place. You got the whole place to yourself. And we're standing around in the garage, empty, right? And anytime there was a crash, one car crash, five car crash, we ran to the garage because they're going to tow them in there.

We're going to look all over them, right? Look at that. Wow, look how bad that bent. Look how bad it's tore up. We crawled, you know, we're walking all around these cars after, and at Talladega, man, they tore them up. So we're hanging around in the garage. There's brand new spark plugs.

cases, they're just boxes of like, you know, they pull one plug out and leave the case laying there. All the teams have done loaded up all their stuff, right? Their boxes, toolboxes. The garage is just, and they left all this stuff behind. And I was like, and Brad always was telling me about how difficult things were for their team and how different it was for them versus Dad's team. And I'm like, man, let's get all this stuff and take it to your hauler. There's brand new cans of brake clean and glass cleaner and spark plugs and anything that wasn't opened or used.

And we probably get filled up about a, I don't know, box size of a case of beer full of stuff and set it on the truck. I think we did it once. And I'm like, man, we helped out. Did he help? Was that, I've always wanted to know this. He's told us this that he used to scavenging stuff like that. I didn't know if you were ever even aware of it. Well, some of the stuff, but yeah, I mean, if it was still good, we'd use it.

I mean, we've seen a bunch of times where somebody crashed a race car and cut the rear clip off and leave it sitting there and still a good fuel cell. We'd take the fuel cell and put a new can around it and go racing with it. So if it's down, if they left it and it's good, we're going to take it. Yeah. You would ask where they got it, though, right? Because, you know, I mean, put it past these guys. No, they got it legit, so I wouldn't worry about that. You were that confident they got it legit?

Oh, yeah. We were good boys. We were good boys. But I figured when I was doing it, I'm thinking, I don't know that spark plugs are that important. But like a can of brake clean or a can of glass cleaner, I mean, you went through that stuff fast. You use that stuff up, you know, because the fun thing we used to do, me and Brad was so the GM parts break clean will melt a stuff. styrofoam cup. And we used to sit there and, and set during the race, we'd sit these styrofoam cups up in the garage and fill them for water and shoot them with those cans of brake

clean and melt the hole in and watch the water run out. We just thought that was hilarious. A couple of scientists right here is doing experiments in the garage. Very toxic. Jimmy, so the other thing that I've been doing with Brad over the last 10 years is we collect pictures. I collect pictures of dad and you. He does. the same thing. We share them. I have a catalog. I have probably about 2,000 Jimmy Means pictures in my phone right now. And it's a great way without being able to sit down and talk to you to learn about your career. And I've got all these pictures of you racing in the 70s. You won the track championship at Nashville Fairgrounds in 74. I had the helmet. Do you know that?

Yeah. All right. I gifted that to you. Well, all right. I just wanted you to know. It's on loan. It's on loan. That's right.

I'd rather be on loan. The hell, is it in here? Well, we've got that, Jimmy means behind you, but that's not it. It's a Winston Racing series. Yeah, it is. No, it's at the house. So anyways, what made you want to get into racing? You're from Huntsville, Alabama.

I moved there from Arkansas when I was two with my... Why did y'all move to Arkansas? Well, I swear... Well, my mother got a job. with the Marshall Space Flight Center, which is there in Huntsville, Alabama. Doing what? Records management. What was your dad?

He was appliance repairman. I'm very good at what he did. Yeah. So where did the racing bug come from? Well, I had a paper route when I was like 13, and I was collected on this paper route. It was raining. And the people I was collecting from invited me in the house, you know, because it was raining and I saw a Hunstville Speedway program on their coffee table.

So I was looking through that program. I said, this is, you know, pretty neat, something, you know, I might be interested doing. Unbeknownstant to me, it was like five or six years later, this is what I started wanting to do. And I remember in high school, we had the driver ed class, and the teacher of the class was also the basketball coach. And here I weigh about 105, 108 pounds at that time. And we were riding around, and the coach said, asking all the people in the car,

said, what are you going to do when you graduate high school? I said, well, I want to be a race car driver. And he told me there's something I'll always remember. So you can do anything you want to if you want to do it bad enough. And I wanted to race. So we made it happen. How did you do it? Where did you get your first car at?

Well, actually, we were hanging, you know, when I was 16 and 17, I was hanging around local racers and, you know, Tommy Andrews, Gary. Mary Myers, Gary Finley, and Tommy Andrews ran some Grand American races back then. So did Gary Myers. And, you know, I was fortunate that I learned from some good people that were, you know, knowledgeable about race cars that did it the right way. So you're peddling around in the shops helping? And, you know, sending wheels, painting wheels, sweeping, all that sort of stuff.

So got an opportunity to buy a chassis. I think it was $225. What was the chassis? 57 Chevrolet. Just a stock chassis. Stock chassis. And these guys that had this chassis decided they could build a better race car than this chassis that they already, that they had bought. So we purchased that, I purchased that.

And for $225. And then I found some suspension for like $200 bucks. It was the old three-quarter tonne Ford truck really heavy front brakes and hubs and all. all that stuff. And we put all that together. And I was fortunate that I had friends that were, like I said, we're racing. And they ran the cadet division up.

It's what I wanted to start in. And they ran a junkyard. And they, everybody built cars out of the junkyard. Oh, yeah. But I had, I went to the junkyard, and they had a 69 commercial crash,

wrecked, total, whatever. And I bought the motor out of it. And the name, the guy's name was, Sig Parks that ran this junkyard. I said, Sig, I like to buy that motor. He said, what do you want for that motor? He said, 300 bucks.

And there was a guy standing right behind me. He said, I'll give 500 bucks for him. And the guy, Sig said, the boys here has already bought it. So he let me, you know, and I said, Sig, I got to pay your payments on it. Yeah, I got to pay it on layaway because I don't have the money. So he said, okay, the motor is sitting right here and we get it paid off. You can get it.

I said, yes, sir. I appreciate that. So is that there? It sat there until I could pay it all. And, you know, I was working a machine shop job, you know, 12, 14 hours a day to earn money, you know, for parts with a race car. So we did that, got it all put together, and actually we had a good race car, and we won a lot of races in that division. What class or what track? Huntsville Speedway.

Okay. What's Huntsville Speedway like? It's a quarter mile. Small? Man, flat. Not like a little banking. Yeah. Yeah.

Is it still there? Yeah. It is. No kidding. So you run there in a cadetka. vision you had success how are you how do you get the next couple of cars how you moving up through the next classes well I ran cadet for I think two years and the second year we ran cadet we said we're going to go to Birmingham to race and and we

won the first time we ever went there really wow so and then you know all the local like I said here I'm you know I'm 20 years old weigh a hundred maybe 10 pounds and all the local guys said was it if smut can go there and win a race we can't but They never did. How did you get the nickname Smut? Well, this guy had bought another 69 Z-28 that he was going to turn into a SCCA TransM car. And I had the job of stripping it for him. And at that time, Smokey was pretty prevalent in the sport.

And I was reading a lot of books about Smokey, how to rebuild small block Chevrolet Motors. And everything I did, I would quote a Smokey quote. And the guy said, well, you'll never build a Smokey. We're going to call you smut. And I was smut before smut was a derogatory term. You grandfathered it in that. Yeah, and I had to change that because every time I'd order something on the internet, I'd have to give them my email address.

And they'd kind of snicker with that smut 52, you know, gmail.com. It didn't get past firewalls. So we changed it. And I was smud off through my late model career. And then when we went to Winston Cup, Bobby Allison knew me, smut from he was real good buddies with Tommy Andrews and that's who I started out and he kind of took that name to to cup you know by spreading with this smut and it kind of stuck it did yeah so you go to Birmingham and race right and when your

first race there with your cadet car right when when when are you getting into sportsman how'd you get into like the late mall sportsman stuff well actually to be honest with you i have always made racing pay i've always you know fortunate running cadet i was living at home i didn't have bills you know but i put every every dime back in to racing and uh at the you know when i decided to move late mall sportsman uh i sold my cadet car i think we sold it for two grand and and i had two thousand dollars saved up in a shoe box on top of my closet from the winnings from racing in Huntsville and in Birmingham and we raced at Huntsville for seventy five dollars to win the feature so yeah there wasn't much money there so and we took you know

we parlayed all that money to a late mall car and uh whose card you buy uh we built it oh yeah yep so it's cheaper just to build it well i didn't even you know i didn't know to go built by one but yeah we you know like i said we kind of learned the right way to do stuff and we built our first a late mall car herself. No kidding. Where'd you build it? Where are you working out? Tommy Andrews.

His shop. And I had to run second shift because I'd help him during the day until he got done working in the evening. And I probably started at 10 and then worked on my car at two or three in the morning. Dang. So you get your late model sportsman ball. Is this, what year is this? What year did you start? 72, I believe.

Wow. And so in two years, you went to Nashville Fairgrounds and won a track championship? Well, we didn't win in 70. We won a couple of features. Yeah, we won in 74, but in 72, we won a couple of features. I think my first feature I won at Birmingham, I took out Red Farmer. How'd that happen?

Well, I apologize to him, so I didn't even whooped my butt, so I don't remember exactly what transpired. Yeah, I took him out to win my first feature in Birmingham. There was a fight afterwards? No, no, he went to a fight. Oh, no, no. He said he had a conversation with him. He had a conversation with him.

No, but in 74, we were, a really good year. We're actually leading the points in all three race decks, Huntsville, Birmingham, and Nashville. And was fortunate enough to win Huntsville and Nashville in 74. Both tracks. Both tracks. And I'd like to say maybe we could have won Birmingham because I finished second two years in a row to Neil.

Neil Bonnet. And we had a race on four. Friday night and it rained it out and they've never ever done this in the past they said okay we're going to run this race on Saturday night and I'm thinking here I am leading the points in Birmingham and you got to go somewhere else in Nashville and and Nashville paid their champion a hundred dollars extra every week so you know we're racing to eat basically and what that car wins is what we operate up we didn't really have sponsors so I decided you know forego Birmingham and go to Nashville and we won the championship. So I'd like to say maybe we could have won all three, but we had a good opportunity,

but we didn't do it. What made you, are you used in 74 when all this success is happening at that level, are you thinking about getting a cup car? You're looking, your eyeing cup. Are you watching Cup on Sundays going, man, I want to get there? Well, basically, I kind of, you know, I really didn't look that far ahead. I just kind of looked what we're going to do next year. And we built a permit tax car to go to Daytona in 74 up 72 minor carlo who built it we did what whose car what did you brand new car a brand new junkyard car you know the damn everything to go to Daytona yeah yeah and so in the arc series in 74 you could build a race car out of junkyard we'd build it for quite a few years after that but uh no but this was the permatex which is the NASCAR you know yeah it's basically like arc series right but it was late maus sports

It was late Mossport. That's right. Right. I don't know why I think of Permatex was the Arcadil. So you built, I'm just, I mean, I didn't know that. I thought that you went to Hutch or even back in the 70s, you got your, you know, you got your chassis from somewhere or, I mean, how do you, who welds a whole cage on top of a stock chassis out of the junkyard? You guys? Yeah, we did.

Yeah. But we built, we built this car. Actually, David Sisko, and if you remember that name, he ran the cup back in. the day. He located this 72 Monte Carlo body for me and chassis because we could run the whole thing. And

later I figure out this is you know this is in 73 and I'm purchasing a 72 Monte Carlo rolling car without motor transmission in the interior for 500 bucks. So I'm building you know in the process of tearing this thing

down and building a race car. I'm thinking that's awful cheap for this this body so maybe this thing's hot. Maybe it's like oh god. So so basically, you know, anyway, I didn't get in trouble for it. Did you learn anything about it? No, I never heard that it was hot or not. He didn't ask questions either. But it was, I mean, man, this thing is cherry.

It was just like, man, it was just like come off her shoulder and forth. Oh, kid. Wow. Well, yeah, we built that car. You know, we bought a four-fit, 427 motor from the dealership. How old was the body? 72 Monte Carlo. And that, is that the one that Darrell Teeboned you?

It is. Yeah. So I got the picture right here, Mike. You are, is that the same race? 74, first race? Yeah. Yeah. Yep.

So y'all qualified in the top 10 or something. Yeah, I think we qualified. Eighth or something. Yeah, I think Bobby qualified seven, Bobby Allison. He was like from Hueytown, a hundred miles south of us. And we'd go down there and we'd kind of look at some of his stuff and see what he was doing. Copy their stuff. And, yeah, we're, you know, like I said, he's.

qualified seventh we qualified eighth and you know what happened in the race well we're going faster than I knew what to do you know so you know we had one set of springs one set of one one sway bar so and like I said we ran really really well and I remember that the wind was like blowing like 40 45 miles an hour good it's great you know and I just go down and turn three that thing turned sideways just without even and, you know, not even just now, it turned sideways. So, and Darrell hit me, and I woke up in Halifax Hospital. It knocked you out.

Knock you out. So I like to tell folks, I'd have been a hell of a race car driver. I hadn't been for that wreck early on in my career. That'll set you back a little bit. Yeah, it run my bell, you know. But we repaired that car, and we went back to next year in 75, and I think we qualified in top 10 again, maybe eighth or ninth, and there was another wreck that not of our doing,

and I decided, well, if I come back to Daytona and race, it's going to be on the cup side. So we built us a cup car. What year was this, what year do you run your first cup race? 1976. And are you nervous? Not really. I mean, it's a big racetrack.

But I had to run a race at Charlotte. I run a couple of late model races at Atlanta. So kind of stepped up to a mile and a half. It wasn't such a big jump. I guess I'm saying, are you nervous about, like, being out on the track with Kell Yarborough and Richard Petty and David Pearson, those kind of guys? No, but I do remember that I run in the back of AJ Ford in the qualified race. And I said, oh, crap, I just run into AJ Ford.

Yeah. You know, like I said, I'm afraid of getting my butt whooped by him, but I just hit him square. We didn't hurt anything. You know, we didn't get squirrely or nothing. But, yeah, and we made the race in the 125s. You ran your way in. Yeah. Like D.K. O.

It used to say he wouldn't get out of electric chair to get in the car for the Daytona 125s. That's how much, you know, they meant in far as, you know, that was our, that was our Super, you know, Super Bowl. We go to Daytona, and if you do well, then your season's off to a good start. Yeah. And it's still the same way today. Oh, yeah. But it's a lot harder to make, you know, I mean, before it was like 14 guys to get in each race and now it's like two. as far as the 125s.

Right. 150s now. Yeah. Right. Hey, what's your relationship with the Allison's at this point? You said you copied some of the have a setup to make that arc race. But like is Neil Bonnet, Allison, I'm assuming you had formed relationships with them at BIR. Is that carried over at this point?

Are they helping you? How was that? Oh, not so much. I mean, Neil and Bobby were really tight. And Neil ran a lot of races for Bobby when in the 12th, Coach. Cola car when Bobby couldn't make all these, you know, these gigs they had scheduled, so Neil would take over. So, no, we weren't that tight, you know, as far as, you know, basically getting any help

and that tore stuff from them. So you run, you had a lot of different race cars just looking at the pictures of all your cars from the 70s, your cup cars, you had Laguna and all kinds of different cars. And then you got team, who was the Broadway Motors folks that you got teamed up with? around 80, 81? They basically was one of the reasons I moved to North Carolina. There was a couple of guys that lived in Forest City that were, I think they worked for Cecil Gordon at one time and helping James Hilton.

And they said if I'd moved to North Carolina, they would go to work for me. And they found me, I'm in that building now. They found me a building. You're still in that same building? 39 years later, we're still there. Wow. And we moved in it, it was 90 feet long, now it was 380. So we built on it.

But Studmurray was the Broadway Motors guy. And it's kind of hard to move somewhere with nobody that would bounce for you or, you know, have somebody that knows you. So at that time, we're getting 500 bucks a race from Broadway Motors. Oh, really? That was our sponsorship. Dang. But it was a help.

I mean, without it, you know, I think we were Broadway motors for two or three years. How much did it cost you to race back in? Man, we went to date. We went to Riverside to race for $500 starting money, so we just made it work. You know, gas is 28, 9 cents a gallon, so we made it work. The math still doesn't seem like it adds up well. It doesn't. You see like you lose money.

Yeah, but I mean. Why would you drive, I've always wondered that. So when I watch races from the 70s and even, I guess more in the 70s, why would guys like you and James Hilton and agree and why would y'all go all the way over to, to the Riverside? Well, I mean, they had to plan, you know, to plan money. Talk about that. So, I mean, you have to run all the races to get the points to be in the top 30 car owner points.

And back then, I think the plan money was $500 extra. So race paid $500 and you got $500 plan money. That's about. Yeah. Yeah. And if you didn't run that Riverside, you're on or on the plan anymore. Yeah, well, we were doing a deal where we put all the independents would put their numbers on West Coast cars.

And just to keep from going out there, because it wasn't a profitable situation. So I remember we're in Daytona and July the 4th, and Bill Jr. called us all in the little office there by the scales. Who all? All the independents. All the independents. So who, James Hilton,

Jay D. McGuffie, Seesle, Cisle, Buddy Arrington, all this guys that were, put our numbers on other cars out there. and Bill Jr., that's a cussing that's what man you ever heard in your life, to be honest with it. I mean, he cussed us up one way and down the other, and he said, guys, he said, you can't judge one race to see if you make money.

You've got to wait until the end of the year. So if y'all want to stay on the plan money, you will take your cars to the West Coast. So we did. So after that, so. What's it like driving to the West Coast in 1978 with a race car on the back? You probably had your ramp truck. Well, actually, I had had a box truck.

and I just purchased that truck back. I had it. I saw that thing for sale out there. Yeah, I just bought it back. Did you? Bill Sedrick had it for 35 years. It still got some of y'all's sideage on there. Still got Broadway motors on it.

But back in the day, I thought that thing was the Cadillac. But we, back in the independent days, everybody had one guy that was their main guy. I mean, I had Sandy Jones, Buddy Arrington, had Joy, Arrington, Henley Gray had Steve Gray and Cecil Gordon had Charles Hambrick. Everybody had their one guy, main guy. J.D. had Jimmy Bird. And we go out there as one man and we would pick up help out there. How do you do that?

People wanted to race back then. So would you get to the track or would you be making phone calls during the week? We were fortunate enough that we had some, you know, some people already, you know, that were going to be there. You know, we had some bunch of friends from San Diego that would come up and help us but all the independence had the same kind of people that would come show up and help but people don't realize we'd go race with one guy and and yeah we'd be we'd be lapsed down you know from the from the leaders but they had pit crews we didn't we had all those five guys

of helping all the other independents they would pit five cars oh my goodness i mean they don't have a clue of what we went through to to race so does that just you just don't pit on the same lap That's how that works. We worked a deal. Whoever's was leading got to pit first, and then we don't sound, on down the line. Yeah.

Wow. Are these guys just volunteering? Is everybody paying? Is everybody chipping in to pay them? Are you kidding? They're just wanting to be working and racing. A sandwich. We'd give them a,

one of these guys, one of her helpers showed up in a, in a motel, said, which one's my bed? I stand in, and the other guy said, you're standing on it. So,

you know, so we slept on the floor. I mean, you know, And these guys now, you know, you've got to have one to a bed. I mean, we had 14 to a room back in the day, whatever it took. Yeah. You know, because we go to Dayton and February in the rooms for, you know,

for the week would be five or six hundred bucks. Cute. And we couldn't afford it. So you had to do what you had to do. Collie. It's, I knew all, I mean, I know all this, but it's awesome to hear it out of your, from you. Especially the Bill France part.

Wow, going back to him. I mean, goodness. I mean, help him out a little bit. I guess I understand his logic, though. I mean, you're trying to get, you know, people to show up to the races every week without that. I got a picture right here from Riverside. You took your Broadway motor's car out there, that old, same car I had in a streetstock series, Mike. Malibu?

Yes, you wrecked the hell out of it. And it turned. Yeah, we broke a, went off through the S's. Flip it over. That is 52. That thing's like, they're trying to, well, I guess the record's about to flip it over. There you are climbing out of it. I always looked, I looked at that picture because there's a, um,

there's kind of a sequence of Yeah, that's the same turn of Joe Weatherer, he lost his life. So what happened? Oh, wow. Oh, I went off through the essence through the dirt, and the brake line was running across the top of the housing, and it went up and hit the top of the frame and cut it. And one down in there.

I didn't have any brakes. Oh, my gosh. Pounded the fence. So that's all the way to Rich, that's all the way to Riverside with your race car, and you destroyed your race car. So when you, and you look like you pretty banged up.

I busted my nose a little bit from the helmet came down and stuff So you load up your car after a race like that And you go all the way back home Well actually that race We I think we were in college station before Riverside And we had another car with us

Because we were going to college station Riverside and then to Michigan Before we went home And we got to college station And we had our That was going to be our road race car and didn't have enough cars. So we did some canagling and got somebody to drive it.

Baxter Price drove it. And we did a starting part way back then because it paid, you know, three grand. So we changed that over for College Station. Then we had to change it back when we got to Riverside. But we also had another car with us that we ran at College Station that we're also going to take to Michigan after that. So we ran three races before we came home. Really? With that deal, yeah.

So, daguums. You destroy that car and you go to Michigan and you run and then you go home. And what do you do with this car here? Well, Sandy Jones was with me at that time. And the record guy picked that car up like it was an indie car. I know. He's like flipping over always. And he picked it up through the roof, put the chain through the roof.

Oh, my God. Yeah, and picked it up and he was swinging back and hitting the record and all that. And Sandy went ballistic when the guy brought it back. That's why that picture's like that. Look at this, my. Right. Yeah, you thought it flipped. Yeah.

So he was, I mean, Sandy was living at the guy. Yeah. But we got to, yeah, he was picking it up through the roof. I wondered about that. But that was a, that car was a short track car. Yeah. And what was funny about that is the, I offset that body on that frame three inches to the left. And at Riverside, it was offset the wrong way.

Oh, yeah. So, but it still ran well. But we got to Michigan and Les Richter called me in the trailer, and he said, here's 500 bucks to help fix that race car. So that 500 bucks fixed it. Really? Yep. $500.

But we did all the worker sale. Sure. So where are you at personally at this point in your life? You know, it's 1981, 82. You got into cup racing. It's been frustrating. You're working your guts out. I've read articles and trying to read your temperature about where you are personally about it.

You've kind of found yourself and you found your kind of place amongst the independence. They were a tight group. You talk about all of you working together, sharing pit crews and so forth. How is your resolve? Like you, you know, you came from winning, you know, track championships and having success, and now this is a whole other deal. You're working your guts out to get, you know, to the racetrack and try to make a living, but you're not having the success that you see a guy like Darrell Waltrop who you could,

you could run door to door with at the fairgrounds with in the 70s. So where are you personally going through like early 80s? Well, I think 82, you know, we had some success. We were, I think we finished 11th in the points. And if you look at the rundown of all the drivers, I think we beat your dad. And we beat Buddy Baker or Gell Yarborough. I mean, we're 11th. So we were one position away from sitting at the head table at the ward off.

And I said, I'm not going to sit the top, you know, 10 at the main table. So never got that far again. Yeah. But, I mean, we had some success. And like I said, we know not what we wanted, but at the same time, I've done, you know, I'm married and I've got a couple of kids. So I always thought, you know, yeah, I'm not doing what I want to do, what I started out doing, you know, winning races in the late mall. But I also, you know, had things I had to take care of, my family and stuff. So, and, you know, we were having some success among all the independence.

We tried to be the best independent out there. Yeah. And so, and we had some amount of pride in doing that and beating all the other guys. And we had some pride in, you know, we would beat the big guys sometimes. Yes. So you had a car that was red, Eureka vacuum cleaner, sponsored it, had a black hood. I love the paint scheme. I've actually painted my street stock car when I started racing just like.

except for I didn't have the red I used a poppy red that had buckets of that laying around but um you went to Richmond I believe in 1986 or 87 and passed daddy for the lead led some laps well the deal was we mounted all our tires before we got there and were all used tires we never bought the first new tire and uh every time of college to come out all the big big guys put tires on and we'd stay out on old tires and they couldn't pass me. So I think we ran like, led like 40, 50 laps. Yeah. And your dad got to me because he already put, he stopped put tires on.

And when he got to me, I body slammed in like, I was something. I was leading the race, man. Yeah. I'm not moving over for you. So I think he probably laughed about that. But we ended up, I think finished eighth or ninth. Yeah. And that was the year that I'd, I'd,

got to drive that Folgers car in Charlotte. But after that, I think after Richmond was at Dover, and we ran really well at Dover. Actually, I knocked your dad out of the first round of qualifying.

Really? Yeah, and I come driving back in the garage area at Dover, and he does this number to me. So I knocked him out of the top 20. And we ran decent there, and then that's what got me the shot, I think. Well, when you're at Richmond having that kind of a day,

I mean, you've had some moments in your cover. career but that was a I remember that day being I'm like hey whoa this is you know this is amazing really when it's happening do you think back to that race when all that's happening can you I guess you can believe it because you built the car you brought the team to the track you're you know you live you're living it but when you got out of car I mean did you look did you guys did y'all look around each other and and think damn that was all right well you know I look back on some of the races I've ran that, you know, and I questioned myself, what did I mount all the new tires I needed?

Yeah. You know, because you don't ever know when you're going to run well or not. Right. So, and I just can't take that chance, you know, and I've done it this year, you know, at Darlington, I had $9,000 where the tires mounted up this year and a car didn't crank. So that's, you know, for me, that's a big loss. Yes. So, you know, it's just a gamble that we didn't take. Sometimes you wish you should have taken that gamble.

So you got out of the car going, dang, we should have had new tires, not, damn, I had basically the race of my career. I had a career day. What a great car. Why was that car so good? And we just hit on it. Damn. You know, you know, it's, it's, it's, we just hit on the setup.

Yeah. It was just good. All right. So we love talking about ingenuity here and getting clever. And I mean, it sounds like from day one, if you guys are scavenging from the junkyard and building cars taking them Daytona, you had to get creative. So did you do anything. to that car that made it good?

I mean, did you have anything that you're proud of? Oh, early on, not so much, but later on, we had to get creative to make the Daytona 500, and we did what we needed to do before it was cheating or, you know. Never cheating. Never cheating. And we had, you know, the intake manifold was that little trick in there, you know, worth 50 horse fire. I mean, everybody was doing it until we did it. So that's what you had to do to make the Daytona 500.

So Brad was telling me, y'all bought a car. So we had Jimmy Spencer on here and he said, hey, I asked Jimmy about that car that he ran so good with and won with the Daytona because apparently they wrecked it after a race or two after that. They wrecked it and you guys must have balled it. and it had hydraulic throwout barons in the rear purchase. Right. And we asked Jimmy, we said, hey, Jimmy, what, anything special about that car you one day tonal with, that McDonald's car?

And he goes, no. I'm like, man, I didn't want to flat out just tell him what Brad told me about the purchase. Well, that was two different races. That was two different races. What do you mean? Well, I think it was Sterling. Yep. and Bill Elliott,

oh, sat on the pole. Both of them. They were inside and outside pole. At Daytona. At Daytona. And Sterling told this story later. They used to have a seminar for Ford drivers in Detroit.

And so we were all up there. Sterling was up there. And he was telling a story about that. And they had hydraulics in their rear springs. And that was the first year that Gary Nelson was on the job. And they were up, you know, they were all up there around the engine. and Gary Nelson was about to pick the seat cushion off of Sterling's car.

And when he did, the buzzer went off on the sniffer, you know, checking for air lakes on the motor. So Gary never picked that seat cushion up, and the valve was under that seat to lower the hydraulics to lower the back of the car. And they've said that Junior was so scared that he got in the plane and come back to run to North Carolina. Back then you could put your cars, In the hauler on Sunday, if you remember that.

You might not remember that was way back then, but you could put your hauler, your cars in the hauler. But they changed those trailing arms in the hauler. And Brad told me that. He's like, think about how hard it was to train two trailing arms in a race car while it's in the hauler. Holy moly. Good Greek, yeah. All right, so we did get confirmation then.

Yeah. We got our confirmation. Well, I went to pick that car. I paid $500 ago. They wrecked it. You know, I went to pick that car up. the juniors and the guy said, wait a minute,

we've got to cut a couple things off of it. So they wouldn't cut some of the brackets was holding some of the hydraulic stuff off of it. That's interesting. So you have that great run at Richmond. He talked about Dover and some highlights from the mid-80s or late 80s. You're racing at,

well, you have to talk about J.D. and the glen. So you're racing it, you know, the glen with J.D., J.D. was an independent. Y'all seem, I don't know how tight y'all were, but damn, y'all ran around each other on the racetrack enough to have a pretty good understanding and relationship. Y'all both seem to be trying to accomplish the same thing each weekend, at least had a respect of each other, knowing what each other's trying to do. You and him are out on the racetrack together.

He had a failure, part failure, going down to back straightaway before we had the chican in, before we had the bus stop at the glint. And he got down in the corner and hit the fence and it killed him. You raced a few more years after that, but how did that experience impact you personally? Did it make you, you know, did it change the way you viewed racing and driving? Not at the time because the next race after that, you know, JD and I had a good relationship. we, like I said, we were, we helped each other. I remember, and this is when I still lived in Alabama,

that we met J.D. It's somewhere close to Talladega, and we was going to Riverside. And we put my car on the trailer behind his truck, behind O'Blue. And I had Jimmy, Bird, and J.D., and I had Sandy Jones, and we go to Riverside, California with my car on an open trailer behind his truck. just to save fuel, just to make it. But to answer your question, yeah, J.D., he hit that fence.

You know, I turned into the corner. He didn't turn. He was behind me. He didn't make it. He didn't turn. So his nose went across my nose, and he got up in the air, and he got sideways like this.

And that big catch fence, I went through this direction all the way to my windshield. Yeah. I was a smaller object. And he had to catch. fence like this and he couldn't

go through it because the car was just too white and it broke his neck so but the next

race was a Michigan and I got to Michigan and I didn't go home after at the Riverside I mean after

the Glen because we had already planned on staying up there I think we went to I don't know if we did Niagara Falls

deal before that or not but we got to Michigan and Steve Gray came over to them. They had an ARCA car there. And so, hey, Jimmy, would you qualify this car for us? Because our driver didn't show up or something. And I thought to myself, well, you know, I got to get back in a car at some point. So this is as good as any. So I wouldn't qualify, you know, got in that

car, never ran a lap of practice and qualified it for him. So you had it on your mind. Yeah. So in that really, I mean, we know this is going to happen. It can happen. And that, in the end of really upset me for as driving you know I still I wasn't scared yeah and but when

when Neil passed away that that really got me why is that you know we we had we had history going up to the late Maldale and stuff and I actually had him in my stopwatch

and saw the crash saw it and he blew a tire he blew a right front tire because you know sound before sight I saw him hit hit the fence and then I heard the boom So, and, you know, my outlook changed then, and then we had that other driver got killed on Monday, Rodney Orr.

Yes. And I said, I'm put. Is that the same weekend? Same weekend. Yeah, it's on the Monday. And I said, it's just not worth it any more to me. I mean, I think it was Jade, Dave Markers and myself. We're basically the last two independents.

And, you know, we're racing to outrun one another. I said, I don't need this. I mean, I'm just, you know, I've been doing it almost 20 years. and it's just, you know, and it hadn't been easy. We worked hard to stay there and do that. So I just gave it up, so I'm done. And then you called in the middle of speed weeks, you did that. Right.

So do you call Jimmy Hensley or? No, that was. That was, I was still racing then. That was before that because I broke a shoulder in a. Okay. So did you put somebody in your car? Brad Teague. Did you call them up?

Yep. The Brad come and needs you help. I don't know if he might have been there already. I can't remember. Either way, you had to reach out to him. All right. And you tell him, hey, man, I'm not going to run this weekend. Would you drive a car?

You can't tell him why, probably. I can't remember. Yeah. What Brad Teague's been a guy that I've seen you partner up with on some things over the years. Why Brad Teague? Well, I mean. Tell me something about Brad Teak because I've watched him race for years. I don't know nothing about the man.

But I remember watching him when he drove that 75 car. the Bush series in the 80s, early 80s, and he was fast. Right. And, well, I think we wanted Bush race. But I've always kind of wondered about what y'all's relationship was. Well, we, back in the early 70s before, you know, we're like 73 or 74, they had a couple races at Atlanta. I don't remember what they called those things.

I mean, Neil won one of them, Billy McGinnis won one of them. And I finished, I think, fifth or sixth in them. And I didn't know it at the time, but Brad was, I think he finished. fourth so and we got uh when i went to cup you know they used to have relief drivers all the time at bristol john a usman and whoever you know would drive cars brad would drive cars so we just uh hit up a relationship and and uh he was a tough racer he was he's a good racer and especially at bristol he was he was the man at bristol for a long long time so he ran a slender u car for a while and did pretty like that car was kind of a 30

if they're worst and he ran pretty good with it a couple times at Bristol. I told him I've saved his butt one time at Talladega because I was I was passing me on the right rear and he almost put me in the fence and if I hadn't let up, we'd have crashed both of us. I told him I saved you that one time. So Brad talks all the time. We have this one picture of one of your Eureka Pontiacs at Daytona. He says it's the fastest Pontiac. at least that weekend.

Tell me about that car. You remember that car? He's down there for, I believe, it might have been the 400, but you, something happened. They blew a motor or to wreck the car. But he said it was, you guys had a special car for that trip, and it was real fast. It's like the best you ever ran.

I'm trying to look for a picture of it. I try to jog your memory. The small Pontiac last year of the Eureka deal. If that's the one I'm thinking about, is we qualified really good. We had some help from Hendricks, Randy Doorton, back to the day, sold us some decent parts, and we had a really good engine. And I think we qualified, like, we started like 7th into 125,

and I think Kel spun out, and somebody driving the Hendricks car killed us. Yes. We checked up a little bit. That's the same weekend. for kill spending and we got killed. That makes me think about something. So you, I was talking to Mike a little bit about your, how a team like yours functions and saves money,

and you just mentioned you got some parts and pieces, engine stuff from Rick. You still kind of, you know, I know, I don't know recently, but over, you know, just a couple years ago, you were working with Rick on some engine parts for Xfinity stuff. talk about piecing things together over your career how some of the some of the people you've worked with some of the things you've done being creative to try to you know put together a great engine like that I'm going to tell you a story all right that people today would

never believe it that we did this we were coming back for Pocono I think it was 77 and we had a box truck with a small block 350 in it and And we dropped a valve in the motor. And we were in Knoxville, Tennessee. I still lived in Alabama. And this is in July heat. I think it's like 7 o'clock. We've got a record to pull us to this service station park lot in the gravel.

We took the motor out of the race car. We took the motor. I got one man with me, Sandy Jones. Maybe that's really when he quit because I put him through all this. But we use a record, take the motor out of the race car, take a motor out of the truck truck. and we take the oil pan and oil, you could do that then, the oil pan and oil pump

off the race, off the truck motor and put it on the race car motor and put it in the tow truck to get home. To save a $200 record bill. No kidding. For 200 bucks. Whoa. So you're taking the race car parts

and putting them on the box truck? Yep. Put the motor in. And it would not run a lick because of the gear ratio and the camshafts are big. every time you put in high gear, it would just die.

I set it, we put racing gas in the truck. I sat on the fender with the hood up, driving down the road, turning the type distributor, trying to find that sweet spot where it'd run with Sandy driving it. We made it home, we started at 7 that morning, and we got home at 9 that night, and we were 200 miles from home. Damn.

To save 200 bucks. I mean, we do what we just do what we had to do. So you talked earlier about your opportunity to drive the 25-Folders car. Tim Richmond's dealing with some health issues, his complications with HIV, and he's out of the car. You had this great run at Richmond that I think was the catalyst to that conversation you end up having with Rick. So what happens? Does a phone ring he call you at the shop? Well, actually, I never talked to Rick.

Jimmy Johnson. Remember Jimmy Johnson was the business partner, Jimmy Johnson. Yeah. and actually called me three times and I hung up on it because I thought it was a joke. What did he say? He called you. Hey, we talked about driving the 25 Folgers car at Charlotte. Somebody's making a joke on me.

Yolly. Finally he calls back to third time. He said, don't hang up. So this is, you know, this is legit. How come every story is. People hanging up? People hanging. I was just thinking the same thing.

That happens a lot. We've heard that about three times at this table where somebody's got a phone call. Steve Park. Yeah. Call Steve Party, hung up on him. Yeah. Yeah, there's several. What year is this, by the way?

87. 87. 1987. So you get this awesome phone call. What's the first thing that runs through your mind? Well, this will be a great opportunity. You know, this is in my mind, I mean, I'm going to have everything it takes to go run well. Yeah.

And did you ever get nervous? Not really. I'm because, I mean, we were fast and I didn't do anything different than I did in my own car, you know. The car was, everything was there. After the phone call, though, in the days that passed between, you know, you actually being able to get in the car, did you have any kind of nerves? Like, man. I don't remember that. What's your wife think?

Well, you know, you've worked your whole life for this opportunity and, you know, we make the best of it, you know. You know, want to make the best, you know. It's a funny story. To me it's funny. I laugh about it. They said, we need to come up and be fitted for a fire suit. I said, well, there's no need to waste of money on a new fire suit because Tim and I are kind of close to the same size. So I go up there and I try on it.

You got one of them actually. I got one. You got one of them. And so I go try this uniform on, you know, when I stand up and doing all the wiggling around. And I said, it fits pretty good. except the crotch is a little bit loose. So I didn't have what, if you knew what I'm saying. He had a set of them, you know.

So you get this. You don't have a follow up for that one, do you? I can't argue with it. So you get this, you know, you go try the suit on and all that and your, you know, Harry Hyde was a crew chief? What was he like to work with? So let me ask you this, I guess. That's the second customer's man,

in all my life. Francis one. Harry had to. Harry was outspoken, honest, up front, told you what he thought, and no nonsense

kind of feeling. This way I sensed him, right? I've never really hung out with the guy, but that's kind of the impression I get from him. What was his opinion

about all this? I think he was, you know, glad to give me the opportunity or be a part of it. And I don't think that I disappointed him for as, you know, our performance, you know, but race was very disappointing to me.

Race was disappointed. We'll talk about that. And, and but for as, you know, every time I would, you know, would make change, would be better. Yeah. And I remember taking that car, you know, we went to test at Charlotte. Wait, wait, wait. So you all got the test? Yeah, I went to test.

Really? They took me the test. Damn. And, and, uh, they had a setup in the car, you know, and I said, man, I don't know if I can drive this. and you know everything's new to me as far as the car and in the motors you know good power

so you know I go out and I can remember the setup had a pair of 2,000s in the front and a pair of 400s in the back and I said I don't know if I can drive that you know it just feels a little you know not stable for me so alright let's try this

a pair of 1650s in the front a pair of 350s I like that you know we got to feel of that then I said to Harry said let's try that other setup I think I can drive it now So, you know, went back. Went back and could drive it.

Just could get the feel for the car. Sure. And all that. No kidding. A pair of 2000s. Man, seems like that'd be loose. Big left front. So you go test the car.

I'm sure you're watching your lap times and they're good and you're like, you know, you get this confidence. You're comfortable in the car. You go back home and talk to Sandy or anybody and go, man, this is, That thing was awesome. This is going to be fun. This is going to be awesome. I mean, are you getting excited?

Oh, very much so. Like I said, we were quick, and I think we qualified fifth. Yep. And it was a deal where they compare the two laps. It wasn't fastest lap. It was two laps combined. And the first lap, I didn't think I drove it hard enough. And the second lap, I turned it completely sideways.

So I know that I killed that lap. So we were going to be better than fifth if I hadn't overdrove the car or something. And, you know, in the race, we just kind of settled back and didn't, you know, didn't try to, you know, lead or anything like that. Just try to hang in there and just, you know, make it towards the end of the race. And then we got swept up in a wreck. It wasn't our doing. Yeah, so the race starts.

So me and Brad were very close friends at this particular point. And you have to imagine, okay, this Jimmy has ground every day of his life. And he is an independent race. racing the other independence. And rarely, but sometimes, you know, racing with some of the big guys up there up front. But it's been a tough, tough existence in the Cup Series for Jimmy at this point. And me and Brad know it well.

We're watching every lap. So this is a big weekend. Brad's pumped up. Brad's down there going through, he walked across the intro stage with you. And my daughter also. Yep. So there, it's, it's, I got all the pictures from that. But Brad, but for the race, me and Brad Hightailed it up to the condo.

Dad had a condo. They built them at 86. And so we're sitting up there in a condo. We're ready. Front row seat. We got the best seat in the house. Everybody back up. This is mine.

Brad's seat. Y'all get out of the way. And, uh, the race starts and Jimmy's taking it easy. Everything's just, it's a 600 mile race, right? I think it was a $600 and $500. And where are you starting? Fifth. Fifth, got it.

So, Jay, he's taking it easy. And, uh, I mean, 20 laps in, not even got the first pit stop yet, I don't think. Uh-oh. And they got, somebody got turned up, somebody got turned sideways because somebody got into somebody. I don't know who it was. Dad's in the crash. He got somebody drove into the door, his car and tore his, you know, knocked a toe out of his car. I was Derek Cope.

Cope. Yeah. I didn't want to name names. Oh, okay. You see that there? He was one of them. They never forget, Mike. Derek Cope caused it or he was just in it?

He was part of it. He was, I think he was over his head a little bit. Yeah. Gotcha. And so somebody, he, Jimmy's slowing down, you know, cars, eight or seven cars spinning around hitting the wall down on an apron, everywhere. Jimmy's slowing down.

Somebody run over the back of Jimmy and pushed him into it. And the cars were destroyed, both ends. I mean, it's awful. And me and Brad sit there and cried, damn real tears in that moment. It was the most difficult thing. I'm heartbroken because Jimmy is my driver, but then I'm watching Brad watch his father go through this experience, right?

And Brad's so pumped up for this moment, thinking, man, this is finally the day. Daddy gets to, you know, we get to see what, this is what, you know, it was so hard. I'll never forget it. Jimmy gets out of the car and he goes, thanks for the opportunity. This has been amazing.

We had some good speed. And Jimmy went back to working on his car the next week like he knew he would. Right? Right. And how do you reconcile with that moment? Well, I know what I can do on my own. and I've done that since I started racing. You know, I really didn't depend on anybody else to make that next move for me.

I was, you know, like I said, I know what I can do on my own, and I still had my equipment, and I could still go to the racetrack and still make a living. And there's some really good things came out of that driving that Folger's car. All right. I've got Alka Seltzer. I think I had one before that. I got an opportunity.

I think it was the years kind of run and I got turtle wax but you know my main was a good one and and actually the guy that the guy with a turtle wax deal he knocked on my door at Daytona at the motel and I didn't know this guy you know was I'd look through the little peep there and he I don't know this guy but he had checked for $50,000 and I didn't open the door but but I got it to next day but anyway but this same guy got me the Alka-Seltzer deal and that publicity from driving Rick's car you know and it was I mean

it's one of those deal I think everybody was pulling hell yeah everybody was pulling for you for to do well yeah and and we got good publicity from it and and we got Alcalfa we got Alcalfa for three years so so yeah so he gets the accesser car

Mike you're aware of that yeah we have hold on I got a couple questions about that event one is had you before that race. Had you allowed yourself even a moment of thinking about potential opportunities that could come to this that would

that would put your independent owning days behind you and did you allow yourself just the idea of what like the promised land looks like of driving for a Rick Hendrick on a bigger basis? No. Didn't even, so you went into that race knowing

this is the one and done deal. One deal. And did not allow yourself. So that's probably how you were able to process it a little better. It was an opportunity, and I didn't think past that. I just wanted to make the best of that one opportunity, and whatever it would come after that would come. Did they ever say anything about if this goes well, there could be X, Y, Z? No.

And like I said, I never talked to Rick before I drove that car. Yeah. What was the Tim Richmond situation then? If they only gave you one week, he must have had, I mean, he was having complications with his, HIV. I don't know if it was even full-blown AIDS at the time, but like, were they just taking it one week at a time? Or I don't remember, I wasn't, I wasn't a fan at that point. So I don't know what the Tim Richmond process was at that point. So like, did they put somebody else in the car the next week?

Was Tim back? I don't know that Tim ran any races after that. He didn't. Yeah. I think he did. Matthew's shaking his head. He didn't. So who else? Benny Parsons. Is that right? Benny. Benny Fieldman. Actually, Tim showed up. at the race. He did. What did he say to you? Just, you know, make the best of it, man. Yeah.

I got out of those pictures of him and Tim out of the back of the holler. Yeah. Oh, wow. Yeah. That's something. So the publicity from that event, though, leads to sponsorship opportunities. Yes. Hmm.

So how did the Arctic Seltzer deal come about? This same age that got me the turtle wax, you know, I guess he got the the Alka Seltzer deal. So me and Brad love drawing cars. And Brad is going to design his dad's Alka Seltzer car. Right? He designed it off a box. He did.

And so Brad showed me all his ideas. And he had some busy ones, some other different stuff going on. But he ended up landing on this baby blue with silver numbers, number 52. I think a lot of people probably find the most recognizable. car that you drove. Right. My favorite is still the Eurek car, but the AlkaSatia car was a cool one. And you had some good days in that car.

I remember y'all qualifying top 20, several weekends. And you had, so when you get a partnership like that, are you able to do some new things, do some things differently than you weren't able to do before? We did. And unfortunately, you know, some of that stuff never works out. You know, I've purchased some motors, and I remember one of them, eight laps in the race at Talladega, the exhaust port collapses. A brand new engine. So even though, you know, you've got a few dollars and you try to do what you're supposed to do to make it better, it doesn't, sometimes it doesn't work out.

Yeah. So what do you remember, is that what you remember from those days? Is like having that a little extra money and it really didn't. It, right. Didn't make things the way you thought. it didn't make things way of thought so damn wow i'm processing that for a second i mean that's boy that's that also is almost as disappointing as the charlotte race is that you finally get into some little extra cash and it doesn't it doesn't it doesn't move the needle like you were hoping or

thought that that's a that too is a letdown that i didn't even think about so you ran you talked about going to detona and turning the driver duties over to brad teague for that event and you ended up phone in the cup car for a couple years after that. She had a few different drivers driving for you and you, and eventually get out of cup, right? Right. What made you make that decision to get out of cut? Was it the opportunity in the Xfinity series?

You went in crew chief for Budmore one year. Right. What are you thinking at this point in your life? Well, after I quit driving, I spent a year what Brad and I did some things. we built some cars for a commercial. We did a Dell computer commercial, and we went to Bristol, and Brad drove the car for the commercial and stuff.

And then the opportunity came to go to work for Bud. You'd never been a crew chief before. My whole life. But you knew everything. You knew everything. All right. So here you're going to go work for somebody else. You never worked for anybody else.

else before no and uh be honest with you when you work for yourself that you can't stop that clot from running it's just i mean it's like it's out of control but when you work for somebody else that thing is slow motion so that's that's what i encounter work for bud it just it's not the same when you work for yourself you know you don't have i mean not that i didn't put the input in it that i needed to do to make it try to make it successful but it's not the same when you work for somebody else yeah and that only lasted what a year year and a half i'm basically Basically, when I went there, Donnie I even Wingo was still there. And I was the go-between between Bud and Donny, because they couldn't talk to one another without fighting.

So I was the middleman. I was the middleman. What was Donnie's role? He was crew chief. And I was more like supposedly team manager. Oh, I got you. So you were the team manager. At the end of that year, he went to work for Travis Carter.

And then I was the crew chief. Then they made him the crew chief. Well, what was that like? We had Wally Dallandbach. We had when we're still with Donnie, we had Dick Trickle. And it's what's disappointing to me is when we had Dick Trickle. We had Yates motors. And the next year we had pro motors.

And they're decent motors, but they're not what Robert Yates' stuff was. So I feel like, I think we finished fourth at Daytona 500 with Wally. And I feel like if we'd have had Yates power, we might have a sense. We got there, I think we got there right by your dad just like this and never took the lead. But I think we ended up forth. And we ended up forth at Sears Point.

You know, pit crews killed us. We'd come in, run in first or second and leave running 11th. It's kind of hard to use all that stuff up to get back to the front on a road course. Oh, yeah. Hey, Jimmy, you brought up Deller and Hart several times that whether you've run into him, What was your relationship with him like? It was good. You know, we weren't, we were cordial,

and he would speak every time he saw me. And, you know, I've got some good things that I remember about Dale, and then one of them was, again, at Dover. Sunday morning, we're walking in the garage, and he said, hey, come over here. He said, come up here. We go up in the lounge,

those is set up book on the table. He said, this is what I got. I guess we're struggling that week I'm looking at the setup I said tell I can't drive that you know I have 2,000 2200 right front and probably a 500 in the right rear

something you know when I've got a pair of 350s or something but just something like that you know offering up to help and I remember another time with at Atlanta we blew no burnout of wheelbearing and we had to change the right front

assembly so that's when we had turtle wax we had to get back out I want to try to make some kind of, you know, a good run out of it. And then, you know, we mess up on the right front and we blew a right front tire. We knocked the wall down. So next week, Dale comes over to me. He said, here, good a headache of work. He said, you deserve this more than I do.

Oh, wow. And I wish I had that on a plaque in my office and never cashed it. But it's 500 bucks. $500. Then, you know, it's 500 bucks. And it's stuff like that. You know. They used to give out the Goody's Headache Award after every race.

It was an awesome. I mean, not an awesome award to get because you didn't want to win it. But they used to have some really, at the end of every MRN race, they had like three or four awards they'd give out. And it was like they, the guys, the MRN guys were the ones that literally would vote and say, I think we're going to give it to this guy. Yeah, I agree with that one. That's a good choice.

That's funny. I forgot about that. They should bring that back. Speaking of goodies, we've got a producer's note here. And we're bouncing all around, so I apologize for that. A producer's note said, Speakling, tell the story of who hippie is

and the night Jimmy had bad headaches and needed goodies. Well, when I went for Bud Morris, I kind of left hippie high and dry. He was my main man. He was, he was for 12 years. I mean, that guy did everything for me. This isn't the sandy guy. No, no.

Hippies later. Hippies towards the end of when I quit driving. But hippie drive the truck, change tires, you know, body work, just everything. And when I quit, my own team, I didn't tell him. So he hears it on the ESPN that I'm going to work for Bud Moore. You know, he shows up Monday morning at the shop. He's there by itself, so he doesn't know what to do.

So I come back, you know, Monday evening after leaving buds. And I said, hippie, I'm going to keep you on. I'm going to pay you. I'm going to get you on the bud since we can. So he was driving truck, too. So I was able to do that after maybe a month. He got him on that Bud's driving the truck. And probably the best job you ever had because, I mean, we worked 80, 100 hours a week for the same money.

And Bud paid time and a half. So he made really good money. But anyway, and we were rooming together. And I had a killer headache one night. And so I'm going to go in there and hippies goody. And in his shaving kit, he's always got a goody power. So I go in there and I say, yeah, there's a goodie powder. So I take this goody powder, you know, I lay down, I got to turn the TV on,

and I'm laying on my hand. Now, here, across my ankles and I could feel my heartbeat. I lay my, you know, my hand on this head on the side of my ear, and it's just bouncing, you know. My heart's just got a beating out of my chest. So I don't sleep none that night. So next morning, you know, we're at the racetrack, and hippie's got a big old honor rods behind the car, butts car. and Henry Benfield's one up.

And there's about eight or ten of them. And they're just horse laughing. And I'm walking by. It's 30 degrees. I'm short-sleeved shirt. I'm high stepping. I'm just wide open. I said, what are y'all laughing about?

He said, oh, nothing. I said, well, tell me, so I'll laugh too. He said, oh, you won't laugh. And it was speed that he put in his goodie fighter so the DOT man wouldn't get him. So I didn't sleep that next night either. Holy s'clock. But this day of Henry Benfield walks right in this room today, he says, I got a goodie, I got a goodie powder for you.

And this 20, 25 years later, he will still say that. Hey, listen, we were just telling Henry's stories a couple weeks ago with Jimmy Spencer. So he didn't die. It is true. I went, we were just, we didn't tell this story, but just you reminded me of something because he doesn't forget those things. I got you goodies powder, right? Jimmy and I came in from an appearance.

It was in the dog days of summer. I was working for Jimmy Spencer. My first year, I was so thirsty. I go into the bus. Henry's Jimmy's bus driver, okay? I go into the refrigerator and I see Apple juice. Hippie drove his bus later too, Spencer's. That's hippie.

Yeah. That is, I know who you're talking about now. Right. I go into the bus. Right. I go into the bus and I see what I believe is apple juice. And I mean, when you're so thirsty, just thinking it's like they're so thirsty and you just can't wait.

and you're going to go and you're going to take a big old gulp and I do it. I hit it hard, right? Well, it wasn't apple juice. It was vinegar. And so I spit it out everywhere. I mean, it's just spewing out and Henry's just buckled over laughing and every day since then. I got you some apple juice. A fresh squeeze apple juice right here. I got some apple juice all day. And I remember that when we were telling Henry Benfield stories and that's the same thing he did with you. Now, going back to the speed, apple juice ain't no cat. category than what they did to you. Well, I did it to myself, but anyway.

Yeah, but a little heads up could have been nice, right? There was another time we worked day and night and going to Daytona test and go to test and we run really good so we don't spend the night and we're coming back home. Hippie says, you're going to have to drive, you know, I'm just wore out. You're going to have to drive. I said, well, you got any of that stuff stay awake. So I take something else, you know, and he says, and I'm running my mouth. 90 miles an hour. He said, next time I get sleepy, I'm going to give you the stuff to keep me awake. You were wired. I was wired. That is crazy. Oh, man. Well, hey, listen, that could have ended up worse. It could. That's all I keep thinking. I could end up worse. We almost lost Jimmy. Yeah,

that was close. Close call there. Were you pissed off? No, no. I'd laugh too. It was funny. Oh, my God. You know what they used to do? I mean, now that, that wasn't a prank. I guy had he had a purpose for that but those were the prankness people that i ever hand the benefit was for sure and he would put snake real snakes in people's suitcases so when they would go to the hotel and open it up there was now the but the worst thing i ever heard him do was um i can't remember his name but he'd worked with r j reynolds and um he put women's lingerie into this dude it was phil i can't remember his last can put it in his suitcase to take home to take home because he knew his wife did the

laundry. Oh my God. And so when she opened up the case, there was this woman's lingerie in it. That was Henry was ruthless. Ruthless. That's that. Can you imagine trying to score him out of that one? No.

Oh, man. So how did you get from crew chief in the 15 at Buds to owning or managing the Lear 77 Xfinity car? Oh. What happened in between there? Well, I think that's the time that we were doing. I don't know if that's when Brad and I did the Dell commercial, but there's a guy that worked for Ford.

It used to be race parts forward. He got a hold of these guys that owned the Lear team. These guys were out of Detroit. They worked for UAW Lear. And Preston, Preston Miller. If you remember that name, but that was back in the 90s. Anyway, Preston told these guys that they had some affiliation with Ford, the guys that owned the Lyrteam. And somehow my name came up that you need to talk to.

So he'd help you. He can, you know, maybe put your team on the right track. So I went to work for them, I think, in maybe August of that one year, the 97, maybe 96. but it was kind of a laughing stock when I took it over, I thought. Yeah, it was bad. It was bad. And they had money. They had money to race with.

So I toughed it out to the end of the season, and every time I walked in that room, we were racing now to Moresville. And every time I walked into the shop, I'd feel these knives in my back, you know, because I didn't have any friends there for us, you know, because I'm rocking the boat. I make changes and stuff. So, you know, I tell the guys. said, if you want me to work for you, you need to move this thing to Forest City,

because I'm not going to commute. So, and they did. Dang. And use your shop. Use my shop. And which I got, you know, it was a good, you know, they used my shop and my tractor because I was saving the money for what they were doing and renting this building here. So, so I think we put that deal together.

And we had three good, three good years of some sponsorship money. And we were, you know, and Renwell, one Hickory, the last. The last, and we built that car just hoping we'd make the race and set outside pole and won the race. And we had some good runs, you know, we think, you know, top ten, but quite a few top tens. Yeah. Do you look back on that time fondly or do you enjoy it? I do, because, anyway, we did everything in the shop. And we had probably at the time, we had probably the best fabrication guys in the business at that time.

And all of them went on to work for cup teams. And, you know, one of them runs Stewart Hoss's Fab Shop, you know, and one of them works for you right now that work for me. Really? Yep. Who? Dave Erksvitz. Okay.

So he worked back then, and Ronnie White was a setup guy of Hendricks for years. Yeah. So, I mean, everybody got jobs, and we're really good, really good. what they did. These days you run your own team out at the same shot. You've been managing, you've been running your own team for I can't, I don't know how long now, it seems forever.

But, you know, what is, what is, how do you operate now? You know, you have different drivers every other year. You had David Starr there for a little bit. A couple different guys coming in and out, depending, I mean, I don't know how quick these deals come together then maybe they're in the ninth hour happening in December. January sometimes.

You know, but so how do you still make a living? How do you do it? Well, we've been forcing enough that the last four or five years, you know, the drivers generate their own sponsorship and they get paid a percentage of what sponsorship money that they bring.

So that's how we've been able to survive. And plus, you know, we do so much work herself, you know, We do our own motors. Where do you get all your motor parts? Mostly from Hendricks. And they've been really good to me.

I'm going to tell you a little story about Rick. He might not want to tell this, but I'm going to tell it. I got his number in my phone, and I'm pretty proud of that. I know. And I got, anyway, I called Rick. I got the nerve. Long story short, you hadn't heard. heard this, but I'm going to try to tell you in a hurry. Rick called me one day. He said,

hey, this is Rick. I hadn't talked to Rick 20 years. Really? He said, Rick Hendry said, I just want to know if you've heard of a John Hendricks. I said, no, sir, I don't believe I have him. He said, well, he went to school with you in Huntsville, Alabama. And he was a year earlier than me. So, and he had just got hooked back up with It was his cousin because at the end of the Civil War, one side of the grandpas changed their name and put an S on the end of their name. So they lost the family tree there. And they got hooked back up. And they were having dinner.

You know, I said they only been hooked up for like a couple of months, but they had dinner. And John Hendritch brought up my name. And where he got my name from was when, you know, racing out of Huntsville. my name was in the paper all the time because we ran three nights a week and we had a really good sports rider that he supported racing so my name was in the paper all the time

and he asked Rick had ever heard of me he said well yeah he drove my car one time so and at the end of a conversation Rick said if I can do anything for you give me a call so I sat on that for about two months and what did he mean by that and if anything I can do for you let me know but we'll back up you know what John Hendricks

did and he formed his Discover Channel. Oh no kid. Oh yeah he's yeah yep so when I look back on the I still have my yearbooks from high school and I look back and said yeah there's John Henry said so but anyway that is so random so I get the nerve to call Rick I say Rick I said I'd like to you know

purchase you know enough stuff to build two motors and they said I don't want you to give it to me I just you know a good price if you could. And I tell him, I need everything but the blocks. So I get all that stuff, and he doesn't charge me a dime. And he finds out I bought two blocks from him. And the parts guy calls me up, he said,

Rick doesn't want you buying those blocks. He's going to give them to you. So he gave me enough stuff to build two motors. And one of those motors at Talladega, we finished fifth and outrun every hindered his car there with his used stuff. But another story about Rick, it's been two or three years ago I said Rick I want to

legitimately I want to lease a motor from you for Daytona for the Expendity race because that's that's the main race you gotta make it blah blah blah so we go there and I ask you and I say Rick what's this motor going to cost me and he says a number

and I said okay no problem so we're fourth in fourth place off the fourth turn coming to the checker flag We're going to finish. If we had got in the right line and got pushed, we could have been sacking.

But anyway, ended up selling because we didn't get in the right line. But anyway, I called Rick Monday morning. I said, Rick, are you going to invoice me for this motor? I just need to send a check.

He said, he texted me back. He said, don't worry about it. The motor's yours. Damn. Wow. That's pretty awesome.

That's the Rick Hendrick, we know. Yep. He's, man, salt to the earth. That's awesome. So, man,

it's been a lot of fun talking to you. You know, I've kind of, I've got your helmet. I've got your, I've got a uniform of yours. I've watched you run many, many races pulling for you. I got a, do you means, Eureka T-shirt. I painted my street stock after your car. I became best friends with your son, and we had the best of times running around the

infields of those racetracks. And I just appreciate you. I think you, you know, you work. really hard and you never complain, you show up every week, no matter what happened the week before, you come back and put in the same effort. And it's just a real inspiration. I think it's, you know, it's, I take a lot, I think I take a lot of motivation and direction from people like you and you specifically. I've been around some, you know, some big race teams and, and seen that side of it and seen all the resources and then to turn around and look at the other side of the garage and watch some of them teams and how they work,

I think I have a better appreciation for them and a better appreciation for the owners that are coming up behind you that are doing it just as like you do it. And the drivers that are trying to make their way just the same way you tried to make it. I think that really helped me a lot. You help me so many other ways too, but people would ever call me, Grounded or humbled, it would be because of people like you and knowing people like you. I could have certainly went the other way. Well, I appreciate. Had I not known you.

You have for the love of the history of the sport and your respect for it. Well, you know, it's people like you that make it interesting and fun to learn about. You know, I really miss those days of going to the racetrack, and I miss those days of watching the independence work through a race weekend. and figure out how to make it work. And those are some great times. And it's fun to see people like you still walking around in the garage, making your living in this sport.

Hopefully people appreciate your story, Jimmy. I think they will. Where are you headed to next? We go to Rhode America this weekend. Yeah. Where are you headed to now? I've got to do some errands. Yeah, but then back to the shop.

Some local errands, yeah. All right. Well, I appreciate you, buddy. And I know Mike appreciate you as well. Absolutely. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you, Jimi Means. Jimmy Means on the Dale Jr. Download. There we go. My favorite part of the show is here, and so is Leiavon. She is on YouTube right now. She has a bunch of questions that fans have sent to Xfinity Racing on Twitter.

So, Leah, let's go. Our first question from Brady Rivier. With all the road courses now on the Cup series, who was a mentor for you early on in your career for road courses? I had a few. So I went to Bob Bondarant's school. in Phoenix. They had a teacher named Cooper. You know, when you go to those schools and or you go to a driving school of any kind, if the teacher or instructor has some racing experience, you're like, oh, man, you know, you're a pro. And so I was totally tuned in to what he was helping me with. And then we went and left there and we won Watkins Glen in the Xfinity car. So we beat Ron

fellows, which was still one of my favorite wins of my entire career, because Ron and me would later become great friends. He would also help me a ton with road racing and some of the tips and tricks. He was extremely hands-on. We worked together in the Corvette program at certain periods of time, but also when he came raced in Cup, he drove our Xfinity car and won a race for us. Ron and I were great friends. Boris said was amazing. So Boris would, I could go up to Boris any time I wanted. And he'd tell me what he was running in his car for his setup, everything. He'd say, put this in your car.

Because I would go and we'd be working and I'm trying to get them to fix the car. And so we're getting further and further out to lunch with changes we're making because I don't know how to make the car go better. And maybe I'm not even giving them the right feedback. And we get slower and slower and the car is just more and more frustrating. And I'd say, Boris, man, we're out to lunch. Help me. He'd tell me what to put in the car.

I'd come back. And I'd say, Tony Jr., you know, Boris is second on the board, and here's what he told me he's got. They'd throw that in there, start the next practice, and we'd go right into the top 10 and be like, all right, now we're back on board here. And that happened a lot in my career. Andy Pilgrim was extremely helpful. When we went into the Corvette program in 2001, Andy was really hands-on with my driving and what I was doing with the car and how to race in the wed and all those things. and all that improved, all the road racing that I did in the cup cars. So I'm sure I missed a few people, but I had a lot of people that were helping me.

Next question from V. Johnson. He's halfway through the new season of Lost Speedways and really likes it, but he's curious, how much time does your crew spend at each location filming and doing research on the site? Well, they kind of hang out for a couple of days and just eat at the restaurants and enjoy themselves and crews. They just, you know, kick back until I show up and then all the work begins. I'm just kidding.

They're there for about four or five days. They've got to go in. They spend a couple days scouting, setting up shots, thinking about how the day is going to run once I get there, but they're also getting a lot of B-roll and footage and images and pictures. They're also interviewing local people that know the track or race there or people from the community that can give us a great understanding of what the track meant. It's a week, probably, almost a full week for each episode.

obviously, you know, there's a month worth of preparation probably for each show that happens here. It's a great crew. They all seem to enjoy it and get along, and it's kind of a small, in terms of production crews, it's kind of a small crew, which I think is a good thing. But that means everybody has to do a little bit extra and everybody has to carry their load. Next question from Ian Spence. It's the Goodwood Festival of Speed this weekend. If you were ever asked to attend and demo a car, would you be open to do that?

Demo a car? Is that what they call it when they drive it up the hill? Apparently. Demmo. Yeah, I think I'd love to. As long as, you know, I can come by. I see some of those guys, like, running hard up that track. I ain't going to do that.

I ain't wrecking nothing. I've seen them guys take those cars up there and crash them. I think this Nova's been there a time or two. If I went, I'd go slow and do the burnouts. I think there's some designated spots where you can kind of get a little, have a little fun. I don't know. Has anybody else in this room been there? Matthew, you know anything about it?

I've loved to, but I've seen it on TV. You've seen it on TV, okay? So usually I give you a hard time about shaking your head yes to everything that happens to an interview, but right now I'd really appreciate it. Sorry, buddy. If you're talking, I'm trying hard. No, I'm just saying like...

Is it even close to... Am I even close? So, I mean, I've watched some on YouTube and so forth, but I think it'd be fun. And I've been invited to come out there, and it may be something I do in the future. Sure. I've talked to Amy, and she's, you know, she's got to be down. She's got to be into it because I'm taking her with me. Not going by myself. Next question from Brian Good. In your opinion, what is the best rivalry in other forms of racing?

Other forms. Other forms. One of his examples was John Forst versus Tony Pedrigan in drag racing. And I remember that when I was a kid. Oh, okay. So I can say from any era. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I felt like it was today. No, no, no. Any era. Shooey. Who race for Mercedes back in the day, Matthew. when Michael Schumacher was running for Ferrari and there was a Mercedes driver. I think it was Mika Hocken. I think that was a pretty good rival. You were another one that came to my mind?

The Myers Brothers versus Junior Miller. Oh, that's a good one. I was thinking Stephen Nassie versus Bubba Pollard. That's one of the only modern rivalries that they chase each other around to beat each other. Yeah, so Mika Hockinen and Michael Schumacher kind of were, I felt like rivals. Mika was winning and Michael was winning a lot. I miss that. I miss Michael Schumacher racing, period.

But I'm, and it was a good little period of time, I think, when those two were at the top of F-1. Next question from our buddy Higgy. Did you conspic-conce-I can't say this word. Conspicate. Oh, my gosh. Confiscate. Confiscate. Oh, my gosh.

Hey. The Texas bro. Welcome. Welcome to getting older. Hey, that happens tomorrow, by the way. Oh, really? It's your birthday? Tomorrow.

Happy birthday. Say confiscate tomorrow too. I'll try. It'll be worse. Anyway, the Texas World Speedway sign for Dirty Moe Acres. It looked great somewhere close to the 76 ball. I think that belongs to David Starr. Oh.

It's his. Hopefully he picked it up. It's his to, he had claimed it. Don't y'all know that when we taped that, that was the first question. I think we might have even stopped production for a moment and said, does anybody know where this sign is going? because David Starr, it was pretty immediate. They said David Starr is getting that sign.

All right, do you have time for one more? Yeah, sure. This is from Frank Blacklock. Can you clear up why the people who love the Pinsboro track bought the track only to have it said they're unused? I didn't understand that in the episode. Matthew might be able to help us there. The people of Richie County bought it because they were attempting to sell it,

and they wanted it to be owned by the people of Richie County with hopes that someday it could come back. They're currently starting to run go-kart races on the property, plus they are going to have a festival up there. They're going to actually have an antique racer and reunion festival up there later this year, and I'll put it out on Twitter. But they want some sort of heritage with the land. There you go.

All right, man, it's over already. Gosh. So that part of the segment is never long enough, Mike. It goes by too fast. It goes by fast. You know what it's like? Can we make it longer? It goes by Infinity X-Fi.

You can make as long as you want to. It's going to go by fast. like XFINITY X-Fi. X-Fi is more than fast. It's also reliable and powerful, meaning that anyone can do more of what they love with faster internet. Can they make the Asked Junior segment longer? Because that's what I love.

You should try to do that. All right. Listen, you and your crew can stay connected with Wi-Fi coverage. It delivers the speed your devices need. Remember everyone, keep them coming. Send your Asked Junior questions to Add Xfinity Racing on Twitter. All right, before we move on, big thanks to Xfinity. Proud, Premier partner of NASCAR.

Last call. All right, last call. One thing I wanted to add about the Jimmy Means conversation, and it's a story that he told me but didn't share on the podcast. I don't know exactly why. Maybe he's a little embarrassed. But we were talking about his Monte Carlo that he built to go to the Daytona in 1974. It was a 72 Monte Carlo, and he went to the 74 Permitex 300 to race it.

Well, he shows up, built his car brand-o with his buddies, right? Good car. They qualify in the top ten. But anyways, before they could even get out on the racetrack, they're going through tech. The front of the car, they had the headlight covers covered with an aluminum plate, which is fine. But NASCAR, in the rule book, it says you need the headlight bezel. You need that factory appearing headlight bezel in that headlight location, along with that tin plate behind it, right? And you can see that on the front of our Nova and in a lot of other cars from the 70s and 80s.

You could cover that headlight with a template, but you had to have the factory appearing headlight bezel and grill work, right? Well, they didn't have it in his car. So NASCAR said, before you go on the track, you've got to have that bezel. We're not letting you run a lap. And they're panicking. What are we going to do? So they run to all the dealerships, Chevy dealerships around Daytona,

nothing. Can't find a headlight bezel in stop. So they go to the junkyards. They're running around junkyards. They can't find any headlight bezels for this car. So almost a whole day's been wasted. They don't have a lot of time. So Jimmy and his guys are trying to figure out what to do,

and they're driving down the street to the McDonald's, just a half a block or two from the track, very close. What sits in the parking lot? Shut up. 72. You lie. Monte Carlo. Wow.

So they pull the truck up to that thing, and Jimmy hops out and takes the headlight bezels off of it and goes back to the track and puts them on his race car. Whoa, way. Yeah. You're hearing it, man. That's some like six-pack stuff. Yeah.

And he told me, he said, you know, I thought about sharing that on the podcast, but I felt bad. And I really, he says, even today, even to this day, I wish I had to put a, you know, $20 bill on the windshield of that car. He stole it. He did. Just took it. Yeah.

Going to get a Big Mac come back. He's like, holy, there's the car. I mean, think about it after a day looking for this stuff. And then you pull in to get your Big Mac. And there it is. You're like, heck, the tent takes you. Temptation was just too much. Wow, that is an interesting story.

All right. You know what else is interesting? Lost Speedways is out. Season two, it launched last week, July 1st on Peacock TV. We love the feedback. I was in a New York cab this past week. Oh, my goodness. No way.

And it had a TV screen in it, and I saw a Lost Speedways commercial. No. It was a Peacock commercial, but it had Lost Speedways in it. That is something. That is a moment right there when you're in a New York cab and you see Lost Speedways in it. Well, we love the feedback. were being gotten so far. You guys got any favorites? Honestly, I haven't seen as much, because I was just so disconnected from social.

Yeah, you're in New York City. Yeah. What, big feedback? Matthew? Matthew, you went on. Leah, what's your favorite piece of feedback? All of it. No, I don't know. I'm glad that I'm not the only one that cries at the end of the Merle Beach episode. It's written. Favorite feedback you've gotten so far. Yeah, I didn't get any heads up about that part. Yeah, it's all. It's written in here like you guys were inspiring to share your feedback. Yeah, nobody told me.

You had your sheet last, you know, yesterday, but it's okay. No, it was after I left yesterday. It was there when I gave him this morning. It's okay. But a little heads up would have been nice. Communication, Matthew. It's your favorite thing, right? And you don't communicate.

Hey, hey, it's cold out here, but it's hot there. No, actually it's even colder in there. Cold blood here. Yeah, it's even colder. No, but I got to say I went to Tri-County Speedway, which they surprised me, and they're like, man, we want you to throw the green flag and all. So I've never been. treated like a celebrity before and that was the coolest thing but honestly the best part about it was

you know being out there with my little boy and people are coming up all day you know in the grandstands and having such great things to say about our show all right it's beautiful lost speedway season two july first it came out so you can watch all the episodes it's in front of the paywall for a limited time so if you want to get it for free go to sign up at peacock tv and you can see all eight episodes and you can watch season one again if you like and then it goes behind the paywall soon Yeah, yeah. And, you know, if we want to make a season three, you guys will be the first to know right here on the Dale Jr. download at Dirtymoe Media.

Doorbopper Clear, their podcast is out on the dirty moe media platforms. Here's a little snippet of what's coming up this week. Listen up all you fans of the second best podcast in NASCAR. I'm Brett Griffin. It's time you come listen to the absolute hands-down best podcast in the sport, door bumper clear. There is literally probably three seconds left in this podcast. So just change it now, right now, right this second. Come listen to us.

So, Freddie Kraft here. We're back from spotting at Road America with lots to discuss. We'll talk Austin, Cendrick, and Matt DeBendetto's battle, long caution laps, and trackhouse buying Chip Canassie racing. T.J. Major's here, and before it's too late, start listening to Dorm bumper clear, available wherever you get your podcast. No pontoon included. So we put them on our podcast, and we promote their show, yet they keep calling us out.

I don't like it, Mike. Yeah, we live rent-free in their head. What can I say? I want to be on their podcast. I'm going to, I'm not, why am I asking? I don't know. I'm going to show up. I'm going to show up.

That's like Dale coming into the junior motorsports going, I would love to have a shop tour one day. That's right. I'm going to, I'm going to sit in on their podcast and see if they can say this to my face. Oh, man. Yeah, let's see that. The Dale Jr. download is on TV. It's on NBCSN. It's at 7 p.m.

Thursday 7 p.m. Eastern Time. NBC Sports Network. Yeah. All right. The Jimmy Means episode will be out. It's going to be a lot of fun. I can't wait for people to learn about Jimmy. And, yeah, hopefully you can appreciate him the way I do.

Great show. Mike, you got one last thing? I do. We have a special guests in the studio today. Haley and Ken from Bojangles were here. They brought biscuits. They brought a bunch of stuff. Also, did you know, Dale?

Today is the anniversary of the first of the open. opening of the first Bojangles. I have that right, right? Right here in Charlotte. Right here in Charlotte. So this is a special day. You thought Independence Day was big. No, no, no.

This is a bigger holiday. Bojangles opened, 1977. So, hey, it's great to have you guys in the studio. Thank you. And yeah, that's it. It's boat time. It's boat time. It's boat time.

That's what they said. It's boat time. Uh-huh. This bit of bad-assery was bad-assery. It was made by bad-assery. Dirty Mo Media. Dirty Mo!