Retired stock cars find a new home with collectors (NASCAR.com)
April 21, 2010
Not only do the members of the HGNSC collect and restore vintage race cars, they actually race them on the track.
It’s not uncommon for people to enjoy a Sunday drive. But for Mark Mountanos and others who share his hobby, the phrase “recreational vehicle” means strapping yourself inside a 4,000-pound vintage stock car that was driven at one time by the likes of David Pearson, Ned Jarrett or Dale Earnhardt.
Mountanos is a member of the Historic Grand National Stock Cars, a collector’s club primarily based on the west coast that specializes in cars from the golden age of NASCAR. Between himself and wife Linda, they own a handful of stock cars that somehow survived the past five decades, rescued from fields, farms and junkyards and restored to pristine racing condition.
And instead of being on display in a museum somewhere, these cars still race on weekends throughout the summer—although Mountanos admits when you’re racing cars that are almost as old as you and are worth 100 times what they originally sold for, you’re a little more careful about rubbing fenders than the drivers were back then.
There are more than two dozen cars listed on the Historic Grand National Web site, ranging from a 1940 Ford modified to a pair of 1974 Dodge Chargers. Three of the cars were on display during the race weekend at Las Vegas Motor Speedway: a 1963 Chevrolet Impala replica dressed up in Ray Fox’s No. 3 livery and owned by Jim Koehler, and two cars owned by Mountanos—Ned Jarrett’s 1966 No. 11 Ford Fairlane (with Ned’s signature on the roof) and his pride and joy, Smokey Yunick’s black and gold No. 13 1967 Chevrolet Chevelle, the car that forced NASCAR to implement body templates.
According to Mountanos, the Chevelle had been lost for several years before Yunick located it and did a complete restoration. It was the last car he restored before his death in 2001. Yunick took the nose of a ’66 Chevelle, welded it onto a ’67 body and then literally spent the winter massaging the body panels, mounting the windows flush with the chassis and making it as aerodynamic as the rules would allow for that time.
Mountanos said Yunick, who called his Daytona Beach shop “the best damn garage in town,” planned to enter the car in the Daytona 500 with Curtis Turner driving, and was preparing to bring it to the speedway for a tire test.
“Someone said he had two or three thousand hours in it, just doing work on it,” Mountanos said. “He was buddies with Bill France at the time and they talked. France said, ‘You’re bringing that car, right?’ And [Yunick asked], “Are you going to let me run it?’ They were egging him along.
“They knew well that he wasn’t going to be able to race that car, because after they gave him a list of stuff at the track, he said, ‘It’ll take me six months to fix it.’ It was a love-hate affair between those two. Smokey told me the story about how they took the fuel cell out and he drove the car all the way to the shop without it. People swear that he did that.”
Mountanos, a resident of Ukiah, Calif., and fourth-generation coffee importer, caught the car collecting bug several years ago and began racing vintage sports cars. But once he learned about vintage Grand National racing, he was immediately and permanently hooked.
“We have some other cars that we race, a couple of old Indy cars and stuff, production cars and a Trans-Am car,” Mountanos said “But you know what? If we had to get rid of all the other cars and just got to drive these, that would be fine. We just love driving these cars.”
The cars Mountanos owns are meticulously researched and documented to make sure they are the genuine article. That’s what makes them so valuable, because there are so few of them left. Mountanos said most of the cars from that era were wrecked or sold for short-track racing. In either case, they wound up as scrap iron. So the scarcity of cars makes them incredibly valuable.
At the same time, Mountanos knows there are more cars waiting to be found and restored. But how many is open to speculation.
“They’re out there,” Mountanos said. “You do find barn finds. They do come about. And I think as people realize the value of some of these cars, then that takes on a whole ‘nother light, too. They think, ‘Oh, man, if I could find one of those, I think I know where one might be at,’ and then you start finding out the history of it, putting together what it was, and then you’ve got a valuable piece.”
And by visiting tracks like Auto Club and Las Vegas, the group hopes to fuel interest in finding more vintage racers.
“That’s what we’re hoping for,” Mountanos said. “We get a little more interest and people start thinking, ‘Gosh, there was a car in that guy’s garage. Maybe I should find out about it.’ That kind of happened with our Trans-Am group, because we’ve been running that for maybe 15 years now and we started out with very few cars and it just kept building. As the cars increased in value, a lot of them started coming out of the woodwork.”
Even the Ray Fox replica car, which Fox has seen up close and swears is a close enough copy to be the real deal, is worth over $100,000. And cars with proven pedigrees, particularly those driven by champions, are worth much more.
So how do you prove that you have the genuine article? Mountanos said it comes down to finding people who know the cars inside and out, particularly the guys who worked on them back in the day.
“The mechanics are the ones who know more than any of them,” Mountanos said. “They’ll say, ‘Well, that car didn’t run with any of that on it.’ You can say, ‘I don’t know if this is the right car,’ and they’ll get underneath the car and see a piece of plate they welded on. So that’s really fun when they look at that.
“One guy said, ‘I used to have a beer can under the dash and I used it as a breather,’ and he looked underneath, and it was still there. So stuff like that is pretty cool.”
So what’s it like driving at a place like Infineon Raceway in a car that came off the assembly line in Detroit well before the track existed? Mountanos said they’re a handful to drive, and that’s part of the allure.
“They don’t do anything well,” he said. “They don’t corner, they don’t stop. But they go like hell when you push the accelerator.”
Finding replacement parts can be an adventure, Mountanos said, particularly when it comes to drum brakes. Because it’s a close-knit fraternity, car owners know the right people in the business and are always on the alert when parts come up for sale.
“If it’s out there, you buy it, because you don’t know when you might need one or if it’ll be available again,” Mountanos said.
But one of the cool things about owning a vintage stock car is the ability to perform basic maintenance.
“You can work on these cars yourself,” Mountanos said. “It’s not like there’s anything technical. I can replace a transmission, I can put a clutch in, I can change rear-end gears. I’m not a great mechanic. I could probably rebuild the motor. I’ve done it. It might not be as good as if Hendrick Motorsports did it, but you could actually do that kind of stuff on these cars.
“The only big problem with these cars is they’re so big. They’re like two zip codes long.”
Races for the group are usually sprints of 10 or so laps. And even though he’s not running the car on the edge, Mountanos is still running it at a pretty good clip. Mountanos said he’s physically exhausted by the end of the day, from having to wrestle a 4,000-pound car around a track with drum brakes and no power steering.
“It’s crazy,” Mountanos said. “I don’t know how they did it. At Riverside, especially. On an oval, it probably was a little less hard, but not a heck of a lot less harder. You’ve still got to run 500 miles and the tires are wearing out and you’ve got no safety stuff. No SAFER barriers, no guard rails in some places. You know, they’re flying out of the track. And the Smokey car did 186 mph at Daytona in a test. It’s nuts.”
A key piece of advice he still uses is not to follow directly in the tire tracks of another car on the course, since there’s no guarantee the brakes will hold.
Mountanos admits it’s more important to put on a good show for the fans and have a good time.
“In our group, we don’t care if we win,” Mountanos said. “Sometimes we’ll say, ‘Hey, you want to win today? It’s yours. Go.’ And you run up front and win. We don’t care. It just doesn’t matter. We have more fun in the pits with the spectators and the kids.”
And that’s where much the interaction takes place. Fans can come up and touch a piece of history, or even sit behind the wheel and imagine what it was like for guys like Petty, Pearson, Yarborough and Allison. Mountanos said the smiles on the face of the fans are what make it all worthwhile.
“It’s amazing to me to see people come up to these cars,” Mountanos said. “They either saw them race or just want to learn about the history.
“It’s really a great group of cars, a great history. If you look at it, people didn’t really get the NASCAR history, you know. People don’t realize how long NASCAR’s been around. But I think it’s starting to come out. I think it’s starting to happen.”
And that’s what drew Mountanos to collecting vintage stock cars in the first place.
“It’s Americana,” he said. “I can relate to the drivers and the cars.”
The newest of the cars in Mountanos’ collection is a blue and yellow Wrangler Chevrolet once driven by Earnhardt. The car suffered frame damage and was retired, but the current owner has no interest in repairing it.
“It has a bent front clip but there’s no way I’d mess with that,” Mountanos said. “Just getting behind the wheel of that car, knowing that Dale Earnhardt drove it, that’s a huge thrill for me.”
In addition to the cost of the cars, Mountanos said transportation and storage can add to the price.
“I’ve got a barn that we keep them in, and then we’ve got a hauler that we haul them around in,” Mountanos said. “A big hauler, because you need it for these cars because they’re heavy. They all weigh like 4,000-plus pounds.”
One of the things about playing with expensive toys is realizing that everything has a price. Mountanos said he recently turned down an offer of $650,000 to buy the Smokey Yunick car.
What about $1 million?
“If somebody offered me $1 million, I’d sell it,” Mountanos said. “After all, it’s just a car.”
Just a car, indeed.
