A RARE look inside an incredible vintage RACE CAR COLLECTION!

Yes, I've been saving and restoring cars for almost 22 years, he said, but I remember building that. He said I can't believe he's still here. This was one of my luckiest finds. An advertisement in a magazine. Okay, Bill Ryan. It brought me here in the woods in North Carolina and I don't really know where I am because I'm just following you here, so tell me a little bit about what Ryan Enterprises is doing these days. has become the world leader in

vintage

stock car restoration, we not only restore cars for clients who keep them in

collection

s, we also restore cars for clients who

race

them, there is a large group of people who still enjoy racing these

vintage

pieces and spend a good time with them one of the most important things we do is save things, we, you know, the cars, the parts, the parts, you know, anything that we can find that we think is part of the story, buy it, get it, return it so it's saved and not thrown away or destroyed somewhere, okay, so it's all here, a little bit of it is here, yeah, a little bit, okay, I'm ready to see, you've been wanting it see this, so okay, open it. the door, let's see what you have, okay, come in, let me open the door and we have cabbage, the dog cabinet from the store, all right, cabbage, let's see, are you serious?

We have some toys, oh wow, oh my lord, this is amazing. I told you you'd be impressed, all hidden in a barn here in North Carolina. Yes, yes, how many do you have? um restored and unrestored. I have 64. 64. In total, yes, and those are your personal cards. Not that, yes, these are not customer cards. These are yours, yes, I have been saving and restoring cars for almost 22 years. Well, there are many names and numbers that I certainly recognize and, uh, the different installments, obviously, they are all very, very familiar, what

incredible

combinations, okay, let's begin. with jeff right here what is this uh this is a 2012 watkins glen car and this has 100 restored all the Hendrick parts and pieces from his brake assemblies to his r07 engine and his carbon dash.

I'm really a stickler for that. my older cars have 23 degree engines if it was a snowflake engine it's a snowflake engine if it was a pontiac head engine it's a pontiac engine if it was a hendrick engine it's a hendrick engine i'm there are a lot of guys who restore old

race

cars and they put the craziest, baddest racing engine they can in them to make them go faster and that's cool and there's a market for that and that's cool, but all my stuff is like it ran when I was famous, so You I'm super meticulous, I'm really to the point of going crazy, yeah, yeah, uh, how about I mean Donnie Allison's Hawaiian tropical car?

I mean, that's epic, that's a beautiful piece, yeah, that's actually, um, actually, that's the one in the building that isn't. Ours is for a client of ours in Canada, he's a super cool guy retired from the special forces and he found the hot rod and brought it to us and we put it all back together for him and some of this stuff, I guess, is pretty easy. to verify that you know something like a Hendrick car like this or the Dale or Junior machine over there, but something like this Kale Yarborough uh Valvoline car to where do you find it and then b how do you confirm that it's what it

look

s like, well, we I actually get that question a lot and people ask how you check all your cars.

They are not verified by the guys who built them and compete with them. We have a really amazing network of friends in the industry who know you. They've done this their whole lives and we go find them and we put them in front of the car and they tell us yes or no, real or not, and it's so much fun to see these guys

look

at their old stuff, yeah, I'll tell you a good story. That really fast thing in that Earnhardt Wrangler car. One of the manufacturers came for Marv Acton and we had all the parts in boxes and we knew what the car was so we bought it, but we wanted you to know, just check everything out. the people who work there and marv comes and looks at this thing and he's looking in all the boxes like this it looks like and he was telling a couple of stories and then he finds these brake horns, these funny shaped aluminum scoops for the brake ducts and he He saw it in the box and he took it out of the box and he says oh my God, Bill said I built it for Dale Inman, he said, I remember saying, I thought it was a very stupid thing with this shape.

He said, but I remember building that, he said, I can't believe I'm still here and I was still with the car, oh, check, yeah, yeah, and then you know this, back to this, David, did you go out and check this? , was Kale's team leader. back then and told us this was one of the two banjo cars they bought that year, this was the 500 car in '81. it had the body like an oldsmobile for the 500, it was recovered like a buick after the Daytona 500 and it ran the rest of the season, so we put it back as a buick um, but the guys that were there, that lived it, you know, I like what Nascar is, but I love what it was, I love what it was. what those guys did and how they raced and everything about It's cool and I assume when you find these things they're not in the spectacular condition that you have them in now, so even just knowing that, I mean, was this Wrangler car yellow and blue when Did you see him there for the first time?

There were traces of blue paint on the ceiling. um, they had ruined it. The western gentleman who actually bought it from Booby Harrington while he was team manager at Osterlund raced it for several years and his son had taken it apart to restore it. He realized it was a little bit bigger project than he wanted, so we bought it from him, put it back together the way it should be, and as you can see, we have doug richard lularosa marv act and jeff collins all original team members who scripted the car and it's put back together with an original aluminum snowflake head with 23 degree engine, jerry stall headers with the old jerry stall heads, um and we get to the point that we are the only ones in the country who can rebuild the heart of the Hurst dairy. we broke calipers we redid pistons from scratch we redid seals from scratch we exaggerated everything just a little to remove all the corrosion everything we can't get brass radiators aluminum raiders the big cores we rebuilt everything from scratch we have to do it because you can I don't understand it anymore, so you have amazing craftsmen working with you to make this happen.

Where do you find? Finding the car is one thing, but finding someone who can build that radiator that way is almost more challenging than finding the car. Yeah, so where do you do it? Find these guys these days. You know, we've been very lucky. We have a great network of people again, like our racing car friends. Our manufacturing employees and friends are just as good and equally important in making all of this happen. stand here and talk about senior all day, but i mean, dw, this is a real junior car junior johnson, yeah junior, find the dash for me, he sure looked at it, we take it now, this was a funny story, so we found this car.

We restored it and I decided that for fun we would take it to the young people for breakfast, we wouldn't tell them, we would take it down the driveway and park it out front and just go in and have breakfast and we did. You know, we did it for the juniors, but it ended up being a cool thing for us because all my guys that worked on this car had to go to the juniors for breakfast, someone kept an eye on them, yeah, and three months after we did this, they sold the property and breakfast was gone forever so everyone on my team got to enjoy breakfast at juniors once before it was no more and that was the coolest part of this whole deal.

We did it for juniors but it ended up being for us because we all got to enjoy a really interesting part. from racing now Daryl has seen this, he has it, he knows it and, in fact, we have his racing helmet up there in a plastic bag. I see it right there, so what do you have hidden in the boxes there? Seeing models and hats and everything we can save um you're a pack rat, right? Yeah, oh, yeah, that's, yeah, the Fred G Sanford of the racing world, well, your stuff is a little more valuable than Fred's, hopefully, hopefully, that and that's and That's a question interesting: it's not for you to give up the value of what you have, but how our vintage stock cars are doing much better today on the collector market than before?

I would say for the last 10 they were great and then they went through a loss of value for about 10 or 12 years, mainly because there is a lot of fake stuff out there and we fight against it every day, people call, hey, I bought this car, well we know that car isn't really good, they said so. Of course, they said they were trying to sell it to him, you know, call me first. We pretty much know most of the 99 of the real things and you know we know enough people that if we don't know, we can call.

Someone and ask you, do you know a friend by text or a lularosa or you know and they know, so because of fakes, the market value is damaged, the market is starting to recover as far as the phone calls, we're getting interest, you know? where abraham is doing this now, dale jr is collecting some things now that are being built to become the value that they should be, but currently when someone calls me and says, hey, i have this car, i want to restore it if it's real. and it's worth doing, you say you know you'll probably spend more to restore it than it's worth now, but in five years I don't think that will be the case.

The other thing about these vehicles is that they are cool. for vintage racing, yes, because they are practically bulletproof in many ways. Yes, of course, we had a client from Florida who used to compete in the Ferrari Challenge series. Yeah we put him in a Nascar and he had a lot of fun with the thing and the fun, these things when buying spy tires on a track are one of the most fun things you will ever drive, they are also one of the safest cars you can drive in put your ass on and I remember a guy from Florida came and broke a transmission.

One day at Kershaw and we fixed it, you know, 20 minutes, new transmission out the door, back on the track and he came in at the end of the day, he says, you know, he said when I broke a transmission in my Ferrari it was 22. thousand dollars in three months before I could race my car again, he said you guys had my car back on the road in 30 minutes, I said yeah you already know that and it's a 4500 transmission so yeah yeah y'all they win, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, wow, uh. I'm obviously referring to a wide variety of generations here as well and not all the cup cars because this is a rod moroso right that's the champion that's the bush car yeah the championship winning race car that was their big track car that year it has the original v6 just like they raced in the past, I'm not a big fan of those engines but no I have several V6 cars and we put V6s in them again because that's what they raced with, pretty much how she was left the track, uh, yeah, that one was actually old. run by a great friend of mine in Florida who passed away from cancer a couple of years ago and we bought his wife's

collection

when she was getting sick and just to make sure she was okay, we bought all the stuff from her engine, her trailer, your tools, your spare parts. cars all just because that one over there is actually the rob moroso cup car so the year he won the championship bush he ran three cup races he ran a moroso car in richmond a preston antifreeze car in dover and a swisher sweet car in atlanta which is an Atlanta swisher sweet car so we have both the cup and the bush swisher sweet car which is really cool yeah how about Mark Martin Folger's car?

That was the track car for '89 and '90. Well, Mark was exceptional as a track. runner, is he a race winner? No, actually it was, uh, he came into Glenn in 1990, he got into a fight with Dick Trickle and Troy Beebe in practice, they went up the hill. Troy Bieber was parked sideways on the racetrack to avoid spinning and was hit. dick got a relief driver for the race brand he ran the race in his backup car uh when we found this it still had all the original decals and the paint was just the right front tire was pushed into the firewall oh wow so We fix it and repair it. um and put it back like you see it now and actually Mark drove it at Darlington a couple of years ago okay before the race yeah yeah how much of that do you do as far as corporate stuff or showcasing things with these vehicles because, obviously, if people are looking for some history eh, you pretty much have everything we do and we don't, we don't do much with this, we just keep them hidden, we bring military tours here six or eight times a year we do our military dinners in the store, so we do that, um, what we've done specifically with Valvoline and Wrangler when their corporate people call us and say, hey, we'd like to use some cars for something or we let them use them, we don't charge . they, you know,You know?

We went up and bought every header, every accessory, every pattern he had for Nascar stuff. When Tom Powelson closed the chassis shop in Hudson Pagan in 2005, we went and bought everything. If it is thrown away, it will be gone forever, yes, if we can. Save it, now we have it granted. I don't have the 80,000 square feet I need to get everything out, but at least we have it safe somewhere so it's not lost forever. That's amazing and I'm seeing a couple of uh texaco. havelin stars over here that's a super cool car that's actually fido that's the car that friend the furthest one the white all the way that's the one davey won his second race at dover and uh joey knuckles I was here checking out that car, Oh yes, I'm sure it's someone else.

He remembers everything so cool to talk to you about the older cars, but he came out and checked that one out for me and it's a super cool car. This Davey Allison car. This is when. Davey was racing aluminum in the Bush series and Ford in the Cup series and Ford came up to him and said hey you gotta stop, you can't win races at Chevrolet and then at Ford, it's not working, so they tried to get him. I can't wait to give them money to convert everything to Ford. Ford didn't have anything in the budget at the time because mid-season they made a deal where what if we just switched them to buicks?

So the last 11 races, I think back to 1991, I ran Buicks instead of light ones to keep Ford happy. This is one of those v6 buicks. That year we ended up with a really cool car, a beautiful v6 piece, just like it's supposed to be, and that was another great one we found because the original bodywork and stickers were faded and rotted away, but they were still there, they were there. There was no doubt, yes, so what are these chassis up here? They are the ones that are not finished, but they are not in your other store, they are here, why yes, just for storage, in the end there is only one rear banjo.

We have steering chassis if we ever need it. The second is one of the Red Bull chassis. We did their street legal program at my company, so that's one of the leftover street legal chassis. I saved it because the first cot race was in Sonoma and michael walter put terry labonte in his car just so they would have a provisional champion if they needed one, that's terry labonte napa car from sonoma so i saved it just to have it . I thought it was a cool piece and I wasn't a big fan of the newer cars but like terry labonte and it was a cool thing to have this one is special so this is a 1976 77 78 holly farms kel yarbrough car this is a Three championship winning car, uh, funny story behind it, so a lot of guys know it.

When racing boss Sosby used to offer youth liquor back in the day, that might be the best line you've ever said to me, so when David shows me that his son was going from late model racing to Arca racing, They came closer. to the juniors and the governor said, hey, my son is going to race, we want a good car and junior said the price is this, pick any car in the shop you want, but that one just won in Ontario, so I gave him I said, well, let's take that one. one, so David raced it a couple of times, they switched to short wheelbase cars and thank God David didn't cut it, he parked it in a chicken coop and a chicken box, yes, on plastic covered blocks, such as you see, and sat down. there for a long time until we drug it with our rental car, yeah, so I guess it's a barn find, yeah right, what a barn we found today, but if I'm looking for one of these, are they still sitting? in barns or everything is pretty much the guys inside the business know where everything is um yeah they're still out there but you really have to be careful about what's fake and what's real um and I'll tell you the difference is when we start to looking for these cars years ago, we were finding six or seven reals a year, now we find one, maybe two, so it's definitely slowed down, there are more people looking for, you know, Ray Ray and Ray is always looking for something cool. he has some beautiful things in his collection, um, so it's not as easy to find them as it used to be, here you also have almost all generations, um, 70s, 80s, 90s, 2000s, do you have an era in which?

I like them more than others, I like them from the late 70s to the 80s, you know, to the early 90s, that's my favorite, and I'm only 44, so I didn't understand, I couldn't go. Martinsville and look, you know, 31 of these big cars with chrome bumpers hitting each other for 500 laps to this day, I think it would be one of the coolest things to see in person and I never got to see it, but um. I love that era, really, I'm seeing more aj orange back here, that's the original uh 1980 1979 1980 old 442 that car finished third at Daytona wow that year and uh yeah, actually jeff burton drove it around darlington a A A couple of years ago, when Mark was driving the other car, we took it out and let it run.

It's another original and we know she's race-ready and absolutely gorgeous. He could use some love, but again he's someone else. I don't want to restore because it still is. I don't blame you or any more Jeff and a Jimmy Johnson car, but what is this? I mean, Holmen Moody, this, uh, Falcon, is not a normal cup car, no, and this was actually something. That Lee Holman set it up to run over in Europe and it's, uh, it was kind of a cross between a falcon and a fairway or a lightning bolt, a little bit of everything, a little bit weird when we first bought it, an absolutely beautiful car because signed. a script, yeah, yeah, um, and we have some friends, in fact, uh, Klaus Graf, Le Mans champion, comes and races this thing from time to time and has a great time with it, and um, it's just a fancy old toy.

It takes about a day to get it. 427 a big block out of that hood compartment. It's a tall order but it's a fun toy, I bet I know you married Bill. Does your wife think you are completely crazy or does she give us the tip that the rest of us can use on our wives or girlfriends how can we convince them to let us have a collection like this I tell you my wife is spectacular because she has put up with this for years and she knows the passion and she's not a big racing fan, she knows the industry because she works with me at work and she understands it, but no, you know she's not going to go to the race track with you and sit in the big stands and drink a beer and you know she's fair, but she gets it from the historical aspect. and why we do what we do and she's pretty amazing, she really is.

I guess the pri industry helps you a lot with this because there is no way you can put this all together without bits and pieces from other pri members. Yes, we have, I mean. Like I said before, it's our network of people, as far as you know, parts and parts distributors, and like even our cores, you know our cores come from a PR distributor for our radiators that we remanufacture all the tanks from. and so on, you know, if you didn't have that network, nothing like that had ever happened, so what's the dream? what is the OBJETIVE?

I mean, I guess you're living the dream. They are here, they are in your facilities. You can come see them and sit down. Drive them whenever you want. What's the plan? What do you dream of being next? And how often do you exercise them? Believe it or not, this is Bill Ryan's anal, once he restored one, he looks too pretty. a lot of guys do it and I love them for it, but I can't do it so I have one that I run with. I have a 2002 John Andretti Petty Dodge and play with it on the road. the courses love it, we had a great time with it, um, but as for these, once we restore them, we just put them in and let them age like a fine wine, really some people would say that's not what it is supposed to do.

With them, but man, I love them, they are beautiful.