_{*Quick Summary: The author recalls a series of events that could’ve resulted in injury while unloading cars from Days of Thunder.*}

A friend shared this video they found on YouTube the other day:

Seeing it reminded me of a great Papa Joe Hendrick story I’ve never written down. After the filming of Days of Thunder, Hendrick Motorsports bought, then later sold, many of the cars and props left over from the movie. When we received the stunt cars from Paramount Pictures, they came on an open air car transporter like dealers use to transport new cars. When we unloaded the cars, some ran, some didn’t, so we got them off the trailer in various ways. If the engines were okay, but didn’t stay running, we’d put them in gear and bump the starter to creep them along and off the trailer. Some that didn’t roll well or didn’t have engines, we used a Bobcat loader and a chain to pull them off.

We got to the #11 Budweiser Monte Carlo SS on the very top row, all the way in the front. It was an odd car as Junior Johnson had changed over to Fords a couple of years prior, so it didn’t match what that team raced any more. In addition, Chevrolet changed all their Cup teams over to the Lumina body style in 1989, so this car was a real anomaly that shouldn’t have been in a period correct movie. It really stuck out to us. It ran, but didn’t have a seat, so me being young and dumb, volunteered to drive it. I decided I’d just sit on my foot to give me enough height to see, and reverse it along the top, down the ramps, and off the trailer. With a manual transmission, you need your left foot to drive, but thought I was quick enough to swap feet and be okay. So I sat flat on the floor, cranked the car, put it in reverse, then jumped up on my left foot. Great. I’d just let it idle in reverse, and if it got too fast, I’d hit the brake and choke it down. Worst case scenario, I could hit the kill switch. Good plan! So I got almost to the back of the trailer and my coworker Danny Pledger started to yell at me that it wasn’t tracking straight and I needed to turn. The cars had very rough chassis setups in them along with flat or low tires, and this car pulled hard left as I was backing up. So I hit the brake pedal to stop and get better directions, then hit it again, and the third time I hit it, I pulled the steering wheel off because it didn’t have a pin, and without a seat, I was using it to hold myself up while I pushed on what I quickly realized were the non-working brakes. Race cars have removable steering wheels as a way to more easily climb in the car. A removable pin is put in place to hold it on to the steering column. This car didn’t have a pin, so it would slide off the steering column just as easily as it slides on. So now I’m riding backwards, downhill, and sideways off the side of the trailer, probably close to 10 feet off the ground, under power, no seat, no steering wheel, no brakes, and when the steering wheel came off, I lost balance on my foot/seat, my head went flying into the bars behind me and into the floor. Thankfully the car bottomed out on the side rail of the trailer when the left rear tire went off the side, and I was able to reach the kill switch from my position in the floor to kill the engine. So I sat there for a bit, stuck, nursing my new head bump.

Papa Joe Hendrick saw the whole thing, and had an idea. He left to get a forklift. While he was gone, I sat in the floor of the car and felt a little sorry for myself. I heard Pop coming back in the forklift below me, and I was about to stick my head out the window when the whole car shook. Thinking I was falling off the trailer, I grabbed the bars as tight as I could and held on, then I realized Pop was hitting the side of the car with the forklift. He hit it again, hard. I didn’t realize it, but he was trying to puncture the door skin of the car with the forks. Apparently his idea was that he could skewer it through the center, lift it up, and get it off the trailer that way. Thankfully, he was hitting the door bars of the car instead of the gap between them as he was trying to. When he slammed into it the third time, the forks came right through, this time raised enough to go through the drivers window, one on either side of me. When I stuck my head out in between the forks, he really fell apart. He thought I’d already climbed out, and never would’ve blindly tried to puncture the side of the car like that had he known I was still inside. It didn’t take him but just a second to realize I could’ve easily been killed by the forks if I was in the wrong place. Shaking, he told me to get out of the car, but I told him I’d already paid for the ride, I wanted to finish it. So we completed that particular round of OSHA violations, and safely on the ground, I counted myself lucky to be alive.

Seeing that old Budweiser Monte Carlo SS in this video brought back the memory of that story, and I thought I’d share it here.