Day 6 for our Drive Home III team was chock full of fun and amazing cars. First stop was Michelin HQ in Greenville, S.C., where our hosts gave three of our cars a change to all-weather tires for the last half of our trip. A slight snag came when the new wheels wouldn’t fit the small alignment tab on the Fury. Not to worry, soon Mike and I were on our way to Jackson Motorsports with him driving the Fury and me in the International truck with the replacement tires in the back. Jackson does marketing and events for Michelin, and while the Fury was getting new treads we got an insider’s tour of the high-performance tire world from Jackson’s Lowell Eckart.
Lowell was full of fascinating tire knowledge and showed us his prized, super-rare second generation Radial T/A (circa 1978) he found on Ebay. The second bit of memorabilia was an off-road truck tire used on the Red Bull Frozen Rush series in which trucks race up ski slopes. Each tire is shipped to Sweden where 720 studs are installed for a cost of – get ready -- more than $5,000.
With the Fury tires in place, Mike and I returned to Michelin and gathered up the rest of the crew for the short drive to the BMW Car Club of America Foundation in Greer, SC. There our group was treated to a tour by Executive Director Scott Dishman, and we learned this facility is the second largest museum of BMW memorabilia with over 45,000 items, including several dozen notable cars.
While most of the group was inside, Keith and Tabetha took advantage of the parking lot to jury-rig a somewhat-generic heater core into the International to give it some semblance of heat.
Back on the road (and with me having the privilege driving the Fury, courtesy of Mike and Dawn), stop No. 3 was a Cars and Cocoa event and tour of Detroit Speed in Mooresville, NC. While the cold and approaching rain brought out only a few car enthusiasts, one was a former LeMay-America’s Car Museum employee, Carolyn Dunand and her son Teddy, who had a fun reunion with David. Detroit Speed owner Kyle Tucker then gave us a great tour of his operation, which is both a high-end, high-quality auto restoration shop and also an engineering/production facility for state-of-the-art parts for classic cars.
The final stop of the day was the Hendrick Heritage Center in Charlotte, where we received an exclusive tour of Rick Hendrick’s private car collection. Photos aren’t allowed in the Center and words can’t begin to capture its contents; but try to imagine more than 100 Corvettes (all years, all styles, many No. 1 off the production line), some 50-odd Camaros (Z-28s, Yenkos and Copos galore), and another 50 assorted classic and luxury cars – all in pristine condition and dozens with incredible history and provenance. As if the cars aren’t enough, Mr. Hendrick has a collection of guitars that span several rooms and are autographed by nearly every music icon from the last 75 years. Oh, and don’t forget the footballs on display – a pigskin signed by winning quarterbacks from every Super Bowl. We’ve seen a lot of car and memorabilia collections on the last couple of Drive Home events, but there is nothing to compare to the Hendrick Heritage Center.
Enough of all that. We’re up bright and early tomorrow for the 400-mile drive to Nashville. Not sure which vehicle I’ll be driving, but it’s sure to be fun and memorable with the crew and cars of The Drive Home III!
#DriveHome, #AATDriveHome
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