Synopses & Reviews
The Story of Smokey Yunick's Boss Mustang is just one of 50 entertaining true stories from the collector car world. When Smokey Yunich, a famous mechanic in Daytona Beach, Florida, heard his Detroit executive buddy, Semon "Bunkie" Knudsen, had jumped ship at GM to go over to Ford, he wondered if he would still get race cars in plain brown wrappers to tweak. Sure enough, one prototype Boss 302 received a 429 wedge engine and was later delivered to Smokey Yunick for further development of a road racer. Smokey started tearing the car apart to rebuild it the Smokey way (with lots of tricks) but then Knudsen called and said reconfigure it for NASCAR's GT series instead of for Trans Am. Oh, and by the way, he had to be ready for the Talladega race a few days later. Smokey was not amused, but changed the car again for the specific set-up needed for a circle track. Ironically after all the money and effort that went into this car, it had only one race at a major eventâ??the 1969 Talladega 400 mile NASCAR GT event - but alas, after lapping the field, the car suffered a failed rocker arm mid-race and didn't finish. Smokey had reportedly told Knudsen that the stock rocker arms were weak but didn't get authorized to design or install better ones, and so predictably that's the part that broke. And wouldn't you know, Smokey's Champion at Ford, Knudsen, stepped on too many toes while in Dearborn and was fired, so the car being Bunkie's project, was killed off. The car then sat for years until later restored and now worth a ‘life changing' amount of money.
Synopsis
The Story Behind Smokey Yunick's Boss Mustang is just one of 50 entertaining true stories from the collector car world.
Smokey was racing's ultimate trickster. At one race the NASCAR sanction boys noted 16 infractions. With gas tank removed after the inspection, he grinned. "Make that 17," he said and drove away, having plumbed the roll bar for additional gas storage.
Although not the story of the Boss 302 herein, these are the kind of anecdotes that make this book a fun read and more than just facts about barn-finds. The third book in this incredible collection of automotive 'barn finds and beyond' stories includes:
- A persistent Porsche mechanic who asked each 904 owner if their car would be for sale after a race. He paid only $7,000 to one agreeable owner and the car recently sold for over a million dollars.
- Celebrities like Steve McQueen, who bought a Jaguar XK-SS, originally created for the track but turned into a street car by the factory, now worth $10 million
- A photographer who always wondered why his Mercedes gullwing was a little different. He sold it for under $8,000 only to find out decades later that the chassis was from a Le Mans winner in '52. A luckier later owner rebodied it, and it's probably worth $20 million today.
About the Author
Wallace Wyss is a veteran motoring journalist and fine artist, who has written three books on Shelby's cars, two on Ferrari, three on Corvette as well as books on other marques. He is currently writing a series of fiction novels in his Ferrari Hunters series and reports that one of his non-fiction books is under consideration by Hollywood as a TV series. Among the barn-find sagas detailed in this book is his own tale of finding a 12-cylinder Ferrari, fulfilling the dream he had of owning one ever since he first saw a picture of a Ferrari in the Fuller Brush catalog way back in the '50s.