I've been to a lot of show car appearances around this neck of the woods, and let me tell you I've seen some high calibre machines like the Dale Earnhardt collection (Wheaties, Olympic, Taz, Silver, Peter Max, Bass Pro Shops) and I've seen some pretty low calibre machines as well, like the Jeff Gordon show car that came to town just after he switched to his current flame job paint scheme. The Gordon car looked like somebody just 'put it together' thinking that since it had the 24 on the side everyone would oooh and awwwe about it - that didn't happen, there were a lot of disappointed fans - but the car was junk. Unlike the Gordon car the RCR cars of Dale Earnhardt were nice pieces, every attention was given to detail - there was even a detail printed history of each car.

Anyway, let's talk about the car. The car originally started life skinned as a #17 Dewalt Taurus built for Matt Kenseth. The car 'fell out of Matt's good graces' and was 'parked' until Jamie came to Roush. Jamie tested it and liked it. He raced the car at Bristol that first year at Roush's and hit the wall pretty hard. His crew were able to piece it back together and get him back out 87 laps later, which at Bristol, where they run 15 sec. laps, it is pretty quick work to get back out on the track after a wreck and only be 87 laps down. The car was taken back to the shop and during the rebuilding process, actually it was the tear-down process that precedes the rebuild, they found a significant hairline crack that compromised the integrity of the frame. The car was then placed on the show car circuit.

My one problem with the show car was that it was obviously a short track car, based on various things seen throughout the car and by what Paul told me of the history of the car, but when they re-skinned the car as a Ford Fusion they didn't put any of the cuts into the front nose-piece to allow for the venting of the brakes and so on. When I looked under the car, most of the ducts and coolers were in place, butted up against a solid bumper with no screened hole cut out for ventilation.

Here is another bit of info that Paul told me that many of you might not have known - I certainly didn't - the car Jamie just won in at the Pepsi 400 at Daytona was brought back to Roush/Fenway and place in Jack's museum as is, and the back up car from that race was immediately placed on the show car circuit and will also be be in Montreal the weekend of the Busch race. As a matter of fact, the guy in charge of that show piece was called back off the road to drop his current show car off and to pick up that one for display. With no use for the super-speedway CoY, I can only assume that a lot of other teams are doing the same as Jack did with his - turning them into show cars, or selling them to ARCA etc..