Juan Pablo Montoya’s infamous Daytona 500 car – the one that blew up the jet dryer and caused a two-hour red flag last month – has arrived at its final resting place: The woods on Dale Earnhardt Jr.‘s expansive property in North Carolina.
Dale Earnhardt Jr.‘s Property Serves As Final Resting Place For Juan Pablo Montoya’s Daytona 500 Car
Former Earnhardt Jr. team engineer Chris “Sunshine” Heroy is now the crew chief for Montoya, so he called Earnhardt Jr. and offered to add it – for free – to the driver’s large collection of wrecked cars.
Earnhardt Jr.‘s property manager drove to the Earnhardt-Ganassi Racing shop, loaded the car on a truck, brought it back and used a front-end loader to dump the 42 somewhere in the car graveyard (Earnhardt Jr. hasn’t seen where he put it yet).
“(Heroy) is a buddy of mine, and he gave it to me,” Earnhardt Jr. said Friday at Las Vegas Motor Speedway. “I got about 50 or 60 cars out there; I didn’t buy any of ‘em.”
Earnhardt Jr. said the jet dryer assassin car ranks among the most famous crashed vehicles in his collection. Another notable one is the car Dennis Setzer demolished in a 2010 Nationwide Series wreck at Talladega.
“That one is pretty cool,” Earnhardt Jr. said. “But (Montoya’s car) ranks right up there – it’s one of the top two or three.”
So will Earnhardt Jr. try and obtain the jet dryer itself to complete his 2012 Daytona 500 collection?
“I’d like to have it, but I don’t know where it is,” he said. “Probably somewhere in Daytona, or NASCAR might be studying it somewhere. I think we’ll just stick to race cars out there.”
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