Season 3 of the popular car culture show “AmeriCarna” began Thursday on Velocity TV (9 p.m. ET), and show host Ray Evernham couldn’t be more excited.
“We’ve got some really cool stuff coming this year … just some incredible, incredible stories,” Evernham told NASCAR.com.
Evernham has an excellent eye for “cool stuff” when it comes to the automobile. From popular vehicles that may have little or nothing to do with the world of racing to those that left their mark on the track, the stories behind the vehicles that turn up on “AmeriCarna” are told well, they’re informative and they’re entertaining.
It’s a labor of love for Evernham, the former championship-winning crew chief for Hendrick Motorsports and driver Jeff Gordon as well as a winning car owner in NASCAR’s premier series with Dodge.
“There are so many stories out there because cars have really documented the timeline of America and its history,” Evernham said. “Each culture is represented by different things that happened around the automotive market or industry for years. They’re connected by music and fashion and politics and all kinds of things.”
Tonight’s premiere details the 2014 disaster at the National Corvette Museum in Bowling Green, Kentucky, the efforts to rescue the cars and repair the museum.
A 30-foot deep sinkhole opened in the facility two years ago, and eight vehicles — six owned by the museum and two on loan from General Motors — were either damaged or completely destroyed.
“We’ve got the complete story of when the sinkhole opened up and swallowed up all these priceless Corvettes … and the story of how they restored it, how they fixed that building,” Evernham said. “We’ve got inside, never-seen-before footage from the folks at GM.”
Other shows this season will look everything from board tracks to the Bonneville Salt Flats, and a record-setting hot rod from the early ’50s.
“We’re doing a thing on board tracks which is incredible because there was a huge board track right here in Charlotte,” he said. “How in the 1930s they build these giant wooden tracks banked up to 45 degrees, a mile and a quarter in length and ran events there.
“They were kind of the daredevils of the ’30s and we actually went and got Travis Pastrana, who is a daredevil of today you might say, to talk with me about that show.
“We found one of Dan Gurney’s cars that was lost for 35-plus years and put it back on the track.
“We’ve got a vintage hot rod from California that went across Bonneville at 133 mph in 1951. It’s somewhat untouched and we’re rebuilding the motor and doing all those things to see if we can make it go 133 mph again just like they did.”
The series consists of 10 episodes, but Evernham says that only scratches the surface of the incredible tales he and his team uncover.
“We have people that bring us incredible car stories every day,” he said. “We want more than 10 episodes a year because we’ve got a lot more stories to tell.”