Ben Wright says he didn't get it at first. As the Garage 56 car that NASCAR sent to Le Mans kept accumulating road grime and grit from blaring through the French countryside during its 24-hour journey, the Hendrick Motorsports project manager's instinct was to make it look showroom-fresh.
"To be honest, I didn't understand," Wright says. "I always liked clean cars."
That caked-on dirt, the pitted paint and the smudges and splashes of fluid, though, were part of the car's story. The underdog entry that brought a stock-car rumble to sports-car racing's biggest stage had endeared itself to a new audience, charmed by its hulkish appearance and throaty sound and mesmerized by its upstart performance in a field of high-end exotics.
RELATED: Timeline, coverage of Garage 56 project
By the end of those 24 hours in the summer of 2023, the sense of triumph in bringing the project to life, developing it and watching it cross the finish line was overpowering. For those involved, freezing that moment in time was crucial. That meant the dirt stayed. Wright came around.
"I didn't understand, and then going to Le Mans myself and we raced that car and seeing it come back at the end dirty and worn, I don't know, it just upped the cool factor," Wright says. "I think it just embodied everything you just went through, right? We just put this car through its paces, did all of this, finished the event. It just preserved it and gave it -- I don't know if aura is the right word -- but it just made it way cooler."
Nearly two years after the Garage 56 project -- a joint effort among NASCAR, Hendrick, Chevrolet and Goodyear -- completed its mission in the 24 Hours of Le Mans, a new documentary coming to Prime Video on Thursday details the program's impact and legacy. Elite drivers Jimmie Johnson, Jenson Button and Mike Rockenfeller are among the biggest stars in "American Thunder," but the No. 24 Chevy that went an astounding 2,413-mile distance deserves high placement near the top of the bill.
MORE: June 12 premiere for 'American Thunder' | Join Prime Video today!
Coating and preserving that car in as-raced form may well be part of the documentary's epilogue. It's a story that's nearly as suspenseful as the event itself, with the clock ticking and the immense pressure to leave the race-earned blemishes on a living piece of history undisturbed. It's also about building a bridge from NASCAR's first Le Mans effort, done on a shoestring in 1976, to the most recent well-heeled run during the 24-hour race's 100th anniversary.
"This was about celebrating that 50 years prior, celebrating NASCAR's 75th anniversary year, which was just amazing timing," said IMSA president John Doonan, "and then it was making sure that once we completed the task, completed the journey for Garage 56, that no one could ever take away from the dirt and grime and the race-worn elements of the car, so that it would be candidly, a museum piece for generations and generations to come."
Here's how they did it.
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The Garage 56 car's preservation effort began before the race was even complete. The wear and tear of the endurance event's ever-changing conditions started to take a toll, and Wright's first impulse was strong.
"It was kind of a weird one because we here at Hendrick like to make sure things are clean and orderly. That's how we operate," Wright said. "When we were getting close to finishing the race, we had the brake issue, had the brakes fail in the pit lane. We then fixed it. We then had the transmission fail. We came into the garage, we were fixing the car and one of the normal things that we would want to do is go through and clean the car, right? Like, it's going to get on track. We've got an opportunity. Let's clean it. It looks good, right? That's how we operate."
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Chris Graythen | Getty Images[/caption]
That's when Doonan, a fixture in the Garage 56 paddock for the Le Mans fortnight, intervened.
"He's like, 'No, don't clean it.' Like, what?" Wright recalled. "OK, maybe there's some reason. He's obviously working with Mr. France and Mr. Hendrick. If John says it, OK, we're not going to clean it. Little bit weird, don't understand, 'Hey, guys, don't touch the car. Don't clean it.' So obviously, you go through the race finish, the dirt stays on it, and I was looking back a couple days after Le Mans, John started a conversation about wanting to preserve the car with the dirt on it. So then, OK, things are coming into clear on why he wanted us to do that."
From the time the No. 24 Chevrolet ended its 24-hour trek, another race was on. "Even in shipping, you get other handprints on it," Doonan said, "and where there was race-worn dirt, grime and grease on the side of the car, somebody's handprint, it just takes away from it, so we wanted to preserve it right away."
Wright consulted with Hendrick's body shop department, which initially winced at the thought of clear-coating over the dirt, suggesting that a hot-rod shop would be best suited to the task. Bringing the car back to the states for the work, though, was logistically unlikely. Le Mans had ended June 11, and the Garage 56 team was due at the Goodwood Festival of Speed in England on July 13.
RELATED: Photos: Garage 56 at Goodwood
Wright and Doonan focused their search for a speed shop in the United Kingdom, and Berkshire Bodyshop answered the call.
"We were really, really shocked, a bit amazed that someone like that was reaching out to a garage like us to do a car," says owner Andy Cottrell, from his shop offices some 60 miles west of London. "I didn't actually take the phone call. One of the other lads here did, and came in and said, 'Look, Hendrick's been on the phone with Garage 56 to paint the Le Mans car,' and I thought he was joking to start with."
Berkshire had been recommended to Wright and Doonan through stakeholder connections in England and the knowledge that the group had been entrusted with cars owned by the Duke of Richmond, the automotive-minded owner of the Goodwood Estate.
"All right, check mark," Wright said. "This guy obviously knows what he's doing."
Wright said that after arranging transportation of the car from France, they gave Cottrell's crew a timeline of about a week to do the job. "No problem" was the response, he said, but the magnitude of the task set in once it landed on their doorstep in Newbury. "When they unloaded it, it sort of started to hit home then, what it actually was," Cottrell said. "It's a massive piece of history, and we were kind of thinking, 'how did we end up with this?' "
The challenges ahead were twofold: applying the clear-coat chemical without a reaction or smudging, and then ensuring it would adhere to the dirty body panels. That process, Cottrell says, was backward from typical clear-coating, which is applied to freshly painted or meticulously cleaned surfaces.
Cottrell said that clear-coating, for instance, an autographed piece of metal, sometimes causes the ink to move. In this case, sealing in all of the Garage 56 car's dust, exhaust and rubber was of extra concern. Cottrell called paint manufacturers and suppliers he knew for their advice; multiple told him it was best not to get involved. So Cottrell took extra care to try the process on a dirty test panel, using an adhesion promoter in the mix. He also had to ensure that it dried clear, so that it didn't distort any of the car's colors.
Wright had opted for a matte finish instead of a glossy, shiny coat on the as-raced car. Cottrell said that matte looks milky as it's applied, then the liquid dries clear. He took the extra step, though, to add a tiny amount of normal clear coat to the mixture, just to avoid the slight white sheen that sometimes materializes when mattes dry. "Obviously, I didn't want to do anything to affect the rarity of what they wanted to preserve," Cottrell said.
The nerves that came with preserving a historic car that's one of one were evident in the shop's video documentation of the process.
"100% you know, there was so much pressure on me," said Cottrell, who did the clear-coat work himself. "The lads were really excited here to have the privilege of doing it, with what the car is and who drove it. And I actually just stood back, I said, 'Hold on, lads. The pressure's on me now, because if this goes wrong, we've ruined something that's absolutely amazing that's happened in Le Mans and with NASCAR.' The pressure was really, really tense. That's why I was really, really nervous of anything moving when we put a chemical on it. … It came down to it at the end that it was here, and I had to do something. So I just sort of brushed myself away and thought, right, let's get it mixed, and then let's just do this. So yeah, there was a lot of pressure."
Once the clear-coat dried, the successful result became evident. Each mark that the No. 24 Chevrolet had left Le Mans with had been locked in, sporting the same appearance as when Jimmie Johnson climbed out of it in
parc fermé. The true test came when Cottrell and his crew ran their hands over the car's curves.
"It was a very scary thing because you look at it and you think you're going to touch it and rub the marks off it," Cottrell said. "Even when we'd finished painting it, I was scared to. We de-masked it, and I was like, 'can we still touch it,' because you just don't want to ruin the history on it."
Wright tested that theory when he was reunited with the Le Mans racer at Goodwood, where it shared the stage alongside the pristine Garage 56 backup car.
"The first time I saw it was at Goodwood, when we unloaded it. Yeah, it looked awesome," Wright says. "Even at Goodwood, everybody there, they would touch it, and you can do it. Like, I'm telling people, 'Go. Touch the car,' right? The dirt doesn't come off."
Weeks later, Hendrick Motorsports sent a box of gifts -- hats, T-shirts, hero cards and stickers -- to Berkshire Bodyshop in appreciation. But before the Garage 56 racer left their doors, their crew made their own memento by taking a group photo with the No. 24 in their bay -- panel beater Nicolas Lamb and metal fabricator Micki Cox flanking the car, with Cottrell in front with Buddy, his shop dog.
"It's brilliant, and I'm really glad it's turned out really well, and it will hold up for years," Cottrell says. "There's no reason why it won't."
* * *
These days, the Garage 56 car spends most of its days at the NASCAR Research & Development Center in Concord, North Carolina. Among all the grit and pitted grime that was preserved, certain markings from the car's twice-around-the-clock journey stand out.
Wright says you can make out handprints on the spoiler where crew members had pushed it, plus there's a clean, rectangular swipe above the rear bumper where the team cleaned the rear-view camera to make sure the drivers could see out the back.
Two other racing remnants are more obvious. On the car's right side, a curved plume of liquid residue spirals away from the front fender, partially obscuring the car number. Wright says the team had made a pre-dawn pit stop and needed to fill the car with oil, going in through the front hood flap and injecting it. The process misfired -- either because of a broken fitting or a leak -- and oil spilled all over the car's side. "When the oil got moved all around with all the air and the car running, it made this swirl pattern on the side," Wright said. "And that's a story right there, right? Like, that's a cool thing that happened."
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Zack Albert | NASCAR Digital Media[/caption]
Another wound came just before sun-up. The Garage 56 racer smashed into a piece of bodywork that had broken off a car in the LMP2 Class, damaging the front of the No. 24 Chevy just below the driver's side headlight. The evidence of that mishap remains, covered up by silvery tape.
"We didn't want to put a whole new nose on it. We're just going to tape it up and get it going again," Wright says. "But that's preserved, too, so just stuff like that, like all these stories of the car, the battle scars, they're preserved. Just overall, now I will understand a dirty race car that's preserved like that. I don't even know the right words for it. It's just battle scars, history."
Nearly two years after those scars accumulated, Cottrell is still coming to terms with his shop's role in keeping the car's authenticity frozen in time.
"Even now, we're a little bit surreal that it was here. We've painted some lovely cars here, but that's just a different sort," Cottrell says. "It's massive, and it's history. I know it's cheeky, but we wanted to put a little sticker on it somewhere, you know, 'Painted from Berkshire Bodyshop,' but obviously we couldn't. But yeah, I'm hoping one day that I can go over. They have said if we ever go to America, to ring them and we could visit, which is absolutely amazing."
For Doonan, the car represents the fulfillment of a dreamlike project, one that helped NASCAR's seventh-generation stocker compete alongside the world's best sports cars in the Le Mans centennial. Seeing the car now, Doonan says, serves as a reminder of the community that came together to help that car earn its scars in one of motorsports' centerpiece events.
It's like catching up with an old friend. The preservation effort lets everyone who had a hand in Garage 56 pick right back up where they left off.
"You're going to get me emotional because the whole project was once in a lifetime for, I think everybody involved," Doonan says, "and the men and women who were in the trenches on this project have this relationship where when we see one another, it's just like a glimmer in their eye, a special handshake, because we knew very early what the task was and what the objectives were, and we had a very short period of time to deliver on those objectives. Then, when we did it, there was just such a gratification and a satisfaction that we did it ourselves, we achieved it.
"We as a collective group were making the world proud by showing everybody what NASCAR is all about, and that's what seeing the car now, and I get up to the R&D Center every so often, every couple months, and I go see it just to go look at it by myself, just because it's a representation of a lot of hard work by a lot of people in a relatively short period of time."
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Zack Albert | NASCAR Digital Media[/caption]