Driver: Ralph Earnhardt
Car: No. 8 Flatback Ford
Bio: Undoubtedly the crown jewel of the racecar graveyard is the ghostly remnants of this 1937 Ford, which may or may not have been driven by Ralph Earnhardt, Dale Jr.’s paternal grandfather.
The car is the right age, as the 1937 Ford slope back was a common participant in the Late Model racing of the early 1950s, and it has the name “Ralph” and the No. 8 painted on it. From there, the legacy is a bit murky.
The car came from Ray Evernham, championship-winning crew chief and former team owner who is now focused on indulging his passion for racing history and the cars that made it great.
The story Ray tells about the car is unique as well. According to Evernham, the car was the object of a swap between Ralph Earnhardt and Speedy Thompson. Originally owned by Thompson, the engine in the car was a flathead Ford V-8, again a common power plant for the day. Drivers used a set of cylinder heads made by Belgian-born engineer Zora Arkus-Duntov, best known as the father of the legendary Corvette. The “Ardun” overhead-valve cylinder heads he manufactured, which operated in a hemispherical chamber, were used to boost Ford flathead V-8 horsepower by upwards of 100 horsepower. NASCAR had banned the use of the cylinder heads at some point between 1951 and 1953, and Earnhardt had a set of them. As Evernham tells it, those heads were swapped to Thompson for the car pictured here.
Back in 2015, Evernham Tweeted that he’d found those cylinder heads.
Unfortunately, there are no records to corroborate this story. An exhaustive search went all the way to NASCAR historian Buz McKim at the NASCAR Hall of Fame in uptown Charlotte, in hopes of proving that Ralph Earnhardt won a NASCAR race with this car, turned up a single photograph. It’s a grainy black-and-white picture showing a 1937 Ford slope back car with the No. 8 and painted in Ralph’s signature white scheme in an unidentified infield.
Regardless of whether or not the Earnhardt patriarch ever raced this car, it is by far the dinosaur of the racecar graveyard, and enough of the provenance matches to make it both possible and likely that he did.