Okay, so I got this idea stuck in my head a while back about those specific pace cars they use, you know, the ones for that big race at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, the stock car one. Not the Indy 500 ones, the other big race they run there. It wasn’t like some grand plan, just got curious one afternoon.
First thing I did, like anyone else, was just poke around online. Typed in some obvious stuff. You get a lot of pictures, yeah, mostly the shiny official photos. But I wanted to know more, like maybe little details or variations, that kind of thing. Found a few forum threads, mostly people arguing about horsepower or which year looked best. Not really what I was after.
Digging a Little Deeper
So, I thought, okay, gotta go old school. I remembered I had this box, stuffed way back in the closet, full of old car magazines from the 90s and early 2000s. Spent a whole Saturday afternoon digging through that dusty mess. Found some race reports, which was cool. They usually had a small picture of the pace car, sometimes a little blurb about it.
- Sorted magazines by year.
- Flipped through looking for race coverage.
- Photocopied or took phone pics of relevant pages.
It was slow going. Lots of paper cuts. Found some interesting tidbits, like sometimes they mention the driver or some special feature, but nothing super in-depth. It felt like I was finding puzzle pieces but didn’t have the box lid, you know?
Then I tried thinking about actual cars. Like, where do these things go after the race? I figured some must end up with collectors. Tried searching specific years and models, adding “pace car” to it. That led down some rabbit holes. Found some replicas, people selling decal kits. Saw a few cars listed for sale, but who knows if they were the actual cars used on track or just replicas someone built.
Hitting a Few Walls
Talked to a buddy who’s big into Chevys, since they made a lot of ’em. He knew a guy who knew a guy… standard story. Led to a dead end. The fellow he knew mostly collected Camaros, and while some were pace cars, they weren’t necessarily the Brickyard ones I was focused on, or he didn’t have much info beyond his own cars.
It got kinda frustrating. You see these cars on TV for one weekend, leading the pack, looking all important, then they just seem to vanish. It’s not like finding info on a regular production car where everything is documented down to the last bolt.
Here’s the thing: getting solid info was way harder than I thought. Lots of assumptions passed off as facts online. Someone says “they only made 5 of those” and suddenly everyone repeats it, but finding proof? Tough.
What I ended up doing was focusing on just one or two specific years that I personally remembered seeing race. I gathered the magazine clippings I had, saved the best photos I found online (trying to verify they were legit), and basically made my own little digital scrapbook for those years. It wasn’t some grand discovery, no hidden barn find or anything.
It was more about the process, the digging. Just satisfying my own curiosity, piece by piece. Spent way too much time on it, probably. But hey, learned a bit. Mostly learned that tracking down specifics on special editions like pace cars is a real chore. But it kept me busy for a few weekends, messing around with old photos and magazines, trying to connect the dots. Better than staring at the wall, right?
