This Car Collection Is Detroit s Coolest Secret

Oh, glad you could make it. Are you familiar with Roush? They've been tuning things like Ford Mustangs and F-150 trucks for decades, very successful in NASCAR as well. But don't worry if you need a bit of an education, because you can follow me through here into a family business that is NASCAR and muscle car heaven. What a place. This, girls and boys, is what life looks like after you've founded a NASCAR team, applied the family name to a successful tuning car business, and indulged your passion for American street and racing cars, with a few randomers thrown in too. Now, this film would have been about six hours long if we went round every single exhibit, but as you can see, there's classic trucks, a replica US Army staff car, nicknamed The General, and enough NASCARs to start an entire championship, some of which are still streaked with dirt and wearing winner's row ticker tape. We're going to meet the family later, but first, here's a look around the hangar with Roush's in-house historian, Tyler Wolfe. So, we've got all sorts of beautiful old trucks here, 30s Fords and things, and then the other side. This is more stuff that I recognise, I have to say. These are gorgeous early Mustangs. What are these, like 64, 65 cars? Yeah, 64 and a half, 66. This is a really early car then, 64 and a half. Yes. This is really early on. So, Jack moved to Michigan after graduating from college. He'd actually already had an order in for a brand new 65 Mustang Coupe. So, this is not that car, but it's a car that was kind of specced out like the car he had back when he first He calls this his ice cream car too. This was the car for a long time where he'd go and pick the grandkids up from school and take them out for ice cream. Oh, that's a cool grandpa. We like that. Now, this is beautiful as well, but I'm quite excited to get down to this one. Not only just because, for me, this is possibly the best looking Mustang. The internet's probably going to hate me because they'll have their own opinions. Maybe the bullet one's better, I don't know. But a Boss 429 is beautiful. Yeah, easily one of the most iconic Mustangs of the 1960s. Yeah, and I didn't realize how rare it was. Only 850 cars, but this is a special one because it is serial number 429. Serial number 429 of the Boss 429 Mustangs. Yeah, and it'll break a lot of people's hearts even further to know that Jack bought this car for $1,300 in 1975. Wow. I mean, what on earth is this worth now? That's a hard one. It's been restored, so the backstory on it is that when Jack purchased the car, he'd actually seen it for sale in front of a gas station down on Telegraph. The original owner of the car, he had passed away young, unfortunately, from, I think, I believe, cancer. Passed away in his late 40s, early 50s, and willed the car to his 18-year-old son who decided to take it drag racing and ran out of money or know-how or possibly both and abandoned the project. So when Jack saw it for sale, it was sitting out in front of a gas station with the engine out of the car and sitting next to it in pretty rough shape, but over the course of a winter, he actually put the car back together. So it's a period restoration, so it's not super numbers matching original. It's not all original, but it's had a great story. It's got a great story and it's Jack Roush's Boss 429, so that's got to add something to it too, right? Jack Roush's number 429 Mustang. It doesn't have a bad angle on it, this car. No. It's stunning. Now, over there, we've got kind of a random Motley collection. There's a DeLorean in the corner. Most of these cars have a kind of family Ford connection. Absolutely, yeah. This family's just, they're car guys, so they wanted DeLorean. Yeah. The entire backstory of that is, I think, the grandkids talked Grandpa into it. A friend of Jack's owned the car at the time and was over for dinner and they saw the car in his driveway and said, Grandpa, Grandpa, that's the back of the future car. You really need one of those, don't you? And him being the softie that he is, of course, I believe he traded a new Roush Mustang for that. New Roush Mustang for a time machine. Yeah. Fair enough. And then that would probably explain why, over here, there is a replica Batmobile. Yes. So you were saying this is a Chevy, like a modern Chevy underneath, is it? Yes, yeah. Jack's son-in-law actually purchased the car, so it's kind of his pride and joy, but there's a company out of Indiana called Fiberglass Freaks, which builds these highly detailed replicas. There's rockets that shoot out of those exhaust-looking tubes in the back. Wait, is this street legal? As far as I know, yeah. Right. Look out for the Kate Crusader on the mean streets of Detroit. Yeah. There's a speaker under the dash that plays the Batman theme too. It's pretty ridiculous. Of course, you'd have to have that. So over here, it just looks like a toy box full of NASCARs. Yes. So yeah, we have approximately 40 NASCAR stock cars in here throughout Jack's career. Generally speaking, they all have a reason to be here. So oftentimes, their driver's first win cars get saved. We'll have significant race winners, where there's a Daytona 500 winner nestled in the middle over there. Some of the early cars, so the Strollite Thunderbird there is a replica of the cars they were running in 88 and 89. Those were the first two seasons Jack ran in NASCAR. That's the blue car there. The blue car, yeah. Sorry, forgive my lack of NASCAR knowledge. The blue one. Yeah, the car next to it is 90 and 91. Oh, the same year. A great year. One of the winningest records as a NASCAR team owner. I think we're at 328 wins, I believe, currently across the top three NASCAR series, eight national championships, two of those in the cup series, the top level of NASCAR competition. Wow, there's plenty of champagne that's been sprayed thanks to these cars over here. Just want to revert back over to Mustang. So this is Jack Jr.'s? This is Jack Jr.'s. Fastback? Yes, it's a 65. This is actually his college graduation gift. Oh, wow. He must have done really well at college. Well, Jack is big on education. So essentially, he told all the kids, go to college, get a degree. I don't care what it's in, and we'll buy you whatever classic car you want, we'll restore it just like it was new. Oh, so this wasn't like a kind of mint car? No, this has all been restored as well. They bought it and they restored it together, yeah. Well, they've done a lovely job. And then in front of that, just because why have one Fastback when you can have two? Absolutely. So why have another one? Whose college present was this? This was not a college graduation gift, unfortunately. This is another 65 Fastback. But this is a car Jack actually bought to remind himself of a car he raced back in the 1960s. So when Jack was a young engineer at Ford Motor Company, he joined up with a team of other Ford employees. They called themselves the Fastbacks. It was one of a number of employee drag racing clubs where Ford guys would get together and they'd pay dues and they'd buy cars together and work on them at night and take them to the drag strip on weekends and race the cars. So the Fastbacks race a number of cars, but this was one that he kind of had a particular affection for. And are these cars, and this goes for the road cars and the race cars, are they kind of kept in a sort of turnkey condition or are these effectively now like static models? They're more or less static. We kind of mothball the cars for lack of a better description. Most of the fluids are drained. I guess, yeah, because you're not going to be taking this out to go and buy sandwiches at lunchtime. What about the street cars? If I wanted to jump in the 65 Fastback, is it going to need recommissioning or is it pretty much ready to go? The 65 Fastback will run, the honest answer is a lot of the other ones don't, though. I would say there's 115-ish cars in the building at any given time. We could probably start like a dozen of them. Okay, so the rest is here. But what we should say as well is that this is not some kind of like private, walled off, barbed wire facility. Anyone watching this can just come and have a walk around where I'm standing right now. Monday through Friday, 9.30 to 4, as long as we're not closed for some sort of customer event or retirement party. And how much do you charge for admission? Totally free. Totally free. This is the world's best free car museum. Yeah. Next, Tyler showed me the Briggs Cunningham, a failed dream from Chrysler to create the ultimate $300,000 American Super GT, which was going to be powered by a massive V12 engine. Luckily for the likes of the Continental GT and the Rolls-Royce Wraith, it never made production, even though Roush helped build this concept car. And right alongside is the deeply 90s Ford Indigo, which was Ford's idea of a road-going Indy car for two quite brave people. Sticking with Ford, this is where I kind of came and dribbled when we first walked in. This is a bit of a hero car for me. The 5.4 litre supercharged Ford GT. Why have you got two? Well, one is Jack's and one belongs to our current CEO, Evan Lyle. Okay. And these are super tunable. So are they stock or have they had some Roush parts thrown at them? These are as stock as stock can be. Yeah. Nice spec on. This is Jack's as well? Yes. Yeah. He's got good taste. I like the blue with the white stripes over the top. And then, well, these two. The 17. These two complement each other well, don't they? The carbon wheels, the wing up at the back, this is some Le Mans heritage. Again, probably stock. They've not started to supercharge it somehow. Yeah. Jack is kind of at the age, too, where he's not able to drive that near as much as he'd like to be or at all, really. So it doesn't have very many miles in it either. And that's fair enough. Jack Roush Sr. is 82 years old, a survivor of multiple racing wrecks and not one but two plane crashes. Plane crashes he's so proud of, he's hung the wreckage on the wall of his garage. Having earned his retirement, we'd not expected to see him during our visit, but Jack doesn't know how to relax. He heard Top Gear was in town and honored us by stopping by at his shop for a chat and telling us about his very first car wreck. When I was 16 years old, I had a 51 Ford and I was going down the road one day and I came up to a friend of mine that was a year older than me that had a 40 Chevrolet and it had a 300 cubic inch GMC engine, a truck engine in it. The original engines were 217, so it was a big improvement over the original engine. I step on the gas to pass him and he steps on it to keep me on the outside. I get out of the gas to get behind him and he gets out of the gas. Bad thing to do. So here we go, I'm trying to pass him and he's trying to keep me from doing it. I'm faster than him. I'm falling away from him and he loses his nose and hits me in the quarter panel. So I unload the wheel a little bit and I keep going and I get on the racks and the gravel. You get on the gravel and it defies logic, but the car will go faster. So it felt like the car took off on the gravel and God's on my shoulder. He says, better brace yourself, it's going to roll. I didn't see why it was going to roll, but I took the steering wheel, which had two legs on it, I broke it by pulling here, I broke it by pushing it there. I broke the steering wheel with my hands. So I hit this pipe with the rocker panel out in space. So it's spinning like a football and God says, you better brace yourself, it's going to hit on its roof. So I turn loose the steering wheel and I pushed on the roof as hard as I could. It hit on its roof and brought the roof down to the top of the door on the top of the seat on the right side and it rolled until it stopped. The door came off, the hood came off, the battery got busted. Any place you touched the car with your hand was either bent, broken or missing. It was the worst wrecked car you ever saw. And you walked away? I didn't have a scratch. You didn't have a scratch on you? I had a little battery acid on my face, which quickly dissipated. But I'd lost my shoes, I had penny loafers on, new pair of shoes. I was actually going to a date with a girl and I had a new suede jacket on the seat beside of me. The jacket got eaten by the door when I was trying to leave. My shoes got gone but the kid was okay. Luckily for Gearheadz, not to mention his family, Jack survived this and every other scrape he's gotten into. He passed his love of speed and racing onto his son, Jack Jr, who now focuses on running Roush's tuning business after a former life as a racing driver. I was six years old. My dad, at the time, he didn't have a drag racing team and he didn't start his road racing program yet. So he was looking for a driver and he found one. It was me. He threw me in a go-kart and we did that for about five years. Do you miss that buzz? I mean, I imagine there's nothing else that can give you quite the adrenaline hit that driving a racing car and competing can give you. Do you miss it and have you got into some kind of crazy extreme sport to give it back to you or are you kind of happy to have left that stage of life behind? I wouldn't say that I've left it. It's been a little bit different for a number of reasons. I've actually still been racing go-karts. Have you gone back to your roots? Well, yeah. With my kids, I really wanted to give them the chance to be involved with racing. And, well, I have four children. Three of them have not really been that into racing, which is totally fine. It's actually kind of a relief because there is risk in racing. But one of my kids, my 15-year-old son, is really into racing. And there was a point, he started when he was five, even earlier than me. And there was a point when I was trying to run his go-karting program and also doing my road racing. And there were so many conflicts with our schedules that really became a problem for his development. And at that point, I decided to give him the priority in schedule and I started road racing less. Being quick definitely runs in the Roush blood. Jack Jr's sister Susan is a multiple national drag racing champion and just as passionate about restoring cars as the blokes in the family. She wanted to show me around her propane-fueled Mustang, but first, her new Mercury Cougar project car. You're a championship-winning drag racer. Yes. Can you please tell me about the monster that we've got over here? Okay. Well, the red Cougar in the middle, that is my latest project. And we plan on getting it on the track by the end of the summer. The two on either side were restored here within our museum. And actually, it was the parts cars from these two projects that became the race car. Right. So it is, I mean, it's a beautiful car, but it's made from leftovers. Oh, right. Well, they've been turned into something pretty monstrous. Now, I can't help noticing there's something missing here. Yes. Tell me about what's going in this gap. Well, that's going to be a Ford 427 Cammer and a very good friend of mine out of Ohio. He's one of the leading authorities on racing this type of engine. And he's pointing, I'm wrenching. So I'll actually be driving, racing, competing with the engine I built. Right. I mean, that's an incentive to do up all the bolts. What sort of power would you be aiming to get from whatever goes under this bonnet? Or through the bonnet, I should say. Of course, right now, until we get it on the track, we really don't know. We did have the engine on dyno and we found some issues. So we took it off and it's apart and we're putting it back together. The initial with just a single plane intake manifold, dual carb, 750 quick fuel carburetors, it made 850 horsepower. And the car, we figure the car is going to weigh about 26, 2800 pounds. So that's going to be certainly low nines, maybe somewhere in the mid to high eights. Yeah. I mean, well below a 10 second car. I mean, if you can see close up here, what you really need to understand about this is, this is not one of those racing cars, which up close is kind of held together with tape and the panel gaps are all over the place. The finish on this is beautiful. The carbon fiber work inside is stunning. I mean, it looks museum quality and yet it's going to run an eight point something second quarter mile. I love the classics, but you've also got your current race car over here. Let's go and have a look at this. Is this car called Josie Rose? That's my daughter. Oh, I see. That's lovely. The livery is beautiful. Sorry, should I be saying it or she about this car? Oh, it's a she. She's a she. And yeah, tell me about your competition history with it. Well, we started in 2010. I started racing in 2006, drag racing. Before that, we did the great race, the old car cross country vintage rally. We did that for 10 years. And then in 2006, I took the fall of 2005, I took my first pass down a drag strip. Now, we've actually, my husband and I have known each other since we were in high school. And, you know, there's a lot of street racing that takes place here in the Detroit area. So, I mean, you know, we've done some of that. But it became formal, official, first pass 2005. And I thought, I could do this. I imagine, I might be wrong here, but I imagine drag racing is a fairly male dominated scene. How did people take to it when a lady wanted to get involved? Interestingly enough, not so much. There are a lot of ladies in drag racing. As a matter of fact, my daughter started in junior dragsters, which is the little car over towards the front of the building. That was one of her race cars. She started when she was eight. And believe it or not, in the juniors, it's about a 50-50 split. Susan then introduced me to her propane-fueled V8 Mustang, which generates in excess of 880 brake horsepower. And that would give you what sort of time down the quarter mile? Best time, 9.07 at 154 miles an hour. It's really like taking off in an airplane, but you never leave the ground. I've never met a family like the Roush's, united by a love of speed and power, but uniquely talented. Whether it's in circuit racing, drag cars, tuning, restorations, if you're ever walking past their workshop in Livonia, Michigan, I highly recommend knocking on the front door and asking for a look around, just like we did. I mean, Jack, we'll have to probably leave it there because we've got to shoot the rest of the collection. Can I just say thank you so much for coming down, for showing us around, for giving us your humor, your knowledge. It's been a true honor. Thank you very much. Appreciate your interest. If you put in a word with me and my daughter, I'd like to have the keys to some of these cars. I swear I'll bring them back.