A dozen years ago, when my son was more interested in toy cars than real ones, Disney’s Cars movie seemed to be almost on a constant loop in my house. He had the T-shirts, the pajamas, the bed clothes, the lunchbox, backpack die cast cars, the works. And I had the movie’s dialog memorized, ready to deploy at a moment’s notice to snap him out of a strop.
But to my shame, while I already vaguely knew that the real Hudson Hornet had been a big deal in the early years of NASCAR and I’d heard of a few of the big names from that time, such as crew chief Smokey Yunick, I’d never gotten around to learning about the drivers of that time or why it was that Hudson seemed to be dominant one moment and dead and buried the next.
Thanks to the Hagerty Drivers Foundation YouTube channel that wrong has been righted. Though there’s a ton of garbage car content on YouTube, there’s a ton of great stuff too, and if you’re a sucker for the kind of in-depth, high-quality storytelling documentaries that you’d expect to find on TV, and which most automotive media outlets simply can’t afford to produce, you’ll also love this channel.
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Previous episodes have covered the Cannonball Run Countach, the DeLorean Time Machine from Back to the Future, and Chrysler’s insane turbine car project. And now the latest installment titled “The Fabulous Hudson Hornet” tells the story of NASCAR’s first legendary car, including how it came to get that name, through a mix of interviews with people like Richard Petty, incredible color archive footage taken at the time and access to the sole surviving example of a Hornet race car, which was driven by three-time champion Herb Thomas.
It’s a great tale, and told so well that it doesn’t really matter whether or not you’re interested in the sport or old American cars, or whether you’ve seen the Cars movie that was so heavily inspired by it. This isn’t a five-minute coffee-break kind of documentary, it’s a chunky 53 minutes long. But give me an hour of this over 20 minutes of some vapid influencer taking delivery of his millionth supercar any day of the week.