This was posted by Bob Hanner on the Speedworld Message Forum, Bob runs the NASCAR WC Gallery : “In the Omaha paper this morning they had an ad for a local car dealership that had the #88 show car in the showroom today. So i went down there and found out that it was not just any ordinary show car, but the 1996 Daytona 500 Winning Quality Care ford thunderbird. The car was never washed or had anything done to it since they got it back from Daytona USA this past February. It still had the remains of a Champagne bath on it from the victory lane celebration. It also had a roof cam (Now outlawed) and a bumper cam on it. Most noticeable was the dent on the front air dam covered by 200mph race tape. The representative from RYR said that it was “Seagull” Damage. Since Daytona uses restrictor plates the cars all travel around the track in one giant pack. after the cars all go by the seagulls land on the track looking for food stirred up by the wind from the cars. DJ was leading the race at the time and one of the birds didn’t get back up into the air fast enough *THUMP* Probably wasn’t much left of that bird after getting hit by a 200mph stock car. I took some pictures of the car and will have them up on my website as soon as they are developed. The RYR rep also made comment that you will most likely see a lot of Thunderbirds at the restrictor plate races for the next 2 years while the Thunderbird is still eligible if they can’t get the Taurus up to speed. He said they we’re testing at Talladega this week (Which we already knew) and if they can’t get the Taurus up to speed they will call the show car that was here today back to the RYR shop to have a new Thunderbird body put on it and that’s the car DJ will race in the coming Daytona 500. He also confirmed something that a lot of us already figured would happen anyway. That the smaller teams couldn’t afford to use valuable sponsor money trying to perfect the Taurus and would use Thunderbirds until the high dollar teams got the bugs worked out of the Taurus. He stated that at all the tracks this year you will see 4 models of cars on the track: Thunderbird, Taurus, Monte Carlo, and Grand Prix.”(posted 12-19 on Speedworld)(12-26-97)
