UNC Charlotte brothers restore Ricky Bobby’s Wonderbread Car
The Wonderbread Car from Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby is back in racing shape for the first time in two decades thanks to two brothers, an engineer and a controller, both enrolled at UNC Charlotte.
Spencer Brown ’19, currently in the master’s program in electromechanical engineering, and Tony Brown, a doctoral candidate in business administration, run The Garage Shop, a race car fabrication company based in Newton, North Carolina. The International Motorsports Hall of Fame, a repeat client of The Garage Shop, tasked the brothers with restoring the car so it could be displayed at Talladega Superspeedway during the NASCAR Cup Series YellaWood 500.
Restoring a Hollywood car isn’t the most technically challenging job the brothers have taken on but the impact was unmistakable.
“We work on a lot of cool stuff here so I didn’t think it was that big a deal. But man, this thing blew up. Everyone asks, ‘Is that the real Ricky Bobby car?!’”
– Spencer Brown ’19, lead engineer at The Garage Shop
