‘I wanna go fast!’ Ricky Bobby ‘Talladega Nights’ car lands in NC body shop.
Roughly 40 miles northwest of Charlotte, in a spanking-clean body shop off a two-lane country road sits one of Hollywood’s most famous cars, stripped to its essence.
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“I wanna go fast!” actor Will Ferrell’s Ricky Bobby character asserted in the 2006 sports-comedy classic “Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby.”
Fast again will the No. 26 Wonder Bread car go, after a months-long restoration at The Garage Shop. Private owners of high-performance vehicles, including vintage NASCAR and other race cars, turn to the shop for everything from small to full ground-up restorations, engineer Spencer Brown told The Charlotte Observer on a tour of the 15,000-square-foot building Thursday.
The shop and its dozen employees also build land-speed and other vehicles that take years to complete. They involve multi-million dollar programs that engineer, build, test and race the vehicles at Bonneville (Utah) Salt Flats, El Mirage (Calif.) and salt flats in Australia.
For NASCAR, the shop designed and built the cut-away car that NASCAR safety crews use for driver extraction training.
The shop does 3D scans of parts to within half a thousandth of an inch and can use that data to make 3D printed parts like a turbo intake, as seen on “Steve Morris Engines.”
The Garage Shop also has four sponsors that support it financially or with tools and other equipment: Safety-Kleen, Snap-on, Katz Coffee and Labware Inc.
Safety-Kleen helps the shop become nearly 100% recyclable by taking all of its used fluids and metals. Snap-on provides the tools needed to produce world-class cars, while Katz Coffee gives the shop “the energy to provide the best product we can,” Brown said. “Labware provides us with top tier software to review race data.”
The Garage Shop has restored at least 100 vehicles since Brown’s father, Aaron, founded the business in 2008 in Sherrills Ford. The shop later operated in Denver in eastern Lincoln County before its present, far more spacious digs on Buchanan Place in Newton.
Aaron Brown previously was lead research and development fabricator for Evernham Motorsports and Dale Earnhardt Inc.
As a boy, Spencer Brown learned from his father at the legendary motorsports teams.
He spent so much time at his dad’s workplaces that he got in trouble at his Catawba County school in 6th and 7th grades. He missed 90 days of classes one year, he said.
Brown, now 36, graduated from UNC Charlotte with a mechanical engineering degree in 2018-19. He expects to complete his graduate degree in electromechanical engineering at the school this fall.
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Brother, Tony, 27, also helps run The Garage Shop. He obtained his undergraduate degree in finance from Queens University of Charlotte and expects to complete his doctorate in business administration at UNC Charlotte next year.
When a guest pulls into the lot at The Garage Shop, the business might appear like any other auto restorer, until they walk inside and see the vast, spellbinding display of parts and cars.
Standouts include the 1969 Dodge Daytona Bobby Isaac tribute car the shop “built from the ground up” and the 1969 No. 27 Ford Torino Talladega Donnie Allison tribute car, Spencer Brown said. “Both have run 210+ on the Flats,” he said.
Vintage NASCAR cars owned by private collectors, including a No. 83 Red Bull Brian Vickers car and a No. 2 Miller Lite Rusty Wallace car, are being restored.
Most stunning of all is the long and slender, all-carbon fiber body streamliner land-speed record vehicle the shop is partnering on with Steve Morris Engines and Labware. It aims to exceed 500 mph, according to The Garage Shop.
Not so fast in mph terms for the Ricky Bobby car, which sits almost unnoticed among the other racing-related vehicles.
Etched in the metal seat frame of the car are the words “Will Ferrell High Wide & Handsome.”
“High, Wide & Handsome” was a previous title considered for the movie.
Since the movie, the car has been on display at the International Motorsports Hall of Fame beside Talladega (Ala.) Superspeedway.
It’s being restored to go 55 mph or 60 mph max, because this one is a show car that young fans in particular loved to climb in, on and about, Brown said. Wear and tear from kids and others enjoying the car is why the museum hauled it to The Garage Shop two weeks ago, he said.
The shop intends to refurbish the car in time for the Oct. 25 YellaWood 500 at Talladega, Brown said.
“We’re redoing the nose, the fenders, getting it rewrapped, repainted, getting it back to where it looked like in the movie,” he said. Workers are fixing the hood, repairing parts of the car pushed in over the decades and adding new padding.
“We’re taking it through the process of getting it back to being track ready, so they can do promotional events and ride-alongs in it, and I think it’s going to be a really cool car to show off.”
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This story was originally published August 8, 2026 at 5:00 AM.
