(counter ticking)
(typewriter keys clicking)
(piano music)
- Hey guys, you guys are not gonna believe
what I'm about to tell you.
I just found out about the most amazing NASCAR driver ever.
No, he did not win a bunch.
This guy ran one race and then disappeared
forever, leaving nothing behind, but bounce checks
and multiple arrests warrants.
Today, we're talking about
one of the weirdest unsolved mysteries
in the history of cars,
the guy who conned his way into NASCAR and then vanished.
Let's get you up to speed on the guy who snuck into NASCAR.
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(gentle music)
- The early eighties were a magical time in America.
Steven Spielberg discovered the nostalgic power
of kids, riding bikes,
the personal computer revolution
brought a blocking green version of the future
into every household and NASCAR's popularity,
well, she was on the rise.
People couldn't get enough sick, nasty American speed,
including a weirdo that went by the name L. W. Wright.
Nobody knows where this guy came from or who he was before,
but for two weeks and two weeks only in 1982,
he went by L. W. Wright.
He was a smooth talking 33 year old NASCAR veteran,
with 43 Busch grand national races to his name,
or so he claimed and claim it he did.
First in the office of guy named Bernie Terrell,
the owner of a Nashville ad agency called
Space Age Marketing, which I can only assume
Delton regional plumbing advertisements,
and furniture stores.
Wright pitched himself as an experienced racer
on the rise, who just needed to borrow some money
to buy a new race car before the Winston 500 Talladega,
you know, normal stuff.
He said he already had a race team together too,
Music City Racing, sounds legit right?
Now L. W. claimed that country music legends,
Merle Haggard, and TG shepherd, where his sponsors,
nobody would make that up, right?
'Cause that's like a thing that you can easily check.
They're very famous guys.
That's like me using Ryan Gosling as a reference for a job,
fun fact, he hit on my girlfriend one time.
I met him in a diner.
He's like you ever try this milkshake?
It's got peanut butter in it.
I was like, yeah, man, it's great.
Peanut butter is great.
He's like, it's like peanut butter and jelly
but it's a milkshake.
Then he said, some girl was like, cilantro.
I don't know what that meant.
Now let's just stop for a moment to consider
the incredible audacity on display here.
This dude, this total stranger walks into the office
of a popular marketing firm in Nashville,
the country music capital of the world, AKA Music City,
and says that he needs money to fund his racing team,
Music City Racing, which is sponsored
by two of the biggest country music stars in the world,
who also live in that city.
All right, that's like walking
into an Atlanta marketing firm and asking for money
to fund Hotlanta Racing,
a team sponsored by Outkast and Tyler Perry.
How do you assume that no one's gonna check?
That seems like something worth fact checking.
Wright's big brass act totally won over Bernie Terrell,
who sounds like the smartest guy in the world,
so much so that he gave L.W., a man he literally just met
$37,000 and a semi truck and trailer on the spot.
That's $113,000 cash in today's money.
Plus a fricking semi-truck.
Now in an interview months later, Terrelle said,
Wright got him good because he knew nothing about racing,
which you know, duh.
I'm going to add another fun fact here
to ramp up the insanity.
This meeting went down two weeks before the race, 14 days.
Does two weeks seem like a reasonable amount of time
to locate a race car, buy the race car and prep the race car
for one of the biggest NASCAR races of the season?
I mean, at least two people thought so.
The next guy is someone that you actually might recognize
famous NASCAR driver, Sterling Marlin.
Now he wasn't so famous back then,
but he was steeped in NASCAR from birth.
His dad was NASCAR's most successful and certifiably insane
driver cuckoo Marlin.
It's a shame that there aren't any jokes to be made
about that name.
Absolutely none.
So you'd think with multiple generations
of NASCAR experience racing around in his brain dome,
Sterling would be able to spot a fraud from a mile away,
or maybe he just wanted to see where this craziness
was going because Sterling offered L.W.
his Chevy Monte Carlo from last season,
a big brown 450 horsepower bruiser,
good for 190 miles per hour on the straight at Talladega,
on the spot, Wright Coughed up $17,000 cash
and a $3,700 check.
Deal! (mans fingers snapping)
Shake hands, we're done, but there was one condition,
Sterling wanted to serve as wright's crew chief
for the race, by the way, the race
was only a week away at this point.
So Wright said, yeah, dude, of course.
I mean, he was honestly probably stoked out of his mind
that his plan was working.
Like, can you imagine what is going on in this guy's
(beep)
head right now?
One, how do you decide to do this?
And two, it just keeps working.
It's like Mr. Bean sneaking into the Pentagon.
This is like crack for con men.
The con stands for confidence.
And once L.W. saw his first couple cons worked out,
he pulled maybe the boldest grift yet.
This complete maniac, cold called
a renowned motor sports writer
at the Nashville, Tennesseean newspaper,
and not only did he feed him the same hot horse hockey
that worked on the clueless advertising guy,
he added an extra level.
He told this guy that Merle Haggard,
the king of outlaw country was scheduled to appear
at Talladega with his driver.
Now I wanna remind you guys that Merle Haggard
had no clue who L.W. Wright was just like everyone else,
but he did have a bit of a cocaine problem in those days.
And maybe Wright thought that he'd read the blurb
in the paper and assume that the whole thing
was something he agreed to, but forgot about it.
And then he'd show up on race day
and pretend everything was cool.
He'll be like, dang.
I forgot to write that on my calendar
and my entire staff of people that work for me,
the most famous country music star in the world,
they all forgot too, I better get a plane ticket
because I don't want to look like a jerk.
(man burping)
Surprisingly, that plan didn't work.
The article ran on April 25th,
seven days before the Winston 500,
Merle Haggard did not notice,
but the other country music star that L.W. claimed
to be a sponsor of his team, TG shepherd,
well, his attorney did notice.
Attorneys do coke too, but they also write stuff down.
He called the newspaper immediately and told them
that his client had no clue who this L.W. Wright guy was.
And so the story ends there, right?
It was busted, not!
The writer who wrote, Wright's write up,
called L.W. and confronted him,
L.W. turned on the charm as hard as he could
over an old time corded telephone and said, well,
I was kind of premature with the TG Shepherd
and the Merle Haggard announcements.
And somehow it worked.
Maybe it would've made sense if I was alive back,
oh God, I'd be so rich, 'cause you know,
I would just lie, like I do now.
Nollen's my son.
All right, so let's recap real quick guys.
L.W. Wright has money, check.
Semi-truck and a trailer, check.
It's got a fricking race car, check.
He's got an experienced crew chief
from a legendary NASCAR pedigree, check.
But now he needs a NASCAR competition license.
Something that's really hard to get
after a lifetime of training and racing.
There's no way he can get this in like five days, right?
Apparently wrong.
When L.W. showed up at the NASCAR credential office,
nobody recognized him.
Which surprised pretty much no one at this point,
but it wasn't much of a red flag
because a lot of drivers were in and out of the sport
in those days,
a NASCAR licensing official asked L.W.
for his racing history.
And like my dad at the bar, L.W. listed off
some races that he had competed in,
and the dude gave him a license and cleared him to qualify.
The vetting process was the honor system.
Yeah, man, I played D one ball.
Yeah, I won the Rose Bowl I was,
we thought I was gonna get the Heisman,
my parents were really upset about it.
I won every, I won literally every single freaking
Rose Bowl that year dude, I'm gonna start for the Patriots.
Yeah, I kiss my dad on the lips.
(man chuckling)
Again, this was a different time.
All the NASCAR's record-keeping was written out by hand,
then stowed away in a three ring binder
in Bill Francis, sex dungeon.
He's got one, I've been there.
It's nice, one of the nicer ones I've ever been to,
but there's another layer at work here too.
NASCAR had to follow something called the right to work law,
which for them meant, that the driver could afford the fees
and had a functioning race car.
They legally had to allow them to at least try to qualify
for the race.
Incredible.
Wright's race car was parked in the garage
at Talladega Super Speedway and Sterling Marlin,
was wrenching on it in anticipation for a qualifying run.
All right, so maybe at this point, L.W. realized
that he was actually about to push a 450
horsepower race car to its limits on the biggest meanest
fastest stock car track in the nation.
Something he'd almost certainly never done before,
but Mr. Wright was acting wrong.
Sterling remembered him asking weird questions,
dummy questions that any driver would know the answer to,
questions like, hey Sterling, man, you seen my keys, dude.
Can't seem to find my keys dude.
Keys, for your race car?
There ain't no keys for a race car.
Right (man laughing)
I was just joking with you, man.
Got another question.
What if I got to pee in middle of the race,
or poop or whatever?
Is there like a bathroom break?
Like we line up like we in kindergarten or something?
You do what you did when you had to in all them other races.
Slow down a little bit, try to arch it out the window.
Cool man. Yeah, I've been there.
I knew he was a phony when he called his piss, pee.
I mean, so what, maybe this guy's a Dingus.
There have to be some successful Dingus's in NASCAR history.
Let's see if he can qualify.
All right, so Wright strapped himself into his race car.
Started it, without a key, pulled out onto the track,
drop the hammer and wouldn't, you know, it,
the dude qualified for the race.
He came in 36 in a 40 car grade
and clocked a track speed of 186 miles per hour.
That's insane, every step of the way,
you're surprised that it worked.
And now you're going almost 200 miles per hour
on a racetrack in the early eighties, he definitely peed.
He also crashed his car into a wall in the second
qualifying lap.
And he didn't have a backup car,
which meant that the Music City Racing crew had 48 hours
to repair the badly damaged Monte Carlo for the race.
But I get, I mean, this guy is like a time Lord.
So like time doesn't matter,
he started this whole thing two weeks ago.
And by the power of blood, sweat, duct tape,
Bondo, thick rubber bands, and JB weld,
and probably curiosity as to what is going to happen
at this point, Marlin and the crew
mended the car in time for the 1982 Winston 500.
Music City Racing, a team hobbled together in two weeks
by a con man, who'd almost certainly
never driven a race car before was on the starting line
along NASCAR legends like Richard Petty,
Dale Earnhardt, Cale Yarborough.
This was a position that many people spend
their entire lives, dreaming about and L.W. Wright
or whoever he was, made it here by riding a wave
of his own over the top blue
(beep)
for two freaking weeks.
Honestly, respect bro.
No, let's be real.
This dude was probably a psychopath,
but he pulled off something, most people believe
is totally unachievable by the seat of his Wranglers
and he never lost his cool one step of the way.
So whatever God likes status, this guy was experiencing
on the starting grid did not last long, unsurprisingly,
he was laughed almost immediately.
He wasn't a good driver.
He's not a race car driver, his total lack of experience
finally caught up with him, showing the world a glimpse
of who he really was.
It's like, yeah, maybe I can like get hired to play bass
for the Red Hot Chili Peppers,
'cause flea fell off the roof or cleaning the gutters.
But when we get on stage,
I don't know how to play the fricking bass.
You know what I mean?
The guy's not a race car driver,
race officials, black flagged L.W. off the track
after 13 laps, when he was painfully clear,
that was a danger to himself and everybody else.
It's like that scene in Ricky Bobby,
where he's going like 40.
- [Ricky Bobby] Are those the other cars?
(Ricky Bobby screaming)
- But I mean dude, 13 laps, that's 13 laps in a NASCAR race.
Right?
And so I want to give a little credit where credit is due.
When the black flag wave L.W. pulled
the number 34 Music City Monte Carlo in the pit road,
got out of the car and vanished into thin air,
with Bernie Terrell's semi-truck.
(horn honking)
And to this day, no one knows who L.W. Wright was
or at least nobody who does is talking.
He was never seen or heard from again.
And as far as history is concerned,
this guy only existed for two weeks, in the spring of 1982.
And if that isn't the American dream,
then I don't know what is.
If you guys know anything about this,
I really want to get to the bottom of it.
If like your weird uncle talks about how he raced
in the Winston Cup, and you're like, all right, Larry,
you know, let us know, hit us up.
I really, really want to find out more about this.
It's a huge mystery.
How do you do it?
And then how do you disappear?
I'm so impressed and just like intrigued.
So let's get to the bottom of it.
(short beep)
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