SCR: There's an interesting story about how the R&D Center came to be in Concord, and how you obtained the steel to use in your crash sled. Can you fill us in?
Nelson: We were located in a building in Conover, North Carolina, for the first year as we were looking for a site to build this facility. We considered building it in Conover and we considered a few sites in this area. This building was vacant and only partially built. When we saw it, it didn't look too good and it only had a few acres, but it had potential in our eyes. We got more and more interested in this building, primarily because the Concord Regional Airport is across the street, and the fact that we have a lot of people we could fly in and meet with in a matter of minutes, like car owners, and sponsors, and so on. The center of the sport is really this area around the Concord airport. Our interaction with the teams becomes easier. All of those things were good about this location.
One of the other things that was good was the building was already partially up, although it was a shell of a building. The property was in foreclosure. One of my sales points to my bosses was, "Look at how much work has already been done. We can convert it pretty easily." So we made the purchase, and the engineers and architects came in and started looking over what we needed. This office area at the front of the building was, in my words, "just needing to be finished out." They came back and said it needed to be ripped out and started over.
So, we took a building that looked as if it just needed to be finished all the way back down to the ground because the steel in the structure wasn't adequate to hold the two-floor office area. That left us with a bunch of extra steel. I told the contractor to set the steel aside and that I would find a way to use it. My motivation was that somebody had to tell the senior management of NASCAR that we had to take an existing building back down to the ground, but we can use that steel for something else. We were able to use that steel in several other places, including a sled for crash testing.
SCR: You also got the axles for that sled in an interesting way.
Nelson: Across the street, they were preparing to extend the runway at the airport. We were landing one day, and I looked out the window of the airplane and saw some old trucks in a truck junkyard that had become visible as they were clearing the land. I stopped by the company that was clearing the trees and asked them, "What do you want for those axles?" The guy told me, "If you haul them off, they're yours." So I called a wrecker and we got the two axles for free. I would have had to buy those. The greatest expense we had in building that sled was the paint job [bright red]. Or, if you want to look at it the other way, the cost of tearing down the office. It's a real expensive sled if you want to look at it that way [laughs].