T1B

LAS VEGAS – A (mangled) piece of racing history has landed in the woods surrounding Dale Earnhardt Jr.'s property in Cleveland, N.C.

Thanks to a familiar connection, NASCAR's most popular driver recently acquired the Juan Pablo Montoya's destroyed No. 42 Chevrolet that famously slammed into a jet dryer under caution during the Feb. 27 Daytona 500.

Collecting crashed race cars is a hobby of Earnhardt's, and the latest addition is the only one that's caused a fiery on-track explosion and a two-hour delay in NASCAR's biggest race.

And when Earnhardt found it through Chris Heroy, a former Hendrick Motorsports engineer who is the first-year crew chief for Montoya, he jumped on getting it imprecisely added to his car graveyard, adjacent to his backyard replica Western town known as Whisky River.

"I got about 50 or 60 cars out there, and I didn't buy any of them," Earnhardt boasted Friday at Las Vegas Motor Speedway. "(Heroy) calls me, and I get my property manager to go over there and load it up and bring it over.

"We get a forklift or a tractor with a forklift or frontend loader and just carry it into the woods and just set it out there somewhere."

Earnhardt said the car ranked in "the top two or three" among his prized collection of twisted sheet metal.

Could the jet dryer be next item to summoned to his wooded acreage?

"I'd like to have it, but I don't know where it is. Probably somewhere in Daytona or NASCAR might be studying it somewhere, who knows," Earnhardt said. "I think we'll just stick to race cars out there."