Bobby Unser Interview and 1969 Ford Torino Pikes Peak Winner

For the show’s 200th episode, V8TV sat down with three-time Indy 500 winner Bobby Unser next to the exact 1969 Ford Torino he drove to victory at Pikes Peak — a car built by Bill Stroppe, Holman & Moody, and powered by a Smokey Yunick-built Boss 429. Unser hadn’t seen it since 1969. Watch to hear him tell the story of a car, and a win, he clearly hasn’t forgotten.

Three-time Indy 500 winners don’t usually sit down for casual interviews about a stock car built almost fifty years ago. But when the car in question is the exact 1969 Ford Torino that carried Bobby Unser to victory at Pikes Peak, and the people who built it read like a who’s-who of legendary race engineering, an exception gets made. This episode marks a milestone for its own show, and it uses that milestone to dig into a story involving some of the most respected names in American motorsport — a story Unser tells, according to the crew that recorded it, “as if it happened yesterday.”

A 200th Episode Built Around a Legendary Interview

This installment of Muscle Car of the Week marks the show’s 200th episode, and the team chose to mark the occasion with something bigger than a typical car profile: a sit-down interview with Bobby Unser, recorded at the 2016 Muscle Car and Corvette Nationals in Chicago, discussing the actual 1969 Ford Torino he drove to victory at Pikes Peak that same year. Pairing a milestone episode with a milestone car and a genuinely significant driver is a deliberate choice, and it shows in how much ground the conversation covers, from the build itself to Unser’s broader career and philosophy.

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The Engineering Team Behind the Torino

This particular Torino wasn’t built by a single garage — it came together through a collaboration involving Bill Stroppe, Holman & Moody, and an engine built by Smokey Yunick, three names that carry enormous weight in American racing history on their own, let alone combined on a single car. Stroppe was already legendary for his off-road and stock car preparation work, Holman & Moody effectively defined factory-backed NASCAR Ford racing throughout the 1960s, and Smokey Yunick’s reputation for creative, boundary-pushing engineering made him one of the most respected — and occasionally controversial — figures in the entire sport.

A Boss 429 Built by Smokey Yunick

Under the hood sits a Boss 429 engine built specifically by Smokey Yunick, a detail that separates this Torino from a standard production car in a way that goes well beyond badge or trim level. Yunick’s engine-building reputation was built on getting more performance out of a given package than seemed reasonable, often through interpretations of the rules that other competitors and even sanctioning bodies didn’t always appreciate, and a Yunick-built engine under a car with this kind of racing pedigree represents a genuinely rare combination of period-correct engineering talent that few surviving race cars can claim.

Climbing Pikes Peak in a Purpose-Built Stock Car

The Pikes Peak International Hill Climb has tested drivers and machinery since 1916, combining a punishing 12.42-mile course, thousands of feet of elevation change, and thinning air that saps engine performance the higher a car climbs toward the 14,000-foot summit, a combination that has claimed engines and drivers alike over the event’s century-plus history. Winning that event in a purpose-built stock car, rather than a dedicated hill-climb machine, required exactly the kind of specialized preparation Stroppe and Holman & Moody brought to the project, and Unser’s 1969 victory in this Torino stands as proof the combination worked exactly as intended against a field of serious competition.

Unser Sees the Car for the First Time Since 1969

According to the episode, Unser hadn’t laid eyes on this specific Torino since the year he raced it, and reuniting with it decades later at the Nationals visibly surprised him — not just because the car survived, but because it remained in as-raced condition rather than being restored, repainted, or modified over the following decades. For a driver who’s spent a career around race cars that typically get stripped, sold, or scrapped once their competitive life ends, finding this one essentially untouched is a rare kind of continuity that most retired racers never get to experience firsthand.

A Piece of Racing History in the Brothers Collection

Today this Torino resides in the Brothers Collection, a home that keeps it accessible for exactly this kind of public reunion and interview rather than locked away from view. Pairing that accessibility with Unser’s firsthand recollection gives viewers something increasingly rare in muscle car media: a direct link between a surviving race car and the driver who actually piloted it to victory, told in his own words rather than reconstructed from old records and secondhand accounts decades after the fact.

Why This Interview Landed on the Milestone Episode

Three-time Indy 500 wins, a Pikes Peak victory, and decades of racing across multiple disciplines gave Bobby Unser a perspective few interview subjects can match, and pairing that career with one specific, still-surviving car gives the conversation a focal point that a broader career retrospective would lack. It’s the difference between hearing someone describe a legendary career in the abstract and watching them stand next to the actual machine that helped build it, engine bay open, memories visibly returning in real time.
That kind of direct connection between subject and machine is also exactly why V8TV built the show around weekly muscle car profiles in the first place — the cars themselves are only ever half the story, and the 200th episode leans all the way into the other half.

Fifty years after Pikes Peak, that’s still the case. That history is exactly what makes a survivor like this Torino, still intact and still willing to be driven, genuinely worth the drive to Chicago to see in person.

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