What You Didn't Know About Dale Earnhardt Jr.'s Race Car Graveyard
History has seen its fair share of oddball collectors. According to Mental Floss, as we continue to create new things, the stuff that people collect only gets weirder and weirder. There's a woman from Maine who collects umbrella sleeves. Not umbrellas, which would be quirky enough, just the sleeves. A North Carolina man has amassed a collection of over 800 back scratchers. British collector David Morgan somehow found room for his stockpile of more than 500 traffic cones. And Florida man George Frandsen's collection of 1,277 coprolites, or fossilized feces, has earned him the nickname the "Indiana Jones of poop."
In light of such oddball hoarders, the collection owned by NASCAR racer Dale Earnhardt Jr. isn't as crazy as it sounds. According to Jalopnik, the semi-retired stock car racer has created his own race car graveyard on his wooded North Carolina property that he calls Dirty Mo Acres. He and his friend Sunny Lunsford began hanging busted car engines from old oak trees back in 2005, and the vehicular graveyard only grew from there. He's been acquiring cars wrecked during races ever since and stockpiling them out on his property. Let's take a look at the old stock car bones that have been laid to rest in Dale Earnhardt Jr.'s NASCAR graveyard.
Dale Earnhardt Jr. has dozens of dead race cars in his NASCAR graveyard
Dale Earnhardt Jr. has compiled a list of the more than 40 wrecked race cars in his graveyard on his official website. Each one has been lovingly and meticulously eulogized, with a short bio explaining who drove it, when and where it was wrecked, and so forth. His collection includes the wreckage of legendary racers like Jeff Gordon, Jimmie Johnson, and Danica Patrick, but the driver who has contributed the most debris is, of course, the collector himself. Eight of the cars pushing up daisies there were crashed by Dale Jr., who is only one of many race car drivers who are actually really weird people.
According to his Facebook, Dale Jr. doesn't even keep track of where all of his dead race cars are on Dirty Mo Acres. He said he had been looking for Wayne Jesel's land speed racer (pictured above) for a year or so. His property manager never tells him where he puts the cars when they arrive, so Dale Jr. has to go exploring to find them. He wrote that it "just adds to the mystery of the graveyard." Hopefully one day he'll open Dirty Mo Acres up to the public and let us all explore the woods for his fallen racers.