When he was a student at Martinsville High School in the 1970s, and with the promise of free food and 15 minutes of fame, Danny Turner cajoled a group of classmates into twice performing feats that gained inclusion into the “Guinness Book of World Records.”
Five decades later the former Martinsville city councilman and ex-mayor — who never missed a day of school in his life — has lobbied his way onto the doorstep of another distinction for the books.
Monday morning, Franklin County native and lifelong motorsports maestro Joey Arrington will headline a delegation from Southside Virginia including Turner as they attempt to set a new land-speed record for a stock car at the Kennedy Space Center’s Shuttle Landing Facility in Brevard County, Florida.
Arrington, whose father Buddy Arrington had a 25-year career as a NASCAR Cup driver, built the engine that Russ “Speedking” Wicks used to set the existing record of 244.9 mph in 2007 at Bonneville Salt Flats, Utah.
Now the 69-year-old Arrington hopes to set a new standard with Ridgeway drag racer Tommy Hurley behind the wheel of a souped up 1969 Dodge Daytona Charger that carries a 358-cubic inch V8 engine capable of cranking 1,000 horsepower at 9,500 revolutions per minute.
It is no wonder the car is called the “Martinsville Missile.”
Arrington hopes Hurley can set a new record at 250 mph, and that is not a figure that merely was pulled out of the air.
The project is part of the VA250 initiative established by the Virginia General Assembly in 2020 to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution and the independence of the United States.
Arrington had an itch to reset the 2007 record and began kicking the tires on the idea with Turner early in 2024.
He came to the right person.
Turner once convinced a cadre of teenagers to spend the greater part of their Easter break pushing a hospital bed nonstop around the Martinsville High School track in order to earn a Guinness Book mention.
He beseeched local businesses for food. He hit the local radio airwaves for publicity. He succeeded.
Monday’s trip to Cape Canaveral? It’s just a bigger stage and a bigger budget.
Turner estimated that the project needed just shy of $300,000 to get off the ground.
“I said let’s tie it in with the 250th celebration of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and I think we can go get some politicians to give us the money,” Turner said Friday in Martinsville during an unveiling ceremony of the VA250 car. “So we loaded up. We went to Roanoke. We went to Bristol. … We went everywhere.”
Partly thanks to some legwork by former congressman and state legislator Virgil Goode, Turner and Arrington soon found themselves in Buchanan at the Botetourt County office of Del. Terry Austin, the state chair of the VA250 Commission. (Disclosure: The commission is one of our donors for our Cardinal 250 project, but donors have no say in news decisions. See our policy.)
Austin was immediately intrigued.
“Arrington’s name sort of resonated with me,” the nine-time Republican state delegate said. “My father was a big Dodge fan and followed Joey’s father when he drove. I’m thinking this is pretty neat.”
Austin ran the idea by his legislative assistant, Matt Miller.
“He said, ‘I love it,'” Austin related. “‘You know, not everybody’s about old buildings and history 250 years ago.'”
Austin said the state legislature appropriated $20 million to the commission for various VA250 projects throughout the commonwealth, bolstered by private and corporate dollars. It did not take long for Austin to return a call to Goode with good news.
The check would be cut. (The amount: $50,000.)
The group did not get the green flag until more partial funding was secured. However, Arrington walked out of the meeting with Austin with his foot firmly on the gas.
“When I left the office I felt like it was a done deal,” he said.
* * *
The Arrington surname represents racing royalty in Southside Virginia.
Buddy Arrington spent his entire career as an independent driver without high-dollar factory backing. He recorded 103 top-10 finishes, highlighted by a third-place run in the 1979 Winston 500 at Talladega Motor Speedway in Alabama.
While he never saw Victory Lane in a 28-year career, his 560 starts are the second-most in NASCAR history.
Joey Arrington has known no other life.
Even before he graduated from Laurel Park High School in 1974, he was a 17-year-old crew chief and mechanic on the blue and red No. 67 that his father piloted around NASCAR ovals.
“It’s been around racecars since I’ve been in the first grade,” he said.
The younger Arrington dabbled behind the wheel with nine Cup starts including a 12th-place finish at age 18 in the Wilkes 400 in North Wilkesboro, North Carolina, a race where the top three finishers were Cale Yarborough, Richard Petty and Buddy Baker.
However, Joey Arrington preferred life behind the scenes, in the shop and under the hood.
He founded Arrington Manufacturing in Martinsville in 2000. He built motors that powered Bobby Hamilton and Ted Musgrave to NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series championships in 2004 and 2005, respectively.
In 2013, Arrington sold his complex to nearby Patrick & Henry Community College, where the school offers STEM, Motorsports and Workforce Development programs.
Arrington operated a shop in Mooresville, North Carolina, before returning to Martinsville, where he established Joey’s Speed Center in the old Sears building behind the Liberty Fair Mall.
Arrington has a mini-museum inside the facility, with racecars dating back to the 1950s including an old Dodge his father got from Richard Petty. It takes just a bit of imagination to make the old machines come to life.
Arrington needed much more when it came to rigging the “Missile.”
The master mechanic bought the car from Brad McBride, a longtime acquaintance from Hickory, North Carolina. He all but stripped it down to the 2006 Ronnie Hopkins NASCAR chassis and began the long process of turning it back into a hot rod.
“We took the motor out of it. We modified the body,” Arrington said. “We completely stripped the car, put it back together just to make sure it’s clear in our mind that it’s safe.
“We built the engine for it. Then the car went to the wind tunnel. It’s quite a task. It took a lot of work, a lot of ingenuity, a lot of … well, we don’t have a rulebook.”
* * *
There certainly were rules against hauling moonshine when Buddy Arrington was caught near the Henry County-Pittsylvania County line while transporting 240 gallons of illegal mountain whiskey in 1971, just two days after he had served as the Grand Marshal of Martinsville’s annual Christmas parade.
News reports said the jugs of “tangle foot” were packed into the rear seat and the trunk of the NASCAR driver’s blue Ford Torino Cobra 429 and were confiscated and later disposed of by the Pittsylvania County Sheriff’s Office.
When nabbed with the goods, Buddy was contrite. He was released on a $500 bond. He served no time as a first-time offender.
The story was merely added to the lore of automobile racing’s relationship with the bootlegging trade.
Franklin County resident Henry Lee Law has become a mini-celebrity through generations of his family’s history of making the distilled spirits and from the Discovery Channel’s television program “Moonshiners.”
Law knows Buddy Arrington’s story, and he knows it’s true. The ‘shine came from the Law family’s operation.
“Buddy got caught with moonshine years ago and I had just loaded him the night before,” Law said Friday in Martinsville.
Law will be part of the Martinsville delegation in Florida. He plans to ride with Turner in the helicopter. He might even bring along some special high-octane Franklin County juice for some extra horsepower. His “Law’s Choice” logo advertising now-legal moonshine will adorn the back of the VA250 car.
“We’re going to use some real strong Law’s Choice to put in that thing and make that record,” Law said.
* * *
Joey Arrington thought he had a driver and an earlier date to run for the record at Cape Canaveral, where 78 space shuttle landings took place from 1984 to 2011.
Danville’s Peyton Sellers was the original choice to drive the car with a target date of early January for the launch.
However, the run was postponed. Then the group announced that former NASCAR star Kyle Petty would drive the car in March.
Strike two. The deal with Petty fell through.
So Arrington went hyper-local, opting for the 50-year-old Hurley, a 1994 Magna Vista High School graduate who lives in Henry County a stone’s throw from Martinsville Speedway. He has rented the Shuttle Landing Facility for eight hours Monday, from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Hurley is an experienced drag racer, primarily competing on one-eighth-mile tracks in North Carolina at Farmington Dragway in Mocksville, Mooresville Dragway and Piedmont Dragway in Julian, where he temporarily mashed the gas in the Big Dog Division.
“I’ve got an old drag car, a ’65 Chevelle,” Hurley said Friday. “I don’t run as much as I’d like to. It just takes so much money. It’s just me and my dad. We just do it for fun.”
Video by Robert Anderson.
Hurley’s challenge Monday morning in Florida will be to get through the gear box cleanly to achieve the target speed, which is just a bit faster than the 88 mph Michael J. Fox’s character Marty McFly hit to activate the flux capacitor in the movie “Back to the Future.”
Hurley aims to reach 90 mph in first gear, 130 in second gear, 170 in third gear and 250 in fourth.
Wicks set his 2007 record on the massive Salt Flats where he had nine miles to build up speed and three miles to stop. Hurley will have two miles to accelerate and one mile to shut it down.
Arrington said his driver will be able to make more than one attempt, but as the temperature rises, the odds of hitting top speed grow worse because the lack of oxygen in thin, hot air is not conducive to obtaining maximum horsepower. Arrington is bringing a spare motor along for the ride just in case.
Hurley anticipates no problems.
“Mine’s a clutch car now. Changing gears is going to be about the same,” he said. “I can do 155 [mph] in 4 seconds. I’ve got 3 miles to do 250.”
* * *
Arrington had 700 miles to cover Saturday and Saturday behind the wheel of the massive VA250 hauler that he is transporting to Cape Canaveral from the Pulaski County Motorsports Park where the car was on display for the opening of the new IHRA-sponsored oval series.
Turner, Austin and others flew to Florida on Sunday to prepare for the run at the record.
The group hopes to set up a livestream feed for the world to witness. Turner plans to photograph the proceedings from a rented helicopter.
It has been a head-spinning 12 months for the former Martinsville public servant. He was diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer in 2025 and originally was given six months to live.
“I want to thank Joey for the year that I was only half-speed,” Turner said.
“If you’d asked me a year ago what would I be doing in a year and three days. … I’m supposedly going to be hanging out of a helicopter taking pictures at Cape Canaveral? That is indeed a miracle in itself.”
The VA250 car, emblazoned with a giant eagle painted on the hood courtesy of local artist Lex Hairston, is a red, white and blue beauty.
What could possibly go wrong now?
“It’s like any piece of equipment, anything can break,” Arrington said. “But based on all the data we have from the wind tunnel and the engine [dynamometer] and the chassis dyno, what we’re trying to do should not be a problem.”
While the Martinsville-Henry County community gave Arrington a royal sendoff Friday with a ceremony including politicians (U.S. Congressman Morgan Griffith), beauty queens (Miss Virginia Madison Whitbeck), a jazz band and a former bootlegger, the renowned engine-builder has no elaborate celebration in mind if the VA250 car hits 250 mph.
“The first thing I’m going to do is take a deep breath,” Arrington said. “I haven’t had time to breathe in three months. I’ll probably just leave [the car] in the truck and not look at it.”
A deep breath still will not get racing out of Arrington’s blood.
Once when his father was off competing in a NASCAR event, young Joey and an uncle spent the night with his grandmother in the Sago section of Franklin County.
Sometime around midnight, the unmistakable sound of roaring engines gave away the fact that his uncle was engaged in some street racing on a one-tenth of a mile asphalt stretch of road.
Grandma was not pleased.
“The next morning she was fixing us breakfast and she’s eating his butt right up. ‘You’re up there racing my car. You’re going to tear something up,'” Joey Arrington said. “She’s preaching, she’s preaching, she’s preaching. But when she got done preaching she didn’t say, ‘Amen.’ She said, ‘Did you win?'”
“It’s a dream come true to go from a little straightaway to go to Florida on a 3-mile course to try to set the record. I want to thank the tax-paying citizens of Virginia. That covers about all of us. Everybody’s got a piece of this car. I’m proud of it.”