Matthews Brings Human Touch to Museum of American Speed Story

You can call it a little folksy, but it sure seems to work fast for the Museum of American Speed.

Speedway’s Museum of American Speed curator for the past 10 years has been Tim Matthews, who ?completely gets cars and people’s love for them. He spoke about his fondness on Monday, July 29th, to the membership of the Executive Club at their weekly luncheon held in downtown Lincoln at the Graduate Hotel, not far from the museum in west Lincoln.

“I’d like to tell you a little bit about a place that I love an awful lot,” Matthews began before telling his audience about the museum’s intended purpose. “The mission really is to inspire the next generation to maybe put their phone down for a second and wanna build something with their hands and that is an uphill climb. But I see it happening at the museum all the time. I’ll see kids talking to their dad or their parents saying ‘Wow! Can we build a car? What can I do?’”

The Museum of American Speed was founded in 1992 by “Speedy” Bill and Joyce Smith and Matthews said the key to this museum is it tries to differentiate itself from all other car museums. “Just a bunch of cars that are stacked up door handle to door handle, a quick walk through in an hour and you’re done,” Matthews pondered before explaining how important it is to care.

“There’s no human story there. You don’t know why it’s there,” Matthews explained about cars and exhibits. “You don’t know who built it. You don’t know what the company history is and that’s what people we’ve found at the museum is that folks want to connect to the human story. They don’t really care about the hardware. That’s just the vehicle for explaining the history and the human relationships.”

Matthews talked about some of the events held in and around the museum which are also key to the human interest and add an essence to the whole experience. He said exhibit events are a big draw.

“When we had our Wheel Hub Live Event, which is basically an exhibit within the museum if some of America’s best cars and what we found is when we invite some of America’s best builders, you know people that are building multi-million-dollar customs and hot rods to show off their car at our museum. They jump at the chance! You don’t have to pay ‘em to come, you don’t have to buy ‘em lunch. They want to bring their car to the museum,” Matthews shared.

He said the idea was to have an event that’s like a Picasso exhibit inside an art museum where the best cars can be seen without going to either coast to see to see them. The cars all come to Lincoln where Nebraskans can celebrate the car culture.

And in case you haven’t been to the museum lately, it’s grown a few feet. Matthews said adding their new addition increased their square footage from 150,000 to 240,000. He said it’s an exercise program in itself just to turn off all the lights when closing shop. He said they have 350 vehicles on display at any one time and over 1,200 engines. They also have the largest collection of pedal cars anywhere on public display and the largest collection of gas-powered spin dizzies on public display. He said those are the miniature racing cars that were really popular during the war years due to the fuel rationing when people couldn’t race regular-sized cars. ?

Another addition to the museum recently was the Unser Collection dedicated to Al and Bobby Unser and their children that continued to carry on the racing gene. The collection was moved to the Speedway property from Albuquerque, New Mexico where it was initially founded. The Darryl Starbird Museum was also moved to the Museum of American Speed from Afton, Oklahoma.

“We have the best land-speed racing collection anywhere in the United States,” boasted Matthews. “There just isn’t a museum for land-speed cars. Cars that raced at Bonneville, Utah or at the dry lakes and those cars have all come here.”

He said the museum also hosts drag racing cars, NASCAR, sports cars and much much more.

“We just added a BMX bicycle racers display. We try to do something for everybody. So you can bring anybody to the museum and they will find something that they can latch onto and walk away with a learning experience.”