Mike Bell, the noted racing historian from Decatur, has seen a lot of restored and replicated race cars over the years.

But when Johnny Brown and Marvin Williams pulled into a recent meeting of the Georgia Automobile Racing Hall of Fame Association with their immaculate 1964 Chevrolet Malibu SS dirt track car, Bell knew immediately that he was seeing something special.

"It was just like being at Dixie Speedway in the early 1970s and seeing the cars pull through the gate," Bell said. "That's as period-correct a car from that era as I've ever seen."

Others noticed it too. Former drivers like Charlie Mincey and Leon Archer were drawn to the car, amazed that it was correct in every detail, down to the positioning of the fuel cell, the floor pan and frame from a 1955 Chevrolet that most all car builders used in the 1960s and 1970s and the long obsolete Hurst Airheart brakes.

The car is like a time machine. It was originally built by Hank Grilliot, a veteran short tracker who made the NASCAR record books by being one of the only drivers ever to race a factory-backed Studebaker in the division now known as Sprint Cup.

But when Grilliot wrecked the car at Gadsden, Ala., in early 1973, he parked it in his Lake City shop and it sat there until his death earlier this year.

That's when Brown, who helped Grilliot build and maintain the car back in the day, convinced Grilliot's widow, Mary Ann, to let him restore the racer back to its former glory.

To him, it wasn't just any car, it was a part of his upbringing, a project and pursuit that helped steer him away from trouble at a critical juncture in his life.

"When I was helping Hank with the car, I was around 20 years old," Brown said. "It gave me something to do nights and weekends.

"To me, it's like an old friend."

Brown's first task was to convince Williams to participate in the restoration.

"For this project to work out, I knew that Marvin Williams had to be involved," Brown said.

To racers across the southside of Atlanta, Williams has long been one of the masters when it comes to building bodies for stock car racers.

In the early days, he scrapped through junkyards and discarded take-off parts at local body shops to accumulate the pieces to make Chevelle and Camaro race cars.

He built them for some of the sport's best drivers, among them Leon Archer of Griffin, the first champion of the old National Dirt Racing Association.

He built cars for his brothers Gerald and Ricky and for his son Michael, and a dozen or so others.

On any given weekend for more than 25 years, a Marvin Williams-prepared car was taking home a trophy somewhere.

Then, as now, he hung bodies for the love of sport, and for the thrill of victory.

"Working on race cars is like fishing," he said. "If you aren't catching anything you don't care much about it."

The two began by taking the car apart, cleaning it and replacing the body parts damaged in the long-ago crash.

Williams worked his magic on the exterior, using metal-working skills that have almost become a lost art in today's body shop world where many employees have become little more than parts changers.

He carefully opened the fender wells to accommodate the wide racing tires, smoothed the wrinkles and made each part fit as if it came straight from an assembly line in Detroit.

Old friends pitched in, too.

Roscoe Smith, the ex-racer and parts supplier, rebuilt the brake calipers.

Ronnie Edwards, an accomplished artist and sign painter who has lettered hundreds of race cars over the years, used an old photo of the car to duplicate the original script.

Even Grilliot's old car hauler, a 1971 Chevrolet ramp truck that like the race car sat basically unused since the 1970s, was brought back to show condition to be reunited with the car.

The engine, despite sitting for three decades, fired up with relative ease.

Grilliot's old seat and belts, woefully deficient from a safety standpoint by today's standards, were left as they were the last time he strapped in to race.

The car looks and sounds as if it's ready to turn laps any day in a vintage car race somewhere, but Brown said that'll never happen for fear that it might be damaged.

"That car is original from one end to the other," he said. "It can't be replaced."