Many of the Brumos Porsches Hurley Haywood drove during his Hall of Fame racing career are on display as part of the Brumos Collection, a 35,000-square-foot interactive museum in Jacksonville, Fla.
“Brumos used to be located on Main Street in downtown Jacksonville, and there was a large warehouse in back of the dealership, which we took over and it became the race shop,” Haywood said. “On the backside of that was a wall almost like a vault, and as we started to collect cars that’s where they would end up.
“It was secure, but it was dingy, not the kind of place you would go. People would not be impressed by the building and the race cars were in the dark. When we moved the dealerships from Main Street over to Atlantic Boulevard, we decided we would move our cars over to that location.
“There was a perfect building that we sort of took half of the building for the collection and half of the building was for the new vehicle preparation center. That’s where the museum began and we’ve added and added.”
Dan Davis, the former chairman of Winn-Dixie who was majority owner of Brumos Automotive from 1990 to 2015, spearheaded construction of the current museum that opened in January 2020.
“Dan has a real love affair of the old Indy cars and the Millers,” said Haywood. “His collection is very eclectic; there is lots of different stuff in there. One side of it is for those kinds of cars and the other side is for the Brumos racing cars. We’ve got most of the significant Porsche race cars I’ve driven over the years.
“We have 917s, we have 917/10s, we have the 908 Vic Elford and Jo Siffert drove together; it’s really an amazing collection.
“Many of these cars were in the old museum and when we sold the dealerships, the Field Group was very nice to let us to keep our cars there for a couple of years. Then, Dan decided, ‘I’m going to do this right. I’m going to build a class-A facility for these cars,’ and that’s how we ended up where we are now.”
Visit thebrumoscollection.com for details about the museum, including information on touring the facility.