NASCAR HISTORY

BY JIM SHIELS

Auto racing, as we know it today, had it's humble beginnings during the 1930s in the deep south. During prohibition, many people made their living brewing and delivering home made whiskey. It became a matter of survival for the 'moonshiners' to have cars that were able to outrun the law These 'runners' got together on Saturday nights on home made dirt tracks to settle the arguments of who had the fastest cars. Asphalt tracks were unheard of until the arrival of the Detroit auto makers influence in the early 50s. At first these matches were private affairs of honor, but as they continued, friends began to hear about and attend the contests and the racing fan developed. At this time the post-war south was still very much a rural society. The only form of transportation available to most was the car, and southerners could understand and respect what was involved in the preparations and driving of a hunk of iron that resembled, at least outwardly, the cars that sat in their own driveways. The beach at Daytona had been a mecca of speed almost since the invention of the automobile. The first Henry Ford came there to test an experimental car. Barney Oldfield came there with the Winton Bullet and the Blitzen Benz, and a host of others came to run the measured mile on a sandy beach washed flat and hard by the ocean tides. The last to arrive was Malcom Campbell in 1936. That year his land speed car "Bluebird" ran out of sand at 276 m.p.h., and he headed west to the salt flats. The city fathers had taken to calling Daytona Beach the world capital of speed, and were now faced with the embarrassing problem of having no tourist attracting activity. After several attempts on their parts to promote races that ended in financial disaster, they were more than ready to deal with the pioneer promoters of that era. One such man was Sig Haughdahl. He had originally came to the area to set a land speed record of 180 m.p.h. in 1922 and had decided to stay. In 1938, some of the city fathers of Daytona prevailed on Sig to promote racing in the area. Until that time, the beach had only been used for straight runs. Haughdahl's idea was to form the oval course that Daytona came to be famous for. The beach course was actually a beach-road course, comprising a two-mile stretch of beach and a two-mile section of Florida Highway A I A, connected by two U-turns. The north turn was where a driver plowed through the heavy sand and somehow got his car up onto the highway. The south turn was where he left the highway and got back onto the beach. The south turn had a 12-foot drop-off and was called "The Junkyard." As many as 12-20 cars per race failed to make the turn and wound up in the "Yard." The first race was plagued with problems from the start. The city had put up a $5,000 dollar purse over the objections of other city leaders who in turn stole and hid the money and the tickets for the event. The race was run all the same, and although it attracted some top racing names of the age, it was a flop. One of the drivers in that first race was an unknown man named Bill France. William Elenry Getty "Big Bill" France was born near Washington, D.C. and came to the Daytona area in 1934. The story goes that he stayed in Daytona because that's where the family car broke down. He worked as a house painter and a local mechanic at the Buick garage, and later opened a small two-pump gas station on Atlantic Blvd., near the future home of the famous beach course. After the 1938 race promoted by Haughdahl flopped, Big Bill took a shot at promoting the beach races. He worked long hours and poured heart and sole into the promotions. It was once said that he tacked up 3,000 posters by hand announcing the races. Ticket sales were down due to the fact that there were no fences around the area and fans simply crawled through the acres of Palmetto bushes that lined the highway, to watch for free. The next year Big Bill also posted signs along the highway stating "BEWARE: OF RATTLESNAKES" and the ticket sales increased. World War II brought racing to a halt, but at wars end, racing came back strong as ever. France, who had worked in a shipyard, began promoting again, old tracks were reopened and new ones were built. Stock car racing was a disorganized, slipshod, each man for himself affair with few rules and no real way to enforce those that existed. Promoters were often shady people who made off with the gate money before the races started. France was one of many who saw the need for order, but one of the few who tried to do something about it. In 1947 Bill France and a fellow promoter from Connecticut named Bill Tuthill held a meeting in Daytona for 25-30 interested racer's and promoters of the era and put together a plan for an organization that would be called the National Association For Stock Car Racing (NASCAR). NASCAR was incorporated on February 21st, 1948 and nine races were run under it's name that year. In 1949 France decided to hold a 'new car' race consisting of cars right out of the showroom. The race was held on June 19th., at a 3/4 mile dirt track in Charlotte, North Carolina, and more than 13,000 people showed up. Thus was born the form of racing France termed as Grand National, a style that would make stock car racing a big time sport. No profile of NASCAR or Grand National racing would be complete without the names of the original racers, the devil may care, seat of the pants drivers, who were glorified by the fans and made the sport what it is today. People like Jr. Johnson, Jack Smith, Goober Sosebee, the Flock brothers Tim, Bob, and Fronty, Joe Weatherly, Lloyd Seay, Pappy White, Dink Widenhouse, Possum Jones, Lonzo McGee, Rupert Cox, Peewee Jones, and others too numerous to mention. These drivers bring back many memories to ardent Grand National fans and in some cases tears as to their passing away over the years. Drivers of the early days knew nothing of the technology of today. They strapped on a leather helmet and flew around the track in cars that wouldn't measure up to Pure Stock division standards of today. Safety was an unknown factor in those days. Firesuits?? Fronty Flock won the Southern 500 at Darlington in 1952 wearing Bermuda shorts!! The shorts now rest in the stock car racing hall of fame. The evolution of the race car was hurried along by these same considerations of safety and performance. In the beginning there was the Modified. A Modified was more often than not a mid to late 1930s Ford. First you rescued your steed from the junkyard, fine tuned the engine, beefed up the rear axle, added heavy duty shocks and springs, fixed yourself a seatbelt from a piece of rope, strapped the doors shut with a belt or chain and maybe cut back the fenders. Whatever other modifications you made depended on how good a 'shadetree' mechanic you were. You might grind a special camshaft, add extra carburetors, or use different gears, but whatever you did, you could build a car, with all the 'right stuff for one to two thousand dollars. Then Late Model racing came along. At first the cars were simply called "Strictly Stock" and later as "Grand Nationals. " The idea here was to race cars no more than three years old, just as they were when they left the factory Once they solved the problems of windshields popping loose, batteries falling out, and spindles breaking off, the Grand Nationals were on their way. In the late 50s and early 60s, stock car racing grew dramatically. Big, fast, paved tracks sprang up at Daytona Beach, Charlotte, and Atlanta. They were soon joined by other tracks such as Rockingharn, Talladega, Dover, Ontario, Michigan, and Pocono. Together with Darlington, these new tracks quickly overshadowed the clay bullrings that for so long had been the backbone of the sport. At the same time, up in Detroit7 the executives of Ford, Chrysler, and General Motors started looking at this wild thing that was going on down south. Somebody noticed that if a Plymouth won a big stock car race on Saturday, sales of Plymouth went up on Monday. By 1955, the car manufacturers began slipping into stock car racing. Before long the 'factories' had signed the 'moonshiners' to big fancy contracts and were overrunning the tracks with engineers and P.R. men. Stock car racing had finally met 'The Big Buck', as huge amounts of money and technology entered into racing and the cars got more sophisticated and faster. Few drivers could make the transition or even bothered to try. A driver named Curtis "Pops" Turner survived the transition and made a name for himself but ran afoul of the dominate force of Bill France when he tried to organize the NASCAR drivers in return for a union loan from Jimmy Hoffa's Teamsters Union to help pay for the construction of the new Charlotte Motor Speedway, which he built and was later ousted from. Many drivers wanted the union, but France stated that before he would have a union stuffed down his throat, he would plow up his tracks. He also banned many of the drivers involved in the union quest from competing in any NASCAR race, some, such as Turner were out of NASCAR for many years.
(TO BE CONTINUED)

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