Auto Racing: NASCAR

AUTO RACING: NASCAR

Bill France and NASCAR

The National Association of Stock Car Auto Racing (NASCAR) was founded by racing promoter Bill France in 1947 to showcase the talents of southern whiskey runners in their modified street cars, souped up so they could outrun country sheriffs. By 1960 NASCAR had developed a well-organized professional racing circuit confined, largely, to the South. NASCAR was southern: most of its driving stars and its core of fan support came from the South. The sport had national appeal, though, as the American automobile manufacturers recognized. Early in the decade they sponsored the NASCAR racing season by providing high-performance versions of current showroom models. It was an effective sales tool in a time when speed sold cars, and by the time manufacturers abandoned racing because it was too expensive and because of social pressures to refrain from endorsement of a dangerous sport, NASCAR was self-sufficient.

Whiskey-Running Tradition

At the beginning of the 1960s NASCAR racing was dominated by former whiskey runners turned legitimate. They drank hard up to the night before a race and knew no limits on the track. Fans delighted in the frequency of pileups and in the uninhibited style of the drivers, who would hit and bump their competitors at high speeds and go all out to win regardless of the conditions. Midwesterner Fred Lorenzen was the only major NASCAR driver in the early 1960s who did not serve his apprenticeship on dirt tracks.

Factory Sponsorship

The Automobile Manufacturers Association agreed in 1957 not to provide factory sponsorship of organized racing. In 1962 Ford announced that it would no longer abide by the agreement, and the other major manufacturers soon followed suit. NASCAR racing was the beneficiary. A key NASCAR statistic was the manufacturers' rating, which listed the number of wins by the make of car; race lineups always named the manufacturer just after the driver.

Fireball Roberts

By 1964 the sport had become too dangerous for the manufacturers to support. Richard Petty won the Daytona 500 that year with an average speed of 154.33 MPH, 7 MPH faster than A. J. Foyt, Jr.'s winning average at the Indianapolis 500. At the World 600 one of the finest drivers of the day, Fireball Roberts, died after a fiery crash. Roberts was burned over 40 percent of his body, and in his thirty-nine days in the hospital he received 123 pints of blood. When he died on 2 July 1964 the Charlotte (North Carolina) News wrote, "Fireball Roberts, perhaps the most nearly perfect of all stock car drivers, is dead and it is like awakening to find a mountain is suddenly gone." Veteran driver Jim Pardue died at the same track later in the year. Chrysler announced that it was withdrawing from sponsorship of NASCAR racing. Ford followed suit the next year, temporarily, though less in response to the danger of the sport than to the NASCAR ruling that the company's new 427-cubic-inch engine would have to carry 427 pounds of additional weight during races as an equalizer.

Richard Petty

Factory sponsorship was limited by 1967, when thirty-year-old Richard Petty stood out as the preeminent stock-car driver of the time. With his father, former driver Lee Petty, serving as mechanic, Richard Petty won twenty-seven of forty-eight races and finished in the top five in all except ten. He won ten straight races and set a season earnings record of $130,275. In 1969 the season's earning record was eclipsed by Lee Roy Yarbrough of Columbia, South Carolina, who won seven major races, including the Daytona 500, the Rebel 400, the Firecracker 400, the Dixie 500, and the Southern 500, for total earnings of $188,605.

Petty for President

By 1969 NASCAR had a membership of twenty thousand race supporters and sponsored a full complement of fifty-one sanctioned races. The drivers had organized the Professional Drivers7 Association, with Richard Petty as president, and had begun acting like a labor union, boycotting the new Grand National (the designation for NASCAR-sponsored feature events) track at Talladega and lobbying for better health insurance, pension plans, and more accessible bathrooms. The factory sponsors were gone, but NASCAR racing was thriving.

JUST GOOD OLD BOYS

Fireball Roberts and Fred Lorenzen were rivals, even when they raced Fords together on the Moody team beginning with the 1963 season. Before that, they were dangerous when they got close to one another on the racetrack, as they often did, Roberts in his gold Pontiac and Lorenzen in a black Ford. In 1962 at Martinsville, Virginia, the two drivers crashed. Here are two versions of what happened.

Lorenzen: "I was running good, but I wasn't thinking. Sometimes I'd lose my head and Moody couldn't get to me that day. I was still a little cocky, I suppose, and I felt that 1 was running so much faster than Fireball that, Move, boy. I'm coming through. Because I couldn't go around. It was too hard at Martinsville. But He wouldn't move, so I rapped him in the bumper a little bit."

Ford Factory representative Jacque Passino: "Lorenzen kept tapping him, tapping him, trying to get around, and Fireball was glib enough that he wouldn't let him. But he finally got tired of it. So they're going into the goddamned third turn, and Fireball spiked the brakes. Now Christ, Lorenzen hit him a ton. He broke the gas tank in Roberts's car, but he broke his own radiator, too. So the both of them were out of the race. They thought that was the funniest thing that ever happened to them."

Source:

Kim Chapin, Fast as White Lightning: The Story of Stock Car Racing (New York: Dial, 1981).

Sources:

Kim Chapin, Fast as White Lightning: The Story of Stock Car Racing (New York: Dial, 1981);

Collier's Encyclopedia Yearbooks.