Stock Car Racing History, NASCAR, and Other Problems in American Racing History

[Mark in Oshawa]

Those Daytona results have some great names in there..but you can see also from reading the results how the field was far more spread out. Racing wasn't even remotely close in some ways. You had 2 to 3 guys at the top and a spread heading down through the field. Now, you have guys all going a lot faster in clumps within 100'th's of seconds....it is a different world.

[Lousada]

Thank you for posting this information, and also for your contributions in other threads.
This may seem like a rather dumb question, but how did the people involved at the time consider the championship? Where the competitors really driving for points like they do in this day and age? Where fans/followers as obsessed about the points table as they do nowadays? It must have been very hard to keep track of what was going on if you weren't actually at the track itself.
I'm interested in this because the season seems to begin and end at a completely random point in mid-november. Todays conventions demand that history is divided into seasons, but I was wondering if the people at the time also saw mid-november as the beginning and end. Or did they rather moved from big race to big race?

[Alexamateo]

Just looking at it from the outside, There were 62 races that year and a driver could run 61 (two of the races were Daytona qualifiers and a driver could only run one). Only two drivers ran 61 races (David Pearson and champion Richard Petty, while Ned Jarrett ran 59. A few more ran at least 50 races, but none of those are drivers you would consider championship threats, so in general, drivers just went out for the biggest races.

However, the factories dictated it and would only run certain drivers in the full schedule.

In 1962 for example Joe Weatherly won the championship, but for 1963, His factory Bud Moore Pontiac team cut back to just major races, so he picked up rides for the other races driving for no less than 9 different owners as he won his second championship. Most couldn't or wouldn't go to such extremes.

[Don Capps]

Just looking at it from the outside, There were 62 races that year and a driver could run 61 (two of the races were Daytona qualifiers and a driver could only run one). Only two drivers ran 61 races (David Pearson and champion Richard Petty, while Ned Jarrett ran 59. A few more ran at least 50 races, but none of those are drivers you would consider championship threats, so in general, drivers just went out for the biggest races.

However, the factories dictated it and would only run certain drivers in the full schedule.

In 1962 for example Joe Weatherly won the championship, but for 1963, His factory Bud Moore Pontiac team cut back to just major races, so he picked up rides for the other races driving for no less than 9 different owners as he won his second championship. Most couldn't or wouldn't go to such extremes.

Close, but there are a number of pieces missing in your analysis.

[Alexamateo]

Well by all means, please fill us in.

I only know what I have read, and I know (now) that all that I have read is not to be taken as gospel. For instance, I am pretty sure that stock car racing didn't originate from a cow-pasture in north Georgia from just a bunch of bootleggers looking for something to do on a Sunday afternoon.

I'll give you some of my history as a race fan. I went to the 1981 Indy 500 with my dad when I was not quite 12. I was bitten by the bug and became obsessed with racing (all). I was always crazy for statistics and there was a rundown of all the Indy 500's in the back of the program so I started charting all of the races. When 1982 rolled around, I started with the Daytona 500 that year cutting all of the newspaper articles (Memphis' Commercial Appeal) that had anything to do with racing and keeping them in a notebook as well as charting the races.

Back then it was hard, sometimes you only had the top 10 or 5 even listed and it might be two months before I could get a complete run-down. (in Stock Car racing magazine, it was only later I would discover National Speed Sport News).

Of course I wanted to at least get a list of winners of past races, but that also illustrated a problem. My mom got me the book Stock Car Heroes (or something like that by Bill Libby. It had a line in the preface talking about Neil "Soapy" Castles pulling into victory lane in Greeneville SC to end a 0 for 4 or 500 race losing streak. That bugged me for a long time because I could never find another reference to that race anywhere. I now know it was a Grand national East race which was where all of the 200 lappers were placed when Winston came on and the Cup schedule was shortened. At the time though it was maddening to me.

I kept this up until about 1986 or so. By then, Greg Fieldings Forty Years of Stock Car Racing came out and I of course bought it.

The point of all of this is to say that I realize that what you stated earlier in this thread, "Stock car racing and NASCAR history is largely, to be kind, a huge mess, there being no end of baloney and nonsense passed off as "history" and blindly accepted since almost no one bothers to do the grunt work to check the stories out. ",is true.

I am very interested in what you have to say about NASCAR history and in knowing your perspective, but at times I don't know what I can contribute, because much of my knowledge is tainted so to speak.

[Don Capps]

I only know what I have read, and I know (now) that all that I have read is not to be taken as gospel. For instance, I am pretty sure that stock car racing didn't originate from a cow-pasture in north Georgia from just a bunch of bootleggers looking for something to do on a Sunday afternoon.

You are already far, far ahead of the power curve, knowing more about the origins of stock car racing than the vast majority of those claiming to "stock car racing historians" -- to say nothing of the stock car racing journalists those who are fans. The entire business about the Stockbridge track has long been proven to be a myth, yet you would not know it from what continues to be written by many journalists and accepted by the fans. However, this is a topic I will delve into later.

[Don Capps]

Despite the fact that the "history" of stock car racing as manufactured by various -- at best careless and at worst deceptive or spurious -- journalists and NASCAR over the years has been under attack recently, old falsehoods die hard. The involvement of those engaged in the illegal alcohol business, either as a maker or transporter of "moonshine," and Southern stock car racing is a staple of both Southern and racing folklore. The role of those in "moonshine" business and stock car racing has often been both quite exaggerated and yet at the same time little understood.

That there have been those actively engaged in the illegal manufacture and transport of illegal alcohol who also drove and/or owned stock cars or tracks or were promoters is not questioned. What is under question is the role of those folks in the formation of stock car racing. In many cases, the numbers and roles of the "moonshiners" involved in stock car racing, especially NASCAR, during the Forties and Fifties have been either exaggerated or somewhat embellished tending to overshadow, deliberately or otherwise, the presence of the others involved in the sport. It could be suggested that the focus on the drivers who were -- or thought to be -- involved in the transportation of illegal liquor may have shifted attention away from the true role of the illegal alcohol business regarding stock car racing -- as a means to "launder" money generated by that illegal activity. Recent discussions on the role of "moonshine" in stock car racing tend to be focusing on this aspect of their involvement, particularly in light of the known instances of money generated from the illegal liquor trade being used to promote events through the simple expedient of track ownership.

The origins of "stock car racing" probably reaches back to at least the reorganization of the AAA's involvement in automobile racing in the 1908/1910 timeframe -- and probably earlier than that. The Contest Rules of 1910 use the term "stock car," for instance. Plus, once one begins to look closely at materials such as the AAA Sanction Records, contemporary newspaper articles, and various otther sources, the more evident it becomes that the Southern "moonshiners" were late to the stock car racing game, there being major stock car racing events in California at Mines Field and the Oakland Speedway long before the November 1938 event at Lakewood Speedway which is often cited as the "beginning" of stock car racing, at least in the South -- assuming that one ignores the events at Daytona Beach for starters, of course.

This is still much to be done on this topic, but slowly and surely there are historians -- of the scholarly or academic sort, not the journalist who writes an article or book about the past and then thinks he is actually a historian when he is nothing of the sort -- are digging into this topic and as is usually the case, the truth is far more interesting and fascinating than the mythology. And, much more complicated and frustrating, of course.

[Alexamateo]

If the story is to be believed, when Bill France disqualified Glenn Dunnaway in the very first strictly stock race, he was able to prevail when challenged in court by saying what was done with the springs was something a bootlegger would do to alter their cars, and it aided in swaying the court's opinion. This would seem to indicate that any association with the illegal alcohol business was certainly frowned upon by polite society. I am sure France wanted to downplay any association in the beginning because he wanted decent people as paying customers at his races.

I wonder if it was only later that it became romanticized, probably starting with Tom Wolfe's article on Junior Johnson, The Last American Hero. At its core, wasn't that article essentially a highfalutin' PR piece because Johnson was switching to Fords?

[Don Capps]

If the story is to be believed, when Bill France disqualified Glenn Dunnaway in the very first strictly stock race, he was able to prevail when challenged in court by saying what was done with the springs was something a bootlegger would do to alter their cars, and it aided in swaying the court's opinion. This would seem to indicate that any association with the illegal alcohol business was certainly frowned upon by polite society. I am sure France wanted to downplay any association in the beginning because he wanted decent people as paying customers at his races.

The legal basis for sports sanctioning bodies operating as businesses to establish and enforce their own regulations was, from all I have been able to gather, already a well-established point by 1949. This was scarcely the landmark legal precedence that NASCAR has always made it out to be. It was more a case of NASCAR -- for which one may substitute Bill France -- was not expecting this tactic and was taken by surprise. Bill France ran NASCAR much as any businessman ran his business in the South in those days -- his way or literally the highway. The courts in the South were very much in agreement with this philospohy, with drivers and owners being considered "independent contractors" -- they still are, in fact -- and , therefore, bound by any rules that the organization established in order to operate. What would have been unusual in this case would have been if NASCAR had lost.

It should be noted that until very recently NASCAR in its own writings regarding its creation and that of stock car racing pointed fails to mention the involvement of "moonshiners" in the sport, any mention being obscure, oblique, and brief. Only at some point during the late-Seventies and into the Eighties did the "moonshiners" get any "official" mention by NASCAR and it was probably not until the period around its 50th anniversary that NASCAR began to quietly promote the romantic legend and support the mythology of the "moonshiners." Apparently, this was prompted as much by self-interest than any acceptance of the "moonshiners" as a part of NASCAR's origns given that such a mythology was literally very good for business.

The official story that forms the basis for the founding of NASCAR is not that those "moonshiners" in the Piedmont regions of Georgia, the Carolinas, and Virignia needed someone to take over the organization of their existing efforts to race stock cars, but rather that those poor, yeoman racers needed someone to ensure that they received the fruits of their labor from the wily, unscrupelous promoters who so often took the money and ran, leaving the poor drivers without a cent. NASCAR built this into a legend that was and is readily accepted as an article of faith, the con man promoter fleecing the poor drivers. The irony, of course, is that NASCAR was established by and for race promoters, any efforts to protect the interests of the drivers being secondary at best. NASCAR was first and foremost a business and France simply provided a better business model for the promoters.

The general social hypocrisy of much the South during the developing years of Southern stock car racing, the first decade and a half after WW2, meant that, among other things, the illegal liquor business was both soundly condemned while also being strongly supported in many communities. It should not be overlooked that there was a very strong, vocal element within the South that were bitterly opposed to the use of alcohol, legal or otherwise. Keep in mind that part of the problem was the transportation and sell of alcohol legally bought in one place for sell elsewhere where its purchase was forbidden. While the "Thunder Road" mythology certainly contained grains of truth, the reality of the illegal liquor business was one that required a great deal of romanticizing for the most part given its often harsh, even squalid nature. It was, keep in mind, an illegal activity, a criminal enterprise. In the all too usual romaticizing of the "moonshine" business, that "organzied crime" was all involved and that implies is often skipped over less it spoil a good story.

So, iwhile t seems that while France and NASCAR did keep up appearances and frown upon the very idea of "moonshiners" and their activities by keeping them at arm's length, France was also willing to create business arrangements with those in the illegal alcohol trade to keep his business afloat, especially in the very early years of NASCAR when cash flow was an issue. It is difficult to think that France was unaware of the business interests of a number of those who built tracks and promoted races using NASCAR sanctions, especially given that France was often a partner in the tracks that were built or part of the promotion team for the events held at those tracks. Just saying....

I wonder if it was only later that it became romanticized, probably starting with Tom Wolfe's article on Junior Johnson, The Last American Hero. At its core, wasn't that article essentially a highfalutin' PR piece because Johnson was switching to Fords?

The entire romantic legend created by journalists using the notion of the "noble moonshiner" as racing driver and Southern working class hero probably does get pinned on Wolfe. There seems to be an increase in the number of articles that mention the correlation of "moonshine" and stock car racing in the wake of the Wolfe article, an early trickle soon becoming a flood, the notion then being well-established by the early Seventies among the journalists.

To consider the Wolfe article on Johnson as a PR piece due to Johnson's switiching to Ford might be an anachronistic stretch. Given that the article appeared many months after the switch from Ray Fox and MOPAR to Banjo Matthews and Ford difficult to understand the PR value of the piece. Besides, it is a bit difficult to imagine Wolfe as a Ford PR flack and being capable of sticking to the party line. Re-read the article and you might be a sense of what that means. When the article appeared, it was quite a sensation among the racing set. NASCAR did not take kindly to the article until sometime later when it realized that any mention in an East Coast liberal high-brow magazine a good thing.

[Alexamateo]

It's interesting to note that my comment about the Wolfe article came from something that I had read in the past. That was one commentators take. I have tried to lay hands on it today, but I realize I may have just seen it in something I don't own. It's funny though, that was an idea that stuck in my head.

When I first started following racing, the first book I bought with my own money was Kim Chapin's Fast as White Lightning. I know it plays up the bootlegging aspect to be sure, but I have always loved it. Are you familiar with it, and if so, What's your take on it?