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CHAPTER 1

The First of Its Kind

* * *

June 19, 1949

"Somebody could find a place, take a bulldozer and make a circle and that's the way it was, to begin with. They got better. But you still had all that dust and sand flying. ... You bang fenders, you get out, you fight, you carry on. That was the life."

— PAUL CAWLEY, stock car racer from the 1940s, talking about the early days of racing

BY TEN O'CLOCK IN THE MORNING, WITH THE TEMPERATURE ALREADY pushing 80 degrees, Bill France knew — as he'd feared — that it was going to be a scorcher, a day made for white T-shirts, and ice water-soaked handkerchiefs to cool the sweat on the back of your neck. The people would be hot; the racecars, perhaps grinding to a halt in the baking sun, would be hotter.

France distractedly paced the gravel, and began climbing up the long wood grandstands: theater seating for the front stretch of Charlotte Speedway. Located five miles west of the center of Charlotte, North Carolina, the track was only about a year old, a three-quarter-mile dirt oval with fresh dust clinging to it from the previous day's action.

The wood below France's feet gave a little and it shook him, though he was a little shaky to begin with. He hadn't gotten much sleep the night before, and he woke up on this mid-June morning worrying about the size of the crowd and the importance of the event. That afternoon the speedway would host the first-ever official "strictly-stock" race for NASCAR, France's two-year-old racing organization. The race was open only to drivers of newly built American factory cars produced in the years since the end of World War II, four years before. France was gambling plenty on the success of this event, hoping it would cement NASCAR's standing ahead of the glut of stock car sanctioning groups. This had become a "push all your chips in" kind of day.

Now standing at the top of the bleachers, France cupped his eyes with his hands, staring out toward Wilkinson Boulevard. The cars of race fans were lining up, groups of them spreading out, inching in from everywhere, hundreds of them, with hundreds more beyond, funneling in. The black hard tops in the distance were like a swarm of ants. The crowd was much greater than France had expected, and he permitted himself a smile. It was still hours before race time.

The planning for this event, the endless promoting, had taken a real toll, even on France, who was normally an indefatigable, determined man. He could be leaning easily against a car with his arms folded, wearing a squint and a smile and he'd still look somewhat imposing. In a room full of powerful men, you'd be hard pressed not to single him out. It wasn't only for his six-foot-five-inch frame that he'd long been called Big Bill. He had a talent, irritating though it could sometimes be, for making anybody realize the advantage, the necessity, and finally the inevitability of being on his side. That he frequently did his convincing with a characteristic grin only added to the power of his charm and reputation.

"He had an iron fist and a velvet glove that was needed at times," said longtime racing historian Greg Fielden. "And Bill France aligned himself with good-quality people, which was one of his finer points. He had a far vision."

"Bill France was a very likeable person," recalled renowned car owner Ray Fox, "but he could talk anybody out of their breakfast."

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For all of France's persuasive talents, there had been too many uncontrollable moments of huge import in his life of late, and keeping his focus had become an extreme challenge. He'd promoted Charlotte Speedway's first race of the season two months earlier, at the beginning of April. Within days of the event, he was heading back to his hometown of Washington, DC, to attend the funeral of his father, William Henry France, who'd passed away after a lengthy illness. France Sr. had been a clerk at the Park Savings Bank in Washington. It was by sneaking off in his dad's Model T Ford that Bill France first came to fulfill his own dreams of speed. Standing on the bleachers now, his hands still up at his eyes, France could recall the memory of trying to steady the casket's weight on his shoulder when he and his fellow pallbearers carried his father's body to its rest.

And then yesterday, taking a break from prerace preparations, France and Bill Tuthill, a fellow racing promoter and one of his right hands in NASCAR, and two other men were in the air, demonstrating a new model of a small private plane. France, an avid flyer, could sense trouble as it developed, and he sat helplessly as the plane began to descend maniacally. Jerking downward, with everyone aboard bracing inside, the small plane overran the runway, pounded to the ground, bounced a moment, and kept rolling across the adjoining highway, slamming finally to a rest in a ditch. Cars had barely managed to swerve away and miss it.

Later on, achy but intact, he returned to the speedway and watched as practice sessions for the next day's race began in earnest. The track had been well watered to keep it moist enough for the action, but the heat of the day — the temperature was topping out at 90 degrees — was unrelenting, and as cars continued to dig into the turns, red clay dust rose up past the fence and out toward Wilkinson Boulevard. You couldn't hear the accidents being caused on the road over the din of the racing engines, but soon enough the county police arrived and delivered a threat: They would shut down the track twenty-four hours before the race began if France couldn't fix the dust problem.

The cure was to grade calcium chloride into the dirt. A local Charlotte racer recalled that a large stash of the stuff remained stored under the scoring stand. There was not enough of it to fully work in, but France had officials bring out the grading machine. They made a sporting show of it while France talked to the police about what a fine event it was going to be, for racing and for the town. France had dealt with enough policemen in his time. Given that stock car racing's roots were intertwined with the illegal running of moonshine, he well understood the need to establish that everything was under rigid control, with rules and propriety well in place.

Imagine if they had shut it down, France thought now. The idea that he might be a little nuts for insisting on this strictly stock thing had struck some as an extremely valid point. Would seeing gleaming new cars getting smacked up in dirt track battles really be good for the car business? Besides, fans already accepted stock car racing as a thing of brutal beauty, dominated by old cars that could be modified to make them swifter. Winning frequently required getting an edge under the hood, in the springs or anywhere else that allowed for hidden tweaks. This wasn't Indianapolis, after all. This was proud Southern racing.

France took one last look at the approaching crowd and scratched the back of his neck. By 2:00 p.m. on June 19, 1949 — race time — it would be 91 degrees in Charlotte. And yet they came, many in the crowd showing up as much as four hours early. The orderly traffic looked a lot like what some fans loved best about auto racing: the sense that you were getting a grand view of controlled chaos.

* * *

"The credit for the popularity of Stock Car Racing belongs to the South, the 'Rebels' as the boys like to call themselves," wrote National Speed Sport News technical editor Carl Green in an editorial six weeks before the Charlotte race.

The "Rebels" had for years gotten together for races on local dirt tracks on Saturday nights and Sundays, and in midweek features, wherever the money took them if the money was good enough. Farmers, moonshiners, truck drivers, family men, a great deal of them were kind, generous, civilized people who became pit bulls once they strapped themselves into cars and the races began. And beating and banging often led to frustration and anger.

"You used to drive thirty minutes and fight thirty minutes," said Buck Baker, a thick-browed, short-tempered truck driver turned racer from Charlotte.

"You had to be insane to mess with any of those people," added his son Buddy, himself a talented race winner who grew up watching his father battle on and off the track. "They made their living with their wit. You knock somebody in the fence, you better be able to either outrun him or whip his fanny 'cause those guys went to it. There weren't any regulations and there weren't any penalties. You had to be able to survive till the next week and those guys made sure that it wasn't pleasant if you [hit] them."

Many of the racers, track owners, and promoters had long done well for themselves in the moonshine business. Stock car racing grew in the South at least in part from dares and brags among those who carried loads of white lightning in their trunks and eluded the state troopers. Whose 'shine-running car was fastest? Answering the question required taking those cars to a makeshift track in an anonymous field to find out.

"Somebody could find a place, take a bulldozer, and make a circle and that's the way it was, to begin with," said Paul Cawley, who ran a popular filling station on Grandon Street in Roanoke, Virginia, where a large group of stock car racers congregated in the 1940s and '50s. "Everybody tried it. Finally it ended up getting like [better tracks in] Martinsville, Starkey, Lynchburg, and different places in West Virginia. A lot of quarter-milers. Start with a guy with a bulldozer, but they got better. But you still had all that dust and sand flying.

"You bang fenders, you get out, you fight, you carry on," he added with a smile. "That was the life."

If there was a sense of lawlessness — and several drivers and owners kept their guns with them at the track — it extended to promoters, a number of whom would skip town with the profits in the middle of the race, leaving many competitors in need of gas money to get home. In other cases, a prize would hardly match the effort and expense.

"I won a damn race once and I got a fifth of wine and a damn ham meat," Buck Baker said.

Bill France had come to know this truth well, having begun racing in the late 1920s on local tracks near home. He'd run in 1930 at a wellpromoted race promising a $500 winner's share, and after collecting only $10 for finishing third, he was told the promise had been made simply to bring in drivers and fans.

As good a racer as France was — "And he was a much better racer than he ever got credit for," according to Fielden — mentioning his driving skills is like remembering Babe Ruth solely as a fine pitcher. France's acumen suited him better off the track. He'd been named William Henry Getty France by his parents — the additional middle name recalling the business vision of the Getty name — and he took the mantle seriously.

France had moved to Daytona Beach, Florida, in 1934, at twentyfive, with his wife, Anne, and young son Billy. Daytona was then among the land speed capitals of the world, and for France, setting up a car repair shop in an auto-happy town seemed a savvy move to combat the sting of the Great Depression.

Months after his arrival, he watched Sir Malcolm Campbell run his long and sleek Rolls Royce–powered Blue Bird Streamliner over the hard packed Daytona sand at 276.82 miles per hour — short of the record but swift nonetheless. When the land speed demons packed up and left the next year, preferring the surface at Utah's Bonneville Salt Flats, nervous Daytona town officials, by then used to big local-event revenue, sanctioned a 1936 stock car race. The course wound along a stretch of beach and its parallel road, with the two straightaways joined by north and south dirt turns that, once the cars began grinding their way over them, became terribly rutted, turning quickly into surfaces more inclined for demolition than speed.

Economically, the race proved disastrous, as fans had an easy time sneaking in without paying. France finished fifth, but more important, he saw the greater potential for a Daytona event if done right. Within two years, the races on the 4.1-mile beach-and-road course were run by France, who partnered with Charlie Reese, a popular Daytona restaurateur. Through heavy promotion and crowd control (France and his wife had staffers put up signs warning of rattlesnakes to keep nonpaying customers from sneaking in through the rock and brush), he began to operate races on the beach successfully. He didn't do too badly behind the wheel either.

* * *

After the war (France had spent those years at the Daytona Boat Works), servicemen returned in victory, and a feeling of normalcy and expectant prosperity filled the country. Few symbols could match the new mindset better than a new factory car stamped out of Detroit.

When Detroit began auto production once again, France became enamored with the idea of Everyman racing those brand-new cars to victory. Why couldn't stock car racing be a bit more like Indianapolis, the motorsports mecca where, thanks to postwar renovations, Continental and European champions once again vied for racing glory on the dazzling asphalt and brick surface? In order to be that, Southern racing needed rules, and safety measures, and guarantees.

And the moonshining sport would also need an image adjustment.

France fit in with the drivers, promoters, and owners. Wearing, at various times, most of those hats earned him trust across the board in a sport where each group was often wary of the others.

And he could easily slip into the role of the slightly older, more responsible, regular guy. "Big Bill, he loved to party," said Paul Sawyer, longtime owner of Richmond International Raceway. "He'd come to the parties in Daytona, or anywhere, Atlanta, didn't make no difference to him. But in those days, the fraternization was closer."

For all his camaraderie, France remained adamant about his ideas for growing the sport. On December 14, 1947, he invited thirty-five of the nation's chief representatives of the sport to join him in the Ebony Room at the top of Daytona's Streamline Hotel. During a series of meetings over several days, France laid out his vision for a necessary organization. "I believe stock car racing can become a nationally recognized sport by having a national point standing, which embraces the majority of large stock car events," he offered.

But image, he told those assembled, was key, and the cars on the tracks — along with the conditions of the facilities — would spell the difference. A racer might be driving what was once a spanking-new Cadillac, but after letting the thing get dirty and overused — he didn't bring up the idea of mechanics reworking the shocks and springs to make them moonshine-ready — it would look like, as he put it, a "jalopy."

Many of the participants came to the meeting out of curiosity more than anything else. Given the disorganized state of racing at the time, from the arguing factions to the lack of a presence beyond the South, the notion that France might somehow rise up and corral everybody inside one circus-like big top struck a percentage of those in the Ebony Room as pretty comical.

But whatever France may have lacked in traditional book smarts — he'd dropped out of high school after two years — he more than made up for in his understanding of human nature, and the independent streak that drove competitors to get behind the wheel.

He was more than happy to lose the National Champion Stock Car Circuit designation that he'd been promoting races under. At the meetings, well-known mechanic Red Vogt suggested the title National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing, or NASCAR. The new association's slogan was, "Racing that is open to everyone."

The meetings produced a charter, guaranteed purses, basic benefits, the beginning of a plan to deal with "after-race arguments," and general guidelines for conduct and misconduct.

There would be three divisions, and while the Modifieds were the bread and butter of stock car racing, France was banking on strictly stock as his wild card.

The Modifieds had always been the sport's reliable, comfortable, profitable option. It was also the perfect symbol for a sport whose players were long used to doing things entirely on their own terms. You could fashion something fast out of the extra parts in the junk heap. And pushing the modification envelope was the normal practice, the secrets of speed and better grip on the track being jealously guarded by mechanics. The only people who cheated to get further ahead, as the saying went, were those who got caught.

* * *

Strictly stock became more viable by 1949. New car manufacturing was way up. While auto factories sold 2.1 million units in 1946 — the first full year of postwar production — the number nearly doubled by 1948.

In January 1949, France flew his plane to Detroit to keep up discussions with automakers and spread the word about strictly stock. A brandnew racecar that wins on a Sunday, he told all who would listen, would be a boon for sales come Monday. What better way to sell new cars than to promote them as winners on racetracks?

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Excerpted from "Nascar Legends"
by .
Copyright © 2011 Robert Edelstein.
Excerpted by permission of Abrams Books.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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