From moonshine to Daytona – the birth of NASCAR

Curtis Turner was a barnstorming wild man – another ’shiner – from Floyd, Virginia, who once put his ’plane down on a suburban street, and whose clown prince drinking buddy and two-time champion Joe Weatherley – they called each and everyone ‘Pops’ – once practised a race car while wearing a Peter Pan costume.

That’s nothing. Alabamian Tim Flock, another backwoods bootlegger and two-time champion, for a time raced with a pet rhesus monkey alongside – until ‘Jocko’ broke free from his seat, ran amok in the cabin and cost his owner a victory.

They weren’t all Johnny Reb devils: two-time champion Ned Jarrett of Conover, North Carolina, was nicknamed ‘Gentleman’ and regularly attended church, and Floridian Edward Glenn Roberts Jnr’s’ nickname ‘Fireball’ referred to his pitching arm rather than temper.

What linked them was a love of speed, a feel for balancing big cars on narrow tyres – and an imposing individual born in DC but relocated to Daytona Beach, Fla.

Bill France had caught the racing bug as a kid during 1920s’ America’s brief fancy for steeply banked board tracks. When time and finances allowed he competed on dirt ovals and – after withdrawing his $75 savings to begin a new life in the South – on Daytona’s sand of Land Speed Record renown.

A burgeoning ‘jalopy’ scene was unruly verging on unholy, but France saw the appeal and efficacy of a sport that visited towns otherwise starved of spectacle. So this filling station owner assembled a group of businessmen – from motorcycle dealer to turnip farmer – at his local Streamline Hotel. It would be wrong to say that they were likeminded but certainly all were intrigued at least.

What emerged was the National Stock Car Racing Association – until it was pointed out that a group in Georgia had dibs on that name – plus a points system jotted on a napkin. The National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing hit the road in 1948 with divisions for open-wheel Roadsters (soon to be dropped because they were too damn Yankee) and pre-war Modifieds.

The mooted division for Strictly Stock, put on hold while manufacturers recovering from war built sufficient stocks of ‘full-fendered’ cars, held its first race in June 1949 at Charlotte Speedway, back then a three-quarter-mile dirt oval. Its winner was Glenn Dunaway of Gastonia, North Carolina – until his ’47 Ford was discovered to be fitted with strictly illegit springs.

Writs were writ and it went to court. The feud between France and his extended family of outlaws had begun.

Colarado-born Robert ‘Red’ Byron from Anniston, Alabama, was the inaugural champion despite a severe limp, legacy of his being badly shot-up in a Consolidated B-24 Liberator during WWII.

His car’s owner Raymond Parks, a ’shiner with Southern hospitality manners, insisted that the old Oldsmobile be repaired and polished between races. He also coined the phrase about starting with a huge fortune in order to make a small one from motor racing.

Yet when Lee Petty became the first three-time Grand National champion 10 years later – by which time the series had expanded from eight to 44 races – it was possible to make a good living at it. Petty’s winnings for that season were $49,291; his Rookie of the Year son Richard cleared $8,110. It sure beat working in a mill – cotton or saw- – or breeding chickens, or whatever else it had taken to make ends meet.

Petty Enterprises, from a cramped shed propped by cedar poles, had put Randleman, North Carolina, on the map.

NASCAR was national news by now thanks to France’s bold construction of a steeply banked cathedral of speed at Daytona. And the three-day delay in revealing the result of the photo-finish of its inaugural 500-miler of 1959 put it on the front pages.

Detroit had definitely gotten wind and Chrysler, Ford and GM all wanted to sell on Monday. France tried to keep them sweet and even-steven but wasn’t afraid to come down hard if, when – and preferably before – things turned sour on Sundays. For his asset had become a prize, and there were threats to it from within, too.

When in 1961 he discovered that Turner had approached Teamsters’ boss Jimmy Hoffa for a loan to prop his new Charlotte Motor Speedway in return for unionising the drivers, France banned NASCAR’s most popular performer for life; ‘usual suspect’ Flock was sent down, too.

France rescinded this eventually – after the fatal accidents of Weatherly and Roberts in 1964 – but remained bullish.

When in 1969 rising speeds and delaminating tyres caused a twitchy Professional Drivers Association, led by Richard Petty, to walk from the first Grand National race at his 200mph track at Talladega, Alabama, France broke the strike with a field of mainly second-tier drivers.

Petty was the ‘The King’ but ‘Big Bill’ – his size was a definitely factor – was still the boss. By the time his son ‘Little Billy’ was handed the reins in 1972, NASCAR had begun its 33-year association with RJ Reynolds’ Winston cigarette brand and some of its races were being beamed live across the nation.

And The Last American Hero, based on a 1965 essay for Esquire by Tom Wolfe, was being shot. In it, leading man Jeff Bridges plays ‘Junior’ Jackson, a North Carolina hothead threatened with reform school who knuckles down to a career racing stock cars after his father is thrown in prison for moonshining.

Typical Hollywood: never let the facts get in the way of a good story.