Driving with the Devil

by Neal Thompson

  The face of the sport was changing, too. Many of stock car racing's first stars were dead, retired, or coming to their senses. Many who'd raced before the war were now in their thirties and dropping out, looking for real jobs, starting families. Lloyd Seay was dead; Roy Hall behind bars. Bill France had stopped racing, though he was involved more than ever as a promoter and sanctioner.

  In the early postwar days, stock car events were filled with eager, greenhorn young men just back from battle, looking for adventure on the racetrack. Some veteran racers, including the bootleggers, grumbled about the inexperienced new drivers and how racetracks were being littered with the wrecked carcasses of amateurs' cars. Furthermore, the cars themselves contributed to the increasingly downtrodden look of stock car racing. Because no new postwar car models had rolled out of the factories yet, racers still competed in beat-up, ragged-looking late-1930s Fords. And at six or eight years old, a Ford V-8 coupe looked as if it had been through a war itself.

  Into this uncertain era roared a promising new batch of speed demons. As had been the case from the beginning, many were whiskey drivers, and more than a few hailed from Dawsonville, Georgia. Notable among the liquor trippers were Gober Sosebee and the 1946 champ, Ed Samples, both of whom as teens a decade earlier had been inspired by Seay and Hall. One night just before the war, Samples was shot three times in a moonshining argument. He recovered, but later, after watching one of Seay's final races, he told a friend, “I gotta try something safer than moonshine. I think I'll try racing.”

  The newcomers didn't exactly know what to make of Red Byron. They knew that he could race, that he was a good mechanic, that he was affiliated with two of the sport's most potent forces, Parks and Vogt. But he was also something of an anomaly. He didn't drink the way they did. He didn't run moonshine the way they did. He didn't talk the way they did. He smoked cigars instead of cigarettes, wore nice shirts and slacks instead of overalls. Sometimes he even raced fancy open-wheel cars way up north. He may have been born in Virginia, but his childhood was certainly nothing like their own Dixie youths. And why was he so damn quiet? Instead of lingering after a race to sip whiskey, clown around, and chase women, he'd get back in the car with his sultry wife and just disappear.

  Byron was wary of them as well. He may have been relieved to have competitors such as Roy Hall and Bill France out of the racing picture. But the new boys were clearly an ornery, aggressive bunch, ready to challenge any edge that Hall's absence might have given Byron. Of particular concern to Byron were the Flock brothers, Bob and Fonty, a veritable Mutt and Jeff team. In nearly every picture of the Flock brothers through the 1940s, Fonty is smiling; Bob is not.

  Bob had served with an army infantry unit during the war but was discharged in 1943 with a “nervous condition” and “bad stomach,” for which he continued to collect disability. He would drive Roy Hall's car for the Parks team throughout 1947.

  Fonty had vowed never to race again after his terrible wreck at Daytona Beach in 1941, when his seat belt snapped and he was tossed around like a puppy in a clothes dryer. But after recovering from his injuries and serving stateside with the army, he couldn't stay away and had found a car and a sponsor for the 1947 season. And if two Flocks wasn't bad enough, before year's end the youngest brother, Tim, would join the sport as well—a triple threat of moonshining Flock boys.

  Byron had reason to feel like an outsider in a world jammed so full of bootleggers, both active and retired. He belonged to that minority of stock car drivers who'd never had a revenuer on his tail, who'd never felt the cool touch of prison bars in his hands.

  Daytona Beach and its warm February weather had become host to the traditional first race of the season. The first race of 1947 would also kick off the first full year of Bill France's promising new NCSCC organization.

  On January 26, Red Byron thankfully had just one Flock to contend with: nervous, blue-eyed, superstitious Bob, who always dipped his knuckles into the dirt before each race and tasted the grit for luck. Lined up with Byron and Flock were Sosebee, Samples, and two dozen other threats, every last one of them in a prewar Ford.

  Adding to the day's drama was the presence of camera crews from Universal and Paramount studios, which planned to include highlights of the fifty-lap, 160-mile race* with their newsreels shown in movie theaters. Apparently, word of the steel-crunching contests had reached Hollywood, and these would become the first nationally broadcast images of the South's homemade, decade-old racing style.

  Before the race, sportswriters wondered in print whether Byron, now thirty-one, was still capable of handling the Beach-and-Road course— and his much-younger competitors. Raymond Parks wondered the same. He knew Byron's health wasn't what it should be for such grueling races. Byron's upper body was now strong, his arms ropy and taut, to compensate for his battered lower half. As such, steering wasn't the problem. It was that clutch pedal. Even with the fatigue pins, the clutch proved a challenge. Byron's damaged leg would have to depress the pedal dozens of times over the 160 miles.

  As race time approached, Red Vogt skittered around the car, parked behind pit road.* He had made small adjustments to his makeshift clutch pedal, searching for just the right spacing of the two pins so Byron's boot would fit snugly between them, tight enough so the rutted track wouldn't shake his foot off the pedal during the two-hour ride.

  Byron's pit crew—which included a new crew chief named “Fat” Russell—helped him get into the car, while Parks, well dressed as usual, wished Byron luck. As the green flag was dropped, Ed Samples rocketed ahead of the twenty-seven others, as if they had all forgotten to put their cars into gear. By the time the rest of the field had reached full speed, Samples was already half a mile ahead. Within five laps around the 3.2-mile course, he was a full lap ahead of the others, averaging ninety-three miles an hour.

  Byron never understood such Roy Hall-like showboating. The ten thousand fans loved to watch Ford V-8s pushed to their maximum limits. But no car, no matter how well tuned, could withstand such a pace for 160 miles. In no time, Samples's impetuous, full-speed assault began to do terrible things to his overworked engine, which finally exploded in a plume of smoke. As usual, Byron had gambled on a high attrition rate and held back as other racers blew engines or tires and, one by one, did themselves in.

  After Samples dropped out, Jack Etheridge built up a three-mile lead until his engine also seized, allowing Byron to take the lead at lap number thirty. Leading a race just past the halfway point was a bit too soon for Byron, and it made him uneasy to be alone out front with twenty more laps looming ahead—especially with Bob Flock now stalking menacingly behind his trunk. Flock decided to make his move on the forty-fifth lap, at the approach to the north turn. Driving a Ford that also had Red Vogt's magic inside, Flock accelerated into the turn and tried to pass Byron on the outside. The north turn had long been the spot where a Daytona Beach race was won or lost. This time, the thick sand of the turn's outer edge grabbed hold of Flock's right rear wheel, which violently snapped off its hub and spun crazily toward the grandstands.

  Despite repeated warnings from announcers to back away, fans were standing on the apron of the track and Flock's whirligigging wheel slammed into the group like a bowling ball into pins. Once again, the fans were lucky. Only three men were taken to the local hospital, the worst of them with a snapped leg. Flock tried to keep driving on three wheels, but his Ford soon collapsed, and Byron sped on ahead toward the checkered flag. With no challengers within striking distance, Byron wisely eased up and drove cautiously over the last fifteen miles.

  By the time Byron crossed the finish line, just twelve of the twenty-eight starters were still running. Even driving tentatively through the last laps, Byron pulled into victory lane four miles ahead of the second-place finisher. He earned one thousand dollars and praise from the noted but fickle sportswriter Bernard Kahn, who called him “steady driving Byron … a bespectacled, balding wounded war veteran who wears a steel brace and drives with a special cl
utch to offset the handicap of a lame left leg.” Kahn praised Byron for “plugging away to cash in on a nice job of driving, endurance and mechanical efficiency.”

  It was Byron's second win in three starts at Daytona, and in the weeks to come, his story would begin to spread. Sportswriters praised this “redhead with a flaming spirit to match.” The story tumbled domino-like across the South, whose writers latched onto the hard-luck tale of an unlikely, underdog hero with “a war injury that rendered his left leg almost useless.” Some writers puffed up the story and hyperbolized that Byron's withered and paralyzed left leg—”filled with Jap shrapnel!”—was actually bolted directly onto the clutch pedal. A few said it was bolted to the accelerator. Others said variously that his foot had been shot off or that the left leg was missing altogether.

  The leg. It's what distinguished him, and that troubled Byron. Already something of an outsider in his field, he wanted to be known as a racer, not a crippled racer. When asked about his success, Byron preferred to discuss the technical details of his engines and, always humble, to give credit to his team of Parks and Vogt. But when pressed, he would admit that racing with only one good leg was tougher than it had been with two.

  “I get tired a little,” he told one writer. “But it doesn't bother me otherwise.”

  Byron would return to Daytona Beach six weeks later, on March 9, for a one hundred-mile race in unseasonably chilly weather. This time, he wasn't as grateful to his benefactors.

  Despite Nell's parting words—”Be careful, but win…”—Byron found himself a spectator. During a practice session, his engine overheated and cracked. The prerace favorite, Byron was scratched from the main event. There just wasn't enough time for Vogt to repair or replace the engine, especially since Vogt was still perfecting Bob Flock's red and white number 14 car, which was about to make history. As Byron watched from pit road, Flock quickly sloughed off the pack and stayed there for more than an hour.

  Unlike Byron, Flock had no qualms about holding on to first place, start to finish. His average speed of eighty-five miles an hour set a new record for a one hundred-mile race, previously held by Lloyd Seay, at seventy-eight miles an hour. *

  For Byron, driving seven hours to a race and then sitting in the pits with a busted engine was unacceptable. He decided, partly out of frustration, to cut back on his stock car-racing schedule to prepare for the event that was still the biggest show in auto racing.

  The five hundred-mile Indianapolis Classic, traditionally held on Memorial Day weekend, had been Byron's obsession ever since Barney Oldfield lured him into racing as a teen. Byron dreamed of whipping around the famed Brickyard, where racers were reaching 180 miles an hour along each of the two four thousand-foot straightaways.

  Despite a few disappointing second-place finishes and overheated engines in the early months of 1947, Byron still felt confident heading toward the thirty-first annual Memorial Day race at Indianapolis. Unlike the fairground races and the sloppy half-mile, red-dirt ovals of the South, Indy was a regal, sophisticated event. Marching bands kicked off a week of activity, and a parade of sleek, sexy cars arrived early so their strong young professional drivers could take practice laps and confer with their mechanics.

  The initial open-wheel racers of Indy were often built by European companies such as Peugeot, and by the 1930s and 1940s, some Maseratis, Mercedes, and Alfa Romeos cost as much as thirty-five thousand dollars. The 1920s and 1930s saw American carmakers such as Miller succeed at Indy. Engines made in the United States by Offenhauser, known as Offys, dominated the late 1930s at Indianapolis. But by 1947, the fastest open-wheel cars could still cost more than a house. By comparison, a Ford stock car, even with a slew of power-enhancing modifications, might be worth two thousand dollars.

  In recent months, Byron and Red Vogt had worked together, often all night, to cobble together a loaf-shaped, open-wheel car for Byron to take to Indy. Without thirty-five thousand dollars to spare, they had decided to try something new: a Frankensteinian merger of stock car and Indy car. The odd-looking vehicle consisted of a homemade chassis, with sheet metal molded around a steel-pipe frame. Vogt then installed a Ford V-8 inside, creating one of just three cars at Indy that year with a Ford engine—two of which would not qualify.

  Qualifying laps began a full week before the big race. Red and Nell drove out of Atlanta in late May in Red's Ford convertible. Vogt decided to loan Byron one of his mechanics, the hard-drinking Fat Russell, who followed behind the Byrons, towing the red and blue number 22 car northward toward Indiana.*

  Though Vogt would have felt out of place—like a thrift-store-clothed kid at a black-tie ball—Byron loved the upscale, celebrity feel of the event, with movie stars in the grandstands among well-dressed fans. Byron's would-be competitors ranked among the biggest names in mo-torsports: Mauri Rose, Bill Holland, Rex Mays, and Ted Horn.

  Despite the glitter and glamour, Indy was still a dangerous event and could be as potentially violent, deadly, and bizarre as any stock car race. Years earlier, a wheel flew off a car, over the racetrack fence, and into an adjacent backyard, where it landed on a twelve-year-old boy, killing him. Indy drivers competed in other AAA-sanctioned races, in their same open-cockpit cars, and despite the regularity with which they were flung from those cars—sometimes to be run over by peers—racers rarely wore seat belts and only recently had begun wearing hard-shell helmets. Some drivers kept them refrigerated the night before a race, to cool their heads during the miles of hard driving.

  Still, AAA events such as the Indy 500 were considered a “gentleman's” sport. Car owners were typically industrialists or heirs, often referred to as “sportsmen,” who had earned or inherited fortunes in beer, beef, or steel. Racing was their weekend hobby, just as racehorses occupied the spare time of other millionaires. Byron had to feel like an odd man out among such men, at a race called Decoration Day.*

  To qualify at Indy in 1947, drivers had to average 115 miles an hour for four laps. Ted Horn, the 1946 AAA champ, qualified for the pole position at 126 miles an hour in his beautiful Maserati. Although Horn had raced a Ford V-8 at Indianapolis back in 1935, Fords were now a rarity at Indy, even as they had come to dominate the dirt tracks of the stock car-racing circuit. It became clear during qualifications for the 1947 Indy 500 that Byron's Ford engine was out of its element and in the wrong league at the Brickyard.

  During practice laps, Byron bumped and bucked along the brick-paved macadam of the 2.5-mile track, a cigar locked in his jaw. But Byron's homemade racer—not nearly as sensual as a Maserati or an Alfa Romeo, nor as powerful as an Offy-powered car—strained to find enough zoom. The car wasn't hugging tightly to the surface the way it should. The suspension felt soft, and Byron phoned Vogt back in Atlanta and told him the car kept slewing to the right. “It's wanting to spin out,” he growled into the phone.

  Byron and Fat Russell kept making adjustments, and Byron returned to the track for his final shot at qualifying. After driving a few warm-up laps, he gave the timing official the thumbs-up, to indicate he was ready to start his four official qualification laps. Byron took his first lap at 114 miles an hour, then pushed his car to 114.85 on the second lap. He knew he'd have to do much better than that for the final two laps.

  Byron pushed the car just above 115 for the next two laps, but he could tell they hadn't worked out all the bugs. At the end of his four-lap attempt, he pulled into the pits and waited nervously for his results to be announced over the public address system. Finally, he learned that he was a hair too slow. His average speed was announced as 114.69 miles—close, but not enough to qualify.* He'd missed his chance by a split second. Heartbroken, Byron reluctantly called Vogt again and told him the bad news.

  “Well,” Vogt said, “just put it on the trailer and bring it home.”

  Byron and Nell stayed to watch the main event. Amid sixty-five thousand others, Byron watched with envy as fan favorite Bill Holland held the lead for the first hundred miles. Holland then unexpectedly skidded side
ways in front of the oncoming car of Shorty Cantlon, who unintentionally nudged Holland back into a forward position but whose car then drove headfirst into the concrete barrier. Cantlon was instantly killed.

  When drivers died on a racetrack, in both AAA/Indy races and stock car races, the protocol depended on the severity and gore. If the body was still intact—and many racers did die of head wounds or internal injuries, neither of which resulted in much blood or gore—race officials waved the yellow “caution” flag, which told drivers to slow to a crawl and stay in the same order; for bigger, bloodier wrecks, they waved a red flag, which brought racers to a temporary stop. Either way, the wreckage was cleaned up, the dead racer's body removed by ambulance, and the race restarted—the deceased would have wanted it that way being the assumption. Sportswriters would later euphemistically explain that the driver was “fatally injured” or his “injuries proved to be fatal.”

  After Cantlon's body and wreckage were cleared and the race restarted, Holland's teammate, Mauri Rose, took the lead with less than twenty miles to go and kept it. In another stark difference between the poor man's world of stock car racing and the “gentleman's” sport of Indy, Rose's winning purse totaled more than thirty-one thousand dollars. Even the day's last-place finisher won more than the first-place finisher of most stock car races.

  But Byron was not destined to partake of those riches. He thought about his lousy Indy weekend during the quiet drive home to Georgia. Despite his lifelong dream of an Indianapolis victory, he knew he was just as much an outsider in that world as in the world of stock car racing, if not more so. And the Ford V-8 seemed better suited for dirt tracks than such elite contests as Indy, whose open-wheelers were skittish greyhounds compared to Fords, old reliable hunting hounds. Sleek speed mattered more than reliability at Indy. Maybe, Byron pondered, the hound could be taught some new tricks.