Driving with the Devil

by Neal Thompson

  Byron couldn't have agreed more but had no choice but to swallow France's decree. Despite turning in one of the most successful racing seasons in motorsports history, Byron's achievement would elude the history books, because (a) stock car racing was still considered the equivalent of a circus sideshow, and (b) in stock car racing, Bill France's word was now law.

  * Most racetracks were a mile or a half mile in length, and races were even-numbered events of 25, 50,100, or 150 miles. Because Daytona's Beach-and-Road course was 3.2 miles long, races were often 160 miles —or fifty 3.2-mile laps.

  * In the early days, a trench was dug beside the start-finish line at most racetracks, where each car's backup crew kept gas cans and extra tires. That trench, or “pit,” was later replaced with a ground-level area that came to be called “pit road.”

  * Actually, Roy Hall averaged an incredible ninety-two miles an hour in a 1946 Daytona race, in the same Vogt-tuned car. But that wasn't considered an “official” race, and therefore, his feat was not entered into any record books — among many examples of sloppy record keeping and the need for an official organization to oversee stock cars.

  * Number 22 had been assigned to Byron by AAA, based on his finish in the AAA standings the previous year. AAA's champ always put 1 on his car the following year; the runner-up was assigned car 2, and so on — except for unlucky 13, which was skipped. Byron initially finished twenty-first in AAA's 1946 standings, which gave him number 22 for the 1947 season. Byron was then bumped up to nineteenth place when two drivers who had finished ahead of him in the standings were killed in late 1946.

  * Decoration Day was the holiday created to honor Union soldiers who died in the Civil War. People would decorate soldiers' graves on that day. It was later renamed Memorial Day, but many southerners still considered it a Yankee holiday.

  * In a sign of the spurious motorsports journalism of the day, one North Carolina columnist wrote a story about a bird, allegedly a starling, flying into Byron's path, cracking his windshield and glancing off Byron's goggles, cracking the glass. Race officials were said to have waved a red flag, a signal for Byron to pull out because he couldn't legally qualify with a broken windshield. The story was apparently false.

  * Peachtree was killed while he and his chauffeur were driving to Florida for the wealthy bootlegger's annual vacation. The story goes that their car either slammed into a parked flatbed truck or was run off the road by one. Peachtree was killed, but the chauffeur emerged unscratched, which raised the Flock boys' suspicions. Police didn't find any of the gold jewelry or wadded bills Peachtree usually had on him, and the dazed chauffeur gave a confusing account of what had happened. The nephews finally decided that their uncle must have been killed by a rival bootlegger, who had paid off the chauffeur. The police never investigated.

  Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test

  a man's character, give him power.

  — ABRAHAM LINCOLN

  12

  “Next thing? we know,

  NASCAR belongs to Bill France”

  S peed Age magazine had launched earlier in 1947, a publication geared mostly toward devotees of open-wheel racing, AAA-sponsored events, Indy-style cars, and their miniature versions, the sprints and midgets. In a sign of stock car racing's creeping legitimacy, the editors sent a crew of reporters that summer to both Atlanta and Daytona Beach, ordering them to learn more about this raggedy new kind of racing. In their article “Their Business Is Stocks,” the writers told a wide-eyed account of rambunctious southern stock car races, the funny-talking fans, and the scarred, moonshining drivers, as if they'd discovered some long-lost tribe. Using terms such as gol-durndest and hell for leather, the writers introduced readers to Red Byron, Ed Samples, the Flock boys, Bill France, and Red Vogt, whom they called “the doctor of soupology.” They wrote, “It is said that Vogt can get more out of a Ford engine than any man living.”

  They breathlessly described the race at Lakewood Speedway in which Byron had bumped Jack Etheridge, causing him to swerve crazily through a wooden fence.

  “Boards splinter as metal meets wood and the car disappears through the hole in the fence. The driver steps jauntily from the wreck and lights a cigarette,” the story went. “This scene is reenacted time and time again throughout the South… and the fans are ready to fight if you should deny that it is the greatest show in auto racing.

  “If there's ever a stock car race in your area, don't miss it.”

  In subsequent months, the Maryland-based Speed Age began to receive letters from appreciative southern fans, urging the editors to dedicate even more ink to their sport. “These stock jobs draw larger crowds than any other kind of racing in the South,” a writer from Greensboro, North Carolina, said. “If you want your magazine to be a success in this area, you had better include some stories about them, too.”

  Looking back, the magazine's editors would later acknowledge that they were witnessing the first signs of a revolution in automobile racing. Stock cars and their jockeys were about to grow out of their uncertain, adolescent novelty stage into a viable threat to Indy and AAA dominance. In less than ten years, the world of auto racing would see Bill France and stock car racing dethrone AAA entirely.

  By the end of 1947, France had begun to sense some of AAAs vulnerabilities and conceits. He had become a student of AAA, borrowing from the organization some of its rules and regulations, the tools he'd need to enforce consistency and uniformity upon the stock car drivers, tracks, and promoters along the East Coast.

  France acknowledged in late 1947 that consistency and uniformity in stock car racing had proved to be a “pretty tough” task, one that had led to many “after-the-race arguments” and even a few fistfights. One problem was that all but a few of 1947's “stock cars” were still prewar Ford V-8s, mostly 1939s that had been so modified over the years they were now anything but “stock.”

  By definition, a stock car was a pure, unalloyed passenger vehicle without any modifications or alterations. From the beginning, of course, racing purely stock cars had proved impossible, with wheels falling off, radiators exploding, and engines seizing. Race promoters and sanctioning bodies made allowances for such nonstock alterations as larger radiators and stronger lug nuts to keep the right-side wheels from tearing off. Without such allowances, they'd never have had enough cars for a good race. But as the list of allowable modifications grew to include extra carburetors and higher-compression manifold heads, the list also began to vary wildly from group to group.

  During his racing days, for example, Bill France would travel to Pennsylvania and find that the Northeast's definition of “stock” differed from the Southeast's definition, and he'd have to remove a few modifications in order to race at, say, Langhorne. Some race promoters held fast to a strict definition of stock and called their races “strictly stock.” Others acknowledged reality and called their events “semistock.” Some preferred the term modified stocks. Still others said, To hell with stocks, allowing drivers to go so far as to tear off their car's fenders and cut off the roof, creating a motley racer called a “roadster.” France and his governing body, the NCSCC, had a nearly impossible time enforcing such a “haphazard” mix of rules and regulations.

  Hardly any of the eight-year-old cars competing in the stock car races of 1947 were “stock” cars, by its true definition. Some, such as the contraptions Vogt and Byron created in the black of night, had so many aftermarket, experimental, and homemade parts, they could barely be called “Fords” any longer. Or they contained multiple shades of Ford: a 1934 front end, a 1936 transmission, a 1939 engine.

  France knew he'd have to firm up the rules or, before long, jet-powered “stock” cars with wings would be soaring down the backstretch at Daytona. And he knew he had to act fast, to get ahead of the mishmash of groups that continued to flock to stock car racing in 1947. The sport had grown beyond its southern roots and had given rise to the American Stock Car Racing Association in New Jersey, the New
England Stock Car Circuit in Rhode Island, and other groups in the West and Midwest.

  The most logical group to pull all of the various stock car groups under its ample umbrella would have been AAA, whose Contest Board was approaching fifty years of racing expertise. But France felt that AAA and his rival, Sam Nunis, were elitist, usurious, and dictatorial. Stock car racing needed to remain an affordable, everyman sport. France felt strongly that AAA was an “outsider” and shouldn't be allowed to take over.

  AAA had experimented with stock cars over the years but still hadn't resolved what its role should be. Some of AAA's New York-based chiefs still didn't even consider stock car events real races, calling them “junk car events” and part of a fad that was “dying out.” They held stock car racing in the same esteem as demolition derbies or stunt driving and advised that the organization keep its distance. Only Sam Nunis seemed to realize that the fast-growing popularity of stock cars had opened the door for someone to step up and take control of the sport's tracks, promoters, schedules, and rules. Nunis continued to tout the potential profits to be made in stock cars, even as AAA's Contest Board kept warily inching away from the dirty, junky sport.

  For all those reasons—the lack of consistent rules, the disparate racing organizations, the alphabet soup of competing racing acronyms— Bill France decided in late 1947 to invite all of the big names in stock car racing down to his hometown for a roundtable meeting. With the success of his NCSCC that year, France felt he was in a position to suggest the creation of a more substantial governing body for stock car racing. He also felt sure the drivers, mechanics, promoters, and car owners would follow his lead.

  After all, he said, “I was one of them.”

  France announced his call to arms in Speed Age magazine and other racing publications, in which he proposed a meeting of the best minds in stock car racing. Two dozen of the major players in stock cars began arriving at the Streamline Hotel in Daytona Beach on December 14, 1947.* Most were from Atlanta or Daytona Beach, but France had invited a number of racers, mechanics, promoters, and car owners from New Jersey, Rhode Island, New York, Ohio, Connecticut, and Massachusetts, including representatives of other regional stock car associations and organizations.

  Just past noon on that cool mid-December Sunday, they climbed the stairs to the Ebony Room, a dark, outer-space-themed cocktail lounge with star-speckled walls one flight above the Streamline Hotel. The stated purpose of the gathering was the year-end convention for France's National Championship Stock Car Circuit, at which participants would review the year's racing season and suggest improvements for next year. But over the next forty-eight hours, the meeting evolved into something broader and not entirely expected, birthing a much more profound result than even France foresaw.

  After temporary appointments were made—a chairman, secretary, treasurer, and such—France took control of the meeting. Sitting at the head of a handful of pushed-together tables, in his deep, insistent, enthusiastic voice, France gave an hour's worth of cheerleading remarks as the others scribbled notes on cocktail napkins, smoked, and sipped drinks. “Nothing stands still in the world,” France began. “Things get better or worse, bigger or smaller.…

  “Stock car racing has been my whole life,” he said. He believed the sport was now at a crossroads—stuck between better and worse. What began as the accidental sport of southern moonshiners had now grown into a legitimate and increasingly popular pastime, solid proof that racing was no longer solely the domain of wealthy northerners. But if stock car racing was to continue its ascent, it had to be standardized and formalized.

  France argued that stock car racing offered a simpler, more accessible form of automotive competition than the elitist AAA races with their expensive, tubular racing machines. Southern racing allowed amateurs and hobbyists to take their regular, Detroit-made, off-the-showroom-floor “stock” models to the track. “An average man in a fast automobile can still win races if he's just a reasonably good driver,” France said.

  With a reasonably strong organization behind it, said France, “I believe stock car racing can become a nationally recognized sport”—//, he added, the sport was handled “properly.” France looked around the table, into the faces of Red Vogt, Red Byron, Fonty Flock, Ed Samples, and others. “Right here within our own group rests the outcome of stock car racing in the country today,” he said.

  The meeting broke up at 5:15, with plans to reconvene the next morning. Raymond Parks had chosen not to sit in on the meeting itself but mingled with the others afterward in the bar. France had invited a group of models from a local charm school to mingle with the men. Parks, looking handsome in a tailored suit, crisp white shirt, and dark tie—easily the best-dressed man in the room—sat at the bar between two women in bathing suits, buying them drinks, one of them patting his back.

  Fonty Flock flirted with two of the bathing suit-clad models, and one sat in Bill France's lap. Red Byron sat in a corner with Red Vogt and a few others, flipping through the latest issue of Speed Age magazine, talking about the new “Tech Topics” column Byron had been invited to write. A few of the men didn't recognize Vogt at first; in place of his white T-shirt and white chinos, he wore a black shirt and gray slacks. But, as usual, he was chain-smoking and cursing. During the meeting, the warning from his ex-wife—”I don't trust that man”—had echoed in the back of Vogt's mind.

  Vogt wasn't alone. Some of the participants were wary of France's intentions. He seemed to be mapping out a much more significant role for himself than for anyone else. But by the end of the first night, sufficiently lubricated by free booze and beautiful women, the soon-to-be founders of a new sport seemed ready to follow France's lead.

  The next morning, slightly hungover and hoarse, the group met after breakfast back in the Ebony Room. France kicked things off by reminding the men why they were there: to create rules, and possibly a new umbrella group, to govern auto races for “plain, ordinary working people,” for mechanically inclined men with a sedan and a dream.

  “Stock car racing has got distinct possibilities for Sunday shows,” France said. “It would allow race-minded boys that work all week who don't have enough money to afford a regular racing car [to] be competition to the rich guy. It allows them the opportunity to go to a race track on Sunday and show their stuff and maybe win a prize and not make it their full-time job.”

  France knew some of the attendees were skeptical representatives from other organizations, who had likely agreed to come simply so they could spy. He assigned a couple of them to committees and told them to go off and meet on their own. France later acknowledged his tactic was a “ruse” to get his “rivals” out of his hair.

  More than a few of the attendees had been moonshiners and numbers runners, or still were. And to those in the group who'd left school before their teens, France's words sounded eloquent and well reasoned. After years of promoting races, France had become confident and comfortable in front of a crowd of peers. He had always had a strong, loud voice, but now he'd developed a slick salesman's tongue to go with it. Plus, at nearly six and a half feet tall, he loomed inches above nearly every other man in the room.

  The three dozen whiskey-sipping cigar-puffers took France's sales pitch and ran with it. They sat around long, narrow tables, surrounded by the star-themed wallpaper and a haze of cigar smoke. The room stayed poorly lit and hazy most of the day as they first argued over how to unambiguously define a “stock” car and then began negotiating which guidelines the sport's promoters and drivers should follow for the 1948 season.

  France suggested a point-tallying system for 1948 that would have 5-point increments: 100 points for a victory, 95 points for second place, 90 for third, and so on. The smaller increments of such a system would make the yearlong championship race even closer than it had been in 1947. But Red Byron suggested sticking with the 10-point increments that the NCSCC had used in 1947: 100 points for a win; 90 for second; 80 for third; and so on down to 10 points for tenth place, then 9
points for eleventh place, and on down to zero. The group chose Byron's suggestion. Next, the men agreed to deposit some of the profits of each race into an escrow account, funds that would be used to pay the year-end bonuses to drivers who'd earned the most points. France stressed that this fund was a crucial financial incentive that would keep drivers loyal to the new organization. France also suggested the creation of a benevolent fund to help injured drivers pay for medical bills, which was approved.

  Races for 1948 would be grouped into three different divisions: “modifieds,” “roadsters,” and a “strictly stock” division. The modified division would essentially be a continuation of the predominant stock car racing of the day. Modified races would host passenger vehicles whose engines and suspension could be altered, but the list of do's and don'ts would be refined so that mechanics such as Vogt didn't get too carried away with their crafty modifications.

  The roadster division was also for “stock” passenger cars but would have fewer rules, allowing those cars to be modified even more than the modifieds. Roofs and fenders could be cut off, until the cars looked like California-style hot rods.

  Finally, the “strictly stock” division would host new cars and enact much stricter limits on any performance-enhancing alterations, so that the cars were more purely “stock” cars and looked more like a passenger car than a race car. However, because carmakers were still getting up to their full postwar production and hadn't yet introduced too many new models, the strictly stock division would be postponed until 1949.

  Since roadster racing was a relatively unproven concept in the South, and the strictly stock events were on hold, the biggest events of 1948 would be the modifieds—off-the-rack, American-made cars, with lights and mufflers removed and doors strapped shut and engines and suspensions altered, albeit within reason, to help them perform on washboard dirt tracks. All three divisions would race on dirt tracks, which France believed “is more than necessary to make stock car racing a good show.”