Driving with the Devil

by Neal Thompson

  When reporters asked Vogt about his new motor, he shooed them away. He'd made his point on the racetrack and didn't need to brag. “What good is a motor if you don't have a jockey like Byron to bring it home for you?” was all Vogt would say.

  Bill France chummed with the press, boasting of the thrilling finish and the strong attendance by one of the largest crowds in Daytona Beach history. “What really made me happy was that the race was a good show for the fans,” France said.

  Raymond Parks, standing quietly off to the side of victory lane, was elated. No reporters came to speak to him. None recognized him as the driver “J. F. Fricks.” (In future years, friends would jokingly call him “Mr. Fricks.”) Parks preferred shadow to spotlight.

  It was his seventh Daytona victory in a row, and his fifth since World War II, a feat that would never be matched by another team owner. His racing fever was soaring. He was still shaky from the nerve-racking pace of driving in NASCAR's first official race. But he was proud of his team and beamed at Byron as if Byron were his own son. (Parks's real son, Ray Jr., was now a teen, but the two were largely estranged.) In the same way he had fathered Lloyd Seay and Roy Hall, Parks had nurtured Byron, both financially and emotionally.

  Parks knew that winning both the coveted Rayson trophy and the first NASCAR race meant a lot to Byron. If NASCAR survived, Byron's name would be featured in racing's history books. “I know this one was special to him,” Parks said.

  Red Byron's name was later etched for the third time into the Rayson Memorial loving cup, beneath the name Roy Hall. But instead of taking it back to Atlanta with him, Byron decided to give the trophy to his patron, Parks.

  Sportswriters once again adopted Byron as their darling: “Lord Byron… the wounded war veteran with a racing heart as big as a steering wheel.”

  NASCAR's inaugural race had not been a perfect launch. Despite France's promise of a “real corker,” drivers had been vexed by the soft, unpacked sand of the two turns. Byron was among many racers who complained that the north turn “got cut up pretty bad.” In fact, only twelve of the original fifty-six starters completed the race—a god-awful rate of 21 percent. Every single finisher was driving a 1939 Ford V-8.

  Still, with its numerous lead changes, acrobatic wrecks, and dramatic and emotional finish, the race had offered everything a stock car fan could have hoped for. No one had died or been seriously injured. Bill France was a happy man. Red Byron was happy. Raymond Parks was happy. And NASCAR's first season had only just begun.

  Soon, the Flock boys would be the happy ones. In fact, the first half of NASCAR's first season should have been renamed the “Flock Family Circus.”

  The family patriarch, Lee Preston Flock, had been a bicycle racer, an amateur tightrope walker, and the first man in Fort Payne, Alabama, to own a car, which he drove as a taxicab. He named one of his eight children after that car—Reo—and each of the eight kids seemed to absorb more than a one-eighth share of their father's adventurous spirit. The old man died after a mole on his forehead turned cancerous, leaving the family to struggle in his absence. Daughter Reo became a professional daredevil, performing motorcycle stunts, jumping out of airplanes, and walking on their wings. Eldest son Carl earned a world speedboat-racing record and then became a wealthy bootlegger in Atlanta, bringing three of his brothers into the moonshining business with him. Driving Ford V-8s at high speeds on North Georgia dirt roads was the perfect apprenticeship for Bob, Fonty, and Tim, who in 1948 threatened to become NASCAR's first dynasty. Even sister Ethel, named for the gasoline “ethyl” and who drove her dad's taxi after his death, had recently married a bootlegging race car owner and was thinking of joining her three brothers on the stock car-racing circuit. Despite Red Byron's impressive victory in NASCAR's premier, the first few months of NASCAR's existence were dominated by Flocks.

  Fonty, Bob, or Tim placed first or second in twenty of NASCAR's first twenty-five races. Byron was always right there with them, finishing among the top three in ten races, including four first-place finishes in a row through April and May.

  In no time, the battle for the 1948 season narrowed into a Fonty Flock versus Red Byron contest, an apparent repeat of 1947. In two out of every three races, Fonty or Red—or both—finished in the top three. Bill France couldn't have prayed for a better rivalry.

  Fonty once ran out of gas on the final lap, allowing Byron to win by a hundred yards. At another race, Byron also won by a football field, but a NASCAR scoring official overturned his victory and declared that Fonty had actually lapped Byron. A few weeks later, Fonty was two hundred yards from victory when another racer's wheel snapped off and smashed into his car, causing a mash-up with three others. Byron swerved sharply around the wreckage and sped past Fonty to take the checkered flag. At another race, Fonty was leading with two laps to go until his foot slipped off the gas and Byron jumped ahead. But Fonty caught him on the final straightaway and won by a few feet. So it went through the first half of 1948. At one point, the “two Atlanta crackers,” as one newspaper called them, were tied for the NASCAR points lead. Before race day, other drivers would bet on which of the two would win. Fonty was usually the 2-1 favorite.

  Fonty seemed the fans' favorite, too. He was the more natural driver of the two, and clearly the more southern. He waved at fans and drawled a legitimate drawl. Fonty had what one writer called “a bouncing rubber ball of a personality.” He dressed loudly and spoke fluently and even occasionally earned extra money selling vacuum cleaners door-to-door. Byron the nonsoutherner, on the other hand, was grave and aloof, stoic and cerebral—”a little older and smarter than the rest of us,” Ed Samples once said.

  Fans came in droves to catch a glimpse of the Flock-Byron “dogfight,” as the papers began calling it. NASCAR events regularly attracted more than ten thousand fans, lured to remote tracks in the rural Carolinas and Georgia. Sportswriters couldn't have asked for a better story and seemed to love both opponents—Byron was “the red-headed Huck Finn of racing,” and Fonty was “the clown prince of racing.” Writers would have loved to see them scuffle off the track, too, but had to settle for only subtle signs of the competitive rivalry. “Although there has been no outright hostility between these heavy footed chauffeurs, the air cools noticeably when they meet each other,” one writer said.

  Byron strung together a few victories to take the points lead away from Fonty. And yet, despite leading NASCAR, Byron still had one eye on Indianapolis.

  In 1947, his attentions had been divided between stock cars and AAA/Indy cars, and it had cost him the stock car championship. By missing just a few of the year's stock car races to compete in occasional open-wheel races, he ended up a few points shy of the stock car championship. For 1948, he planned to focus almost entirely on the new NASCAR circuit. Still, Indy had been “his greatest ambition,” his wife, Nell, once said.

  He had to give it one more shot. So he and Vogt rolled his number 22 Ford stock car into Vogt's garage bay, removed the V-8 engine, and installed it back in the Indy car Byron had raced the previous year. Byron and Nell then towed the car out to Indianapolis. It would be the only vehicle out of nearly seventy hopefuls with a Ford V-8 inside.

  Byron called Bill France and told him that he'd miss a few stock car races during his attempt to qualify at Indy. Keeping France in the loop, and NASCAR on his mind, wasn't just a courtesy. To earn points and stay competitive against Flock, Byron had to compete in as many NASCAR races as possible this year. Every day he was away from NASCAR gave Fonty a chance to advance. Plus, he didn't want to offend Big Bill and felt it was better that France hear directly from him about the attempt at Indianapolis instead of reading about it in the papers.

  Byron's first qualifying attempt at Indy was scheduled for the Friday before the race, which was typically held on the Sunday before Memorial Day but for 1948 was bumped to Monday. Byron hoped for a perfect alignment of events: to qualify at Indy on Friday, fly to North Carolina for two stock car races Saturday and Sunday, then fly back
to race at Indy on Monday.* But the engine was running rough on Friday, and he was unable to drive. On Saturday morning, the engine was still rough, and Byron was faced with a choice. His last chance to qualify at Indy would now be Sunday, which meant he'd miss the two stock car events and maybe lose ground in the NASCAR points standings.

  Having already decided to focus on NASCAR and not AAA, Byron reluctantly said good-bye to his Indy car, got on a plane, and flew to Greensboro, North Carolina, where he borrowed another racer's Dodge and raced in a forty-lap event that Saturday night, finishing sixth. Byron then drove over to the North Wilkesboro track for a Sunday-afternoon NASCAR race and finished second. Flock experienced engine problems in both races, so Byron managed to remain in a virtual tie with Flock.

  Still, Byron was heart-sunk at failing to qualify at Indy. Again.

  After flying back to Indianapolis to pick up Nell and his car, and then driving home to Atlanta, Byron returned to NASCAR and its southern tracks and the starting lineups that still, as they had for a decade, consisted mostly of Ford V-8s.

  Reluctantly, he was coming to terms with the stark truth of his career: he was a dirt-track driver, a Ford-driving stock car racer. If he was something of an outsider among southern stock car drivers, he was even more of an outsider in the elite world of open-wheel racing, whose stars were from the Northeast, the Midwest, or California. AAA drivers liked and respected him, admired the courage it took for a cripple to race on their tracks. But many considered him a good-hearted sideshow and not a dangerous threat. In short, Red Byron was a nice guy, with a good soul.

  Which were not exactly common traits among stock car racers.

  The 1948 NASCAR season remained as purely southern as its moonshining origins. Its top drivers and mechanics hailed mostly from Atlanta. Over the years, the most notable rivalries—Lloyd Seay versus Roy Hall, Roy Hall versus the Flock brothers, and now Red Byron versus Fonty Flock—had all been Atlanta-versus-Atlanta battles. Still, Byron remained the only one in that group who wasn't really southern. He didn't grow up on a farm, didn't learn to drive by delivering the family whiskey, and hadn't seen the inside of a jail cell. He was the rare NASCAR driver without a criminal record.

  And yet, he had found his place on the NASCAR circuit. Prior to his Indy attempt in May of 1948, he had won four in a row with NASCAR. Going into a July 25 event at Georgia's new Columbus Speedway, he was in a dead heat with Fonty. Byron even got a little sassy, telling a reporter it was “time to let Fonty eat a little dust.”

  Fonty, who had recently switched to a new car owner, responded with a promise to arrive at Columbus in a 1939 Ford coupe with a newly built 297-cubic-inch engine tuned just for that event and for Byron (and Byron's smaller 274-cubic-inch engine).

  But France's sport was about to be dealt a harsh blow.

  Twice. On the same day.

  Columbus Speedway was a dusty, half-mile track in central Georgia, across the river from the Alabama town where Roy Hall once hid out from the law. The track—cut into a clump of trees on the outskirts of the town of Midland—was encircled by a ring of five-foot chicken wire fencing, strung between wooden posts, behind which fans began gathering early on a Sunday morning to secure front-row spots for another battle between stock car racing's increasingly contentious top stars, Red Byron and Fonty Flock.

  The first-ever race at Columbus had been held a month earlier, on June 20, 1948. Local dignitaries came, along with a few top army officers from nearby Fort Benning. But the race was mostly notable because it was won by Bob Flock at almost the precise moment that brother Fonty was taking the checkered flag at the Birmingham Fairgrounds in Alabama and brother Tim was earning a victory at Greensboro, North Carolina. Three Flocks, three states, and three victories in the same afternoon.

  On July 25, NASCAR actually scheduled two races for the same day: the Columbus race and another at Greensboro. France chose to work the North Carolina race, even though his top racers, Flock and Byron, would be racing at Columbus. France's competitor, Sam Nunis, was sponsoring a race at Chattanooga, Tennessee (for the NSCRA, which had decided not to join with NASCAR but instead continued promoting its own events). France hated that Nunis was operating anywhere near one of his own races and wanted to be at Greensboro to make sure drivers who'd promised to attend actually showed up—instead of sneaking off to Nunis's Chattanooga event.

  Still, though he chose not to be there on July 25, Columbus Speedway symbolized everything Bill France hoped NASCAR would become. It was a fast, competitive track, which racers loved. It was also the only show in town and drew thousands of fans on an otherwise lazy Sunday afternoon. Prerace photographs of the day captured the devotion to the South's popular new sport. Boyfriends and girlfriends came hand in hand. Parents brought their children. With little space in the small grandstands, many early birds drove their Fords and Chevys right up beside the chicken wire and sat or stood on the hood. Many had attended church that morning and came in their best clothes—cotton dresses, white shirts and ties, straw hats. Others put their daily farm chores aside and came in dirt-smeared overalls. All in all, the scene was like a publicity poster for Bill France's dreams.

  As race time approached, Byron seemed calm, confident, and almost serene. He wore a wide-brimmed, safari-style leather hat and dark aviator glasses to counter the insistent Georgia sun. In pit road, he made last-minute checks on his car, testing the “shaker” screen bolted in front of the radiator to keep the red dirt out of his engine—”the most powerful 274-cubic-inch motor in the world today,” he boasted. Byron limped among the other cars, nodding at drivers and stopping to chat with a few. It seems he chose not to stop and talk with Fonty Flock, who had arrived that day with his new car.

  In recent weeks, tensions between the two front-runners had sizzled. Fonty had nudged Byron from behind in a race the previous week at North Wilkesboro, causing them both to bow out with flat tires. That and Byron's recent “eat a little dust” comment had stoked fans' curiosity about the duel between the two Atlanta crackers.

  Byron had always considered himself a smart, fast driver, but ultimately a cautious one. He had an intellectual's regard for the often-overlooked finesse of a race and frowned at recklessness. He preferred to avoid the bumping and bashing that invariably occurred during the early laps. Mostly, he felt it was wiser to use your head, to think and plot and scheme. To him, races were more like high-speed chess matches than all-out sprints. Byron leaned his head into such strategic questions as: When to pit and change tires? All four tires or just two? To pit at all? Did he have enough gas to finish? When to hang back? When to strike? Fifty years later, resolving such queries would earn NASCAR crew chiefs substantial paychecks, often in six figures. In 1948, it was up to the drivers to confront questions of strategy on their own.

  Byron was experienced enough to know that some races called for him to simply gun it from the start, or to shove a competitor out of the way, to just go for it. Then again, sometimes a driver's cautiousness or aggressiveness didn't matter. The most freakish things could happen at 150 feet per second.

  On July 25 at Columbus, Byron was able to accelerate quickly into the lead, but the half-mile track wasn't ideal for his muscley V-8. The straightaways were too short for him to gain any serious distance on Flock and the others. Byron punched the gas on the front stretch but immediately slowed down to take the next turn and then punched again on the backstretch. And at each turn, Fonty was on his tail, sliding left and right, looking for a gap to pass through. Byron's narrow lead continued for thirty-eight of the forty laps, setting up what seemed surely to be one of the most exciting finishes of the year.

  With two laps to go, spectators began inching closer to the flimsy wire fence that separated them from the action. Charles Jenkins had come with his wife and her friend, and they stood between the third and fourth turns. As the crowd pushed itself against the fence, he told his wife he “felt uneasy” and talked her into backing away from the fence to watch the last lap from the bed of a frie
nd's pickup truck.

  Which gave him a perfect view of the terrible next moments.

  On the next-to-last lap, with less than a mile until victory, Byron approached the third turn and saw in his rearview mirror the car of a young, aggressive Atlanta racer named Billy Carden, who was edging left in an effort to cut to Byron's inside. Fonty followed closely behind Carden. To block Carden's maneuver, Byron quickly nudged left, his car dropping down sharply into the arc between turns three and four. But the sudden turn put too much pressure on his right front tire, which had become weakened by the high-speed miles beneath an intense midsummer sun.

  The tire exploded loudly, and the mess of shredded rubber and the exposed wheel hub caught the red dirt and instantly, violently pulled Byron's car to the right. Byron pulled the wheel hard to the left and stood on the brake pedal, a desperate attempt to wrestle the Ford back onto the track and away from the unprotected crowd. When the brakes seemed futile, he decided to punch the gas, while still turning left, trying to spin his Ford's back end away from the now panic-stricken crowd.

  But it was all too late, and Byron now saw the bug-eyed faces of a few hundred fans who had nowhere to run. With the chicken wire fence in front, a row of cars behind, and so many bodies packed so tightly together, the fans were trapped. People leaped, shoved, covered their faces, or just froze. They either helped the person beside them or trampled over them. Byron's car climbed the bank and then raked along the fence, his car cutting through chicken wire as if it were a spider web. The Ford's nose plowed through the front edge of the crowd. Bodies bounced off Byron's hood and off one another. The car's shaker screen cut deep into the flesh of legs. Thick fence posts snapped like twigs.