Driving with the Devil

by Neal Thompson

  Where's all the money going?

  When NASCAR had been officially incorporated in February of 1948, Teague's “treasurer” title became inconsequential. All fiduciary duties were essentially taken over by the private corporation's three officers: France, Tuthill, and lawyer Louis Ossinsky. Still, Teague was no dummy, and as the 1949 season began to unwind, he noticed that NASCAR's share of the money collected at the ticket gates, even after expenses, seemed significantly more than the amount being offered to drivers.

  Teague was soon joined by two moonshiners—Dawsonville's Ed Samples and Charlotte's Buddy Shuman—who began to openly suggest that NASCAR should end its practice of paying a “guarantee.” The guarantee was a predetermined winners' purse announced prior to a race, which the top finishers shared. Instead of that flat rate, Teague and the others wanted to compete for a 40 percent share of total ticket sales. That's how AAA and other race-sanctioning organizations usually paid their racers. Some slick race promoters went so far as to promise that every racer would receive twenty dollars just for racing, which at least helped pay for their gas.

  In March of 1949, Shuman went public with his complaints, explaining to a North Carolina newsman that NASCAR's “guarantee” at Midland Speedway, northeast of Charlotte, was just two thousand dollars. But at a recent non-NASCAR event at Midland, drivers were paid 40 percent of ticket sales, which amounted to a winners' purse of twenty-seven hundred dollars. Shuman said drivers were “very much satisfied” with that 40 percent approach, adding that he was spreading the word to other racers that non-NASCAR races paid better.

  When France refused to eliminate the guarantee, other racers started questioning his use of money collected at the gate. They demanded that France start paying them more. Some followed Shuman's lead and defected to non-NASCAR races. An editorial in a racing magazine defended Shuman and the others, saying that winners' purses comprised of a 40 percent share of ticket sales “looks like a pretty good solution.”

  France tried to explain that stock car racing was supposed to be a hobby, not a career. Back at the Ebony Room meeting, he'd told the other cofounders that NASCAR should be for “race-minded boys” who work during the week but on the weekends want to “show their stuff and maybe win something, and still not make it a full-time job.”

  But finally, France quit rationalizing and simply put his foot down. “It's too much,” France said of the drivers' 40 percent demands. “We'll be in too-tight a position.”

  France felt the drivers were being ungrateful and disloyal. He decided, if I can't persuade them to be loyal, I'll force them. Shuman soon received a telegram from France that said, “Drivers who fail to race exclusively for NASCAR will be barred… for a period of one year.” Other rabble-rousing drivers received similar telegrams.

  In protest, Shuman immediately pulled out of a scheduled NASCAR race at North Wilkesboro and signed up for a race at nearby High Point, sponsored by a rival race-sanctioning body, the NSCRA, which was offering a 40 percent payout. (NSCRA—the National Stock Car Racing Association—had been created in Atlanta in 1947 and sponsored a number of races in 1948, when Shuman was named its champion.) Teague also withdrew from NASCAR in protest. The anti-NASCAR protests escalated as Curtis Turner and Bob Flock pulled out to begin following the NSCRA circuit.

  That's when things got really dirty. France claimed that three racers— Samples, Shuman, and Speedy Thompson—had scattered thumbtacks on a track before a NASCAR race. France accused the trio, along with Teague and another racer, of “conduct detrimental to the best interests of [NASCAR].” And, as he'd threatened, he banned all five men from NASCAR for a year.

  It seemed an excessive step, and one that might backfire on France. But he knew that racers were mostly loyal to one thing: money. He could always win them back with money. France realized that, to earn drivers' patronage at NASCAR races, each individual race had to have an enticing winner's purse, one bigger than AAAs or the NSCRA's. If he could offer bigger payouts, the drivers would come home to NASCAR. And stay there.

  France would soon announce an unprecedented five thousand dollar purse. And the five banned racers and other protesters would soon be crawling back to France, begging for another chance with NASCAR. In the meantime, only Red Byron had managed to carefully steer a safe line through the dissention and flak, racing in all circuits, including occasional non-NASCAR races, while somehow avoiding any direct confrontation with Bill France.

  But Byron's ability to avoid France's iron fist would not last.

  While Byron applauded other drivers' attempts to wrest more money from France—especially Teague, a fellow World War II bomber veteran who had become a friend—Byron was in no position to openly defy France. It was too risky financially.

  So he kept his head down as he worked on customers' cars at his Speed Shop during the week, traveling to races each weekend. He had decided to give up on a third attempt at Indianapolis, to devote more time to high-paying events on the NASCAR and NSCRA circuits, and to only dabble in occasional open-wheel events.

  Most of the stock car events he joined were, as they had been for years, so-called “modified” races. That meant Byron raced his 1939 Ford against other factory-built “stock” cars that had been modified with all the necessary power-enhancing alterations to help them perform on the corduroy of a dirt track. In such events, nine out of ten entries were prewar Fords. For the 1949 season, Bill France had also introduced NASCAR's experimental new “roadster” division. Some racing fans loved the combination of open-wheel racer and modified racing coupe, although others thought the jalopies looked as if they'd been cobbled together with spare junkyard parts.

  Red Vogt chopped up an old Ford coupe and turned it into a roadster, allowing Byron to also compete in NASCAR's roadster division. But it soon became clear that roadsters weren't nearly as popular among fans as the modifieds. Drivers also preferred modified events, and for the first few months of 1949, Byron and Fonty Flock took turns in victory lane in that division. They were once again in a back-and-forth contest for the lead in the points race, followed closely by Curtis Turner and Tim Flock.

  Then, midway through the ′49 season, Bill France abruptly changed all the rules.

  In early 1949, France's rival racing organization, the NSCRA, received a revitalizing jolt from a stocky, aggressive, twenty-two-year-old used-car salesman and part-time race promoter named Bruton Smith, who agreed to take over the floundering organization. Smith was a savvy businessman who began to partner with AAA promoters—most notably France's other rival, Sam Nunis—to sponsor southern stock car races in Tennessee, Georgia, and North Carolina.

  At the start of 1949, Smith announced plans for a “strictly stock” race that would only be open to new cars, those built after World War II. When France heard about it, he immediately realized he needed to organize a strictly stock event of his own.

  Strictly stock races had initially been discussed at the 1947 Ebony Room meeting, when NASCAR's creators voted to establish three tiers of racing: the modifieds, the roadsters, and strictly stock. The strictly stock division never got off the ground in 1948 because there weren't enough new cars coming out of the nation's auto factories. Production was now back to prewar levels, so there were plenty of new car models to choose from. It had already become obvious to France that fans didn't care much for NASCAR's roadsters. And he began to wonder how long fans would continue to pay to see beat-up, decade-old Fords in the modified races. His search for a slick new idea was already leading him toward the creation of a racing series for newer cars.

  With Bruton Smith heading in the same direction, France stepped up his efforts. To outdo Smith and lure drivers away from NSCRA, France announced that the winner of his strictly stock race would take home two thousand dollars, part of a total purse worth an unprecedented five thousand dollars.

  France's attempt to upstage Smith triggered a rivalry that would last half a century. And NASCAR's first strictly stock race would go down as a major turning point i
n motorsports history, despite a plane crash, state police threats, and a lawsuit.

  It had been fifty years since America's first auto races, and nearly fifty years since Henry Ford's prototype had chuck-chucked down Detroit's cobblestones, announcing what that long-ago Detroit newsman had called “civilization's newest voice.”

  But in the prosperous aftermath of war, with auto factories up and running, there were plenty of loud new voices, shiny new sedans on the road, such as Buick, Cadillac, Chevy, Oldsmobile, Pontiac, Hudson, Chrysler, Lincoln, and Dodge. Race car drivers and whiskey drivers were finding that Ford's postwar V-8s weren't as strong as its prewar engines and that the V-8s of Chevy, Oldsmobile, and Hudson were worthy upstarts.

  For Bill France, this was exactly the fan-friendly trend he'd been waiting for.

  France wanted the strictly stock division's cars to be identical to those same Chevys and Oldsmobiles that Mr. and Mrs. America drove to the Piggly Wiggly grocery store. A month before the first strictly stock race, France told a sportswriter, “The nice thing about this game is that you don't need a $30,000 special to get started. You just tighten up some old heap, pay your $10 entry fee and start risking your neck.”

  Simplifying or eliminating some of the technical intricacies of the sport—the superchargers, quadruple carburetors, and handmade camshafts—was key to France's marketing strategy and part of his attempt to appeal to the weekend warrior. The implication was that NASCAR was for everyone, and the drivers are just like you.

  However, strictly stock races would also dramatically change the role of the mechanic, whose status would be reduced to that of a mere tune-up man.

  For Red Vogt, this was a troubling shift. He'd be a wizard without his wand.

  France's new game plan would launch, somewhat poetically, on a former pasture tamed into a racetrack by a couple of moonshiners.

  Charlotte Speedway had been built the previous summer and had hosted a half dozen modified stock car races through 1948 and the first half of 1949. In fact, Red Byron had won four times on the track, most recently in May. The three-quarter-mile track sat off Wilkinson Boulevard, west of Charlotte. A farmer named C. C. Allison had leased that portion of his farm to two enterprising young neighbors, Pat and Harvey Charles.

  The Charles brothers were among Charlotte's better-known bootleggers, but also pretty handy with tools and heavy machinery. They bulldozed an oval into Allison's field, with banked turns on either end. They built a fence around the oval, wooden grandstands, and a ticket booth. But the Charles boys wouldn't be around to see NASCAR's first strictly stock race. A conviction on bootlegging charges prevented that. Before reporting to the authorities, the Charleses turned the track back over to farmer Allison, who had no idea what to expect from his first big race, scheduled for Sunday, June 19, 1949.

  France limited the race to thirty-three cars, as they did at Indianapolis. Drivers were invited to qualify in time-trial heats, which began on Wednesday, June 14. That afternoon, Red Byron posted the fastest qualifying time—a hair under forty seconds for one lap around the three-quarter-mile track. Fan attendance at non-NASCAR races had been declining in recent weeks, which meant that those 40 percent purses some drivers had touted were now worth far less than the purses at most NASCAR races. France's scheme to steal some of the thunder from rival Bruton Smith's NSCRA group seemed finally to be working, and the buzz about the upcoming race on C. C. Allison's farm had grown. As the race date approached, the five drivers who were banned from NASCAR back in March—for “conduct detrimental to the best interests of [NASCAR]”—had been lured into penitence by his five thousand-dollar purse and had asked Bill France if they could rejoin the circuit.

  France instructed the men to go to the Selwyn Hotel, where they were called one by one before NASCAR's “high commissioner,” Cannonball Baker. France also sat in on the hearings, along with NASCAR's secretary, Bill Tuthill, and lawyer, Louis Ossinsky. Over the course of four hours, the NASCAR officials listened to each man plead his case.

  Baker handed down his decision the next day. Baker said he couldn't find enough evidence that Speedy Thompson was involved in dumping the tacks on a NASCAR track earlier in the season and exonerated him. The other four—Shuman, Samples, Teague, and Thompson's brother, Alfred—were found guilty of acting “not in accordance with the best interests of NASCAR.” They would all be allowed to return to NASCAR as long as they first paid fines ranging from $50 to $150. But they would also be “under probation” for a year. The Thompson brothers immediately sued NASCAR, but a judge refused to hear their case. The message—from NASCAR and the court—was strong and clear: don't mess with Bill France.

  Though NASCAR's ruling was made by Baker, drivers all knew the message had come straight from Bill France, who had become NASCAR's commander in chief. In fact, just eighteen months into NASCAR's existence, France functioned as the executive, legislative, and judiciary branches, without all the messy checks and balances. France believed strongly that for stock car racing to thrive, it couldn't be a democracy.

  Tuthill tried to assure drivers and the press of NASCAR's “complete honesty” and once argued that he and France “made an honest effort not to line our own pockets.” Then again, France felt that he had sacrificed his own racing career to take on the leadership role that none of the others wanted. As he saw it, he “had done all the spadework.” So if he got rich in the process, well, he deserved it. Tuthill also felt that if he and France created a profitable and successful organization, “the money should come along with it.”

  Despite such rationalizations, complaints about France's slowly growing wealth would follow him the rest of his days. Tim Flock once vented that “Bill was gittin' to be a millionaire and we was still eatin' cornbread and buttermilk.”

  The rise of Bill France's fortunes, meanwhile, put an even greater strain on those of Raymond Parks. Despite Parks's concerns about pouring more money into the deep pit of his racing team—not to mention his occasional loans to France—he now had no choice but to invest in a new, late-model race car for the strictly stock race.

  “We just have to follow his rules,” Parks told Vogt.

  For a Ford-obsessed mechanic such as Vogt, this new strictly stock business was a problem. He'd now have to transfer his skills to engines and cars not made by Henry Ford. And the term strictly was like a pair of handcuffs to a mechanic whose legend revolved around the term modified. But, like Parks, he had little choice in the matter.

  Vogt and Parks discussed their options and decided to buy Oldsmobile's new Rocket “88” for Byron to race. Ford was still making essentially the same flathead V-8 it had been producing for years, but the more powerful engines of the day were those with overhead valves, especially those made by General Motors for Oldsmobiles and Cadillacs. The streamlined Rocket 88 and its V-8 would soon replace the old prewar Fords as the best stock car of the new NASCAR era.

  Byron was among the few lucky drivers to be part of a racing team with a deep-pocketed sponsor such as Parks. Because France's two hundred-lap, 150-mile strictly stock race was open to “American-made cars only”—and only those built since 1946—racers had to leave the ′39 Fords at home and scramble to find new rides. Even Fonty Flock showed up a few days before the big race, looking for a wealthy patron to loan him a car. Tim Flock also arrived without a car but the day before the race saw a fan he recognized, standing with his wife beside their new Olds 88.

  “Buddy, if you let me drive that car, I'll try to take care of it and not hurt it,” Flock told the man, knowing that the car had just a few hundred miles on it.

  “Are you crazy?” the man's wife barked.

  The next day, the man arrived without his wife and handed Flock the keys.

  Unlike the anything-goes modified races, the rules for the strictly stock events would be maddeningly strict and the list of permissible alterations painfully brief. Drivers could tape over the headlights, remove the muffler, and strap shut the doors—a belt or a dog collar usually did the tric
k. They could add safety belts, but few drivers bothered; some wrapped themselves to the driver's seat with a rubber tire tube. But not much else was allowed. That meant that mixed in with semiprofessional drivers who'd been racing for a decade were hopeful newcomers and amateurs in their seriously Mwmodified family sedans—exactly the mix Bill France was hoping for.

  What France did not want was a race dominated by moonshiners, but that hope would be dashed. Of thirty-three cars at the start line, roughly half the drivers—including Curtis Turner and the three Flock brothers—were bootleggers or at least connected to the whiskey business in some way. Many of the car owners were bootleggers, too.

  The rest of the drivers were a motley cross section of southern culture, including Lee Petty, a bakery truck driver who showed up with his neighbor's Buick Roadmaster; Buck Baker, a bus driver; Otis Martin, a scraggly mountaineer wearing overalls; Herb Thomas, a skinny tobacco farmer; Jim Paschal, a navy vet whose body was half covered with tattoos; and Jim Roper, a part-time midget racer from Kansas who had read about France's race in a comic strip. Also qualifying to start was a lone female racer, Sara Christian, wife of Atlanta businessman Frank Christian (who, like Raymond Parks, had invested moonshining profits in stock cars). Christian would become the first woman to compete in a NASCAR race, and one of the few female racers of the 1940s.

  France told reporters it would be the first strictly stock race since before the war. He publicized the event in newspapers and magazines and felt confident he was about to host “one of the biggest crowds we've ever seen.… You just wait until Sunday and see.”

  France nearly didn't make it to his own big race.

  On Saturday, he and Tuthill took a ride in a friend's airplane, which France was considering buying, to replace the older plane he flew to and from races. But as the plane came in for a landing at the nearby airport, the pilot overran the runway and rolled onto the highway. Oncoming cars swerved out of the plane's path, narrowly avoiding a collision. The plane landed in a ditch with France and Tuthill shaken up but uninjured.