Driving with the Devil

by Neal Thompson

  Byron was now a master of the complicated beach course. He knew how to drive at the surf's edge, so seawater could mist up and cool his brakes, but not too close. He knew, when his windshield became gauzy and opaque with salt spray, to eyeball the telephone poles of highway Al A to help him stay on the road. He knew how to shoulder his car into the turns, to broadslide through the knotty, slurried arcs, trusting Vogt's reinforced wheels to withstand the pressure. With no bucket seats in his strictly stock car, he had to hold tight to the steering wheel to keep from sliding into the passenger seat.

  He and his Olds 88 kept a steady pace for the final twenty-five miles, and Byron comfortably crossed the finish line nearly two miles ahead of Tim Flock for his fourth Daytona victory, more than any other driver in stock car racing's brief history. This win, however, was worth nearly as much as the previous three victories combined—two thousand dollars.

  Ethel Flock Mobley, driving with her AM radio blasting throughout the race, finished an impressive eleventh—ahead of brothers Bob and Fonty. Sara Christian finished eighteenth, and Louise Smith, after her flip, came in second to last. Although all three would continue to race into the early 1950s, resistance from the male racers was strong, and females in NASCAR would not last much beyond that.*

  After Byron's victory, NASCAR officials impounded the top-five finishers and began tearing apart the engines, looking for any signs of illegal modifications.

  Byron's win was a first for a General Motors car in a NASCAR race. In fact, the top-four finishers were all Oldsmobiles. A Ford didn't even finish among the top ten, lost in a crowd of Chryslers, Mercurys, Hudsons, Cadillacs, and Buicks. Inspectors declared all five of the top finishers to be legit, leaving Byron's victory intact—and giving Red Vogt his own victory over Bill France and his inspectors.

  Byron accepted his trophy and envelope of cash, then mingled with other drivers and a few journalists, unstrapping his helmet and firing up the cigar he had chewed during the race. NASCAR's timing official announced that Byron's average speed had been just shy of eighty-one miles an hour—not quite as fast as a modified race car but fairly impressive for an allegedly Mwmodified car. When asked by Daytona Beach sportswriter Bernard Kahn about his speed, Byron was unusually defensive. “No way,” he snapped, the cigar stuck in the corner of his mouth. “Couldn't have gone that fast. Somebody must have made a mistake.… These strictly stock cars are a lot slower.” Byron diverted the conversation, telling Kahn that he actually liked the slower pace of the strictly stock cars. “That makes them easier to ride,” he said, patting his bad left leg.

  Vogt was also asked about Byron's Olds 88 and was equally defensive. He explained that the modifieds could exceed one hundred miles an hour but the strictly stock cars maxed out at ninety-two or ninety-three. For Byron to average eighty for two hours was, Vogt declared, not possible. “I doubt if Red averaged seventy-nine or eighty miles per hour,” he growled, then began loading up his tools for the long ride home.

  For all his protests, a photograph taken that day shows Vogt uncharacteristically grinning, like a cat with a belly full of canary, like a man with a secret.

  Despite the low turnout for that race, Bill France decided to put all his promotional muscle behind his six remaining strictly stock races. Ads in Illustrated Speedway News magazine blared, “See the new Oldsmobiles, Lincolns, Fords, Mercurys and other cars at their best,” which helped lure 17,500 fans to the third Grand National race, on August 7, at Occoneechee Speedway in Hillsboro, North Carolina. Byron led until Sara Christian lost her right front wheel and collided with him. He finished twenty-second.

  The fourth strictly stock race was held at Pennsylvania's Langhorne Speedway, where twenty thousand spectators watched Byron finish third behind Curtis Turner and Bob Flock.

  When France had separated the modified and strictly stock divisions, he decided to tally points separately and award year-end championships for each division. Halfway through the season, Byron's victory at Daytona and third-place finish at Langhorne put him atop the new Grand National division. He decided he could afford to skip the next Grand National race near Buffalo, New York. Instead, he prepared for the sixth of France's eight-race Grand National series, scheduled for late September at Martinsville Speedway in southwest Virginia. But France's popular new Grand National races were in for some competition of their own, and the forces of distrust and dissent were stirring.

  Stock car racing was still, to say the least, in its chaotic adolescent stage, and Bill France's foes weren't yet ready to let him take over the whole stock car empire.

  AAA and Sam Nunis, who had run a handful of stock car events over the past few years, were making plans for their own series of strictly stock races at Lakewood Speedway in Atlanta later that fall. And NSCRA president Bruton Smith had teamed with the disaffected racer Buddy Shuman to open a new dirt racetrack in Charlotte. Shuman also partnered with the New Jersey-based United Stock Car Racing Club to host strictly stock races that they also decided to call the “Grand National” division. The group audaciously scheduled its first Grand National race (at a paved Connecticut speedway) on the same day as Bill France's sixth Grand National race, September 25, 1949.

  The United Stock Car Racing Club's race in Connecticut offered winners a 40 percent share of the ticket sales, but only the size of the crowd would determine whether the purse rivaled that of NASCAR's next big race. For his strictly stock races, France had decided to stick with offering a preset, guaranteed winners' purse, which on September 25 at Martinsville would be four thousand dollars, with fifteen hundred dollars going to the winner. Racers had to gamble: if they drove to Connecticut and the crowd was paltry, the 40 percent share of ticket sales would be far less than the four thousand-dollar “guarantee” France was offering.

  France decided to help drivers make their choice by tightening a rule he'd enforced only sporadically. In the past, France had threatened drivers who competed in non-NASCAR races but never officially banned the practice. Instead, he refused to allow victories in another group's races to count in NASCAR. But now France decided to clarify this issue of racing with other organizations. He instructed his right-hand man, Bill Tuthill, to issue a written warning to all drivers that any drivers caught racing in non-NASCAR events would lose all points they'd accumulated in NASCAR. Tuthill assured France it was the right move. “If we back down, we're through,” he said.

  A number of drivers decided to take a chance and, despite France's threat, raced in a late-summer event at Bruton Smith's new track outside Charlotte. They figured if they stuck together, France wouldn't dare penalize them all. But soon each of the thirteen men received a letter from NASCAR. “If you want to keep racing, you must live up to the rules,” it began, then advised them that they had lost all of their NASCAR points. Borrowing the term AAA previously used for stock car racers—had in fact used for France himself—France called those who refused to race exclusively for NASCAR “outlaws.”

  The stripping of points intimidated a few drivers into obedience, but mostly it infuriated them. Many of those who were punished were from Atlanta—so many that Tuthill told France, it's “not safe for any of us to set foot in Atlanta for a long time.”

  In fact, NASCAR wouldn't hold a race in Atlanta until 1951.

  Some shrugged off their frustration, realizing they'd been trumped by France and there was little they could do in return. A few decided to go face-to-face with France, but that route rarely turned out in their favor. At one modified division race that summer, Gober Sosebee was disqualified for what he considered a bogus infraction. He stomped into France's office and called France “a self-made son of a bitch.”

  “Now, Gober, you didn't mean that,” France said patiently.

  “I said it and I meant it,” the moonshiner drawled back, and stormed out.

  At his next race, Sosebee's gas tank got clogged by an errant rag and he was unable to refuel during a pit stop. His mechanic grabbed a gas can and jumped into the backseat of the car. Wh
ile racing around the track, the mechanic leaned out of the rear passenger window, pulled loose the rag, and filled Sosebee's near-empty tank. Sosebee won the race but was immediately disqualified for having an extra rider in his car. When Sosebee pointed out there was no such rule about extra riders in the NASCAR rule book, France grabbed a pen and wrote “No riders shall be allowed in the back. …”

  So began the arbitrariness and fluidity of the NASCAR rule book, which—like the Bible—could be interpreted in many ways, depending on the interpreter's intent. If France couldn't find a specific infraction, he'd simply, if ironically, punish a driver or mechanic for “being outside the spirit of competition.” Complaints about ever-changing rules and punitive use of the rule book would become hallmarks of the sport.

  Red Vogt studied such confrontations closely, and he learned from them.

  By late 1949, there wasn't a single track in Dixie at which Red Byron hadn't won. Nor did a track exist where a Red Vogt-tuned car hadn't won multiple times.

  But every driver and mechanic had his favorite track. Byron, for example, loved the mile-long Lakewood oval but hated the mile-long Langhorne circle. A driver's love or hate for a track depended on his ability to find the elusive, hard-to-define groove. For Byron, finding that groove was a process of elimination. He would try a diamond pattern (picture a round-edged diamond shape superimposed on an oval), with sharp turns and quick shifting from brake pedal to gas pedal. Or he might try a more rounded groove, broad-sliding through each turn and gently accelerating until the car found a grip, then gunning it down the straightaway until the next turn. Byron could always find his groove at Daytona. And in 1949, he found it at Martinsville Speedway, the half-mile red-clay oval in southwest Virginia whose inaugural race Byron had won two years earlier.

  The Martinsville track's owner, Clay Earles, would pave the track in 1955, but in 1949, it was still known as one of the South's dustiest red-dirt tracks. Fans left every Martinsville race covered in dust. The photograph of Byron after his 1947 race—dirt-caked, grim-faced, cigarette in hand—became a symbol of NASCAR's glory days. Earles, a self-made promoter who occasionally paid better-known racers to come to his track, had become a loyal friend of Bill France. Clay's devotion to France would help Martinsville keep NASCAR coming back for decades. Martinsville continued to host NASCAR races for the next half century, the only racetrack to span the sport's entire history. Drivers still haggle over how to find the best groove at Martinsville.

  NASCAR's sixth Grand National race, on September 25, 1949, drew ten thousand fans to Martinsville. The United Stock Car Racing Club race held the same day in Connecticut didn't seem to hurt France's attendance, and most drivers decided not to take the gamble on that distant event and to stick with NASCAR's four thousand-dollar guarantee.

  On such a short track, it was nearly impossible to pass on either of the two eight hundred-foot straightaways, so drivers would make their moves in the turns, often by driving a high groove at the outside of the straightaway and then cutting sharply into the turn, sometimes all the way onto the apron, in an effort to pass. On September 25, Byron couldn't find a route around Fonty Flock. In driver parlance, Flock was “driving wide” and seemed to have the two hundred-lap race wrapped up. But races are often determined by small bits of luck, good or bad, and at the halfway point, Flock's front right wheel snapped off and he crashed, allowing Byron to take the lead and follow his groove for the next hundred laps. He took the checkered flag three laps ahead of Lee Petty.

  Byron had now won two of the eight scheduled Grand National races and had twice finished third. He skipped the next race in Pittsburgh, which was won by Lee Petty. Entering the final race of the year, Byron and Petty were ranked first and second in the point standings. Byron was far enough ahead of Petty that he could hold on to first place as long as he just finished in the top twenty at the next race at North Wilkesboro on October 16.

  Only some sort of disaster in the season finale would prevent Byron from becoming NASCAR's first two-time champ.

  Roy Hall was still a handsome young man of twenty-eight when he was finally released from prison in late summer of 1949, after serving three years. Of course, the first thing he did with his reclaimed freedom was go looking for a race. He borrowed one of Raymond Parks's modified Fords and drove to Spartanburg, South Carolina, for a NASCAR modified division contest. There, despite spinning out wildly in one turn and causing two other drivers to wreck, Hall finished a respectable ninth, half a lap behind Ed Samples's victory.

  Parks briefly wondered if Hall might still have a racing career left in him. Bob Flock had left Parks's team to drive his own car. Maybe Hall could rejoin the Parks-Vogt team and, with Byron, become NASCAR's dominant one-two punch. The idea intrigued Parks, but he was also wary of the change he saw in Hall. He'd always been a reckless force on the racetrack, but in his first weeks of freedom, Hall seemed downright scary. He was now a hardened criminal who'd done hard time. Hall seemed almost desperate in his need for a victory, as if it would restore all he'd lost behind bars.

  Hall and Byron were about to face off for the first time in many years. For those old enough to have seen Hall race years earlier, this was a thrilling prospect.

  Red Vogt once said Hall “could do things with a car which no car was supposed to do.” Then again, Vogt also said, “Red Byron was the only one who could sit on Hall's tail and worry him.” Vogt had been convinced of Byron's prowess early on, in one of the first postwar races, while watching him hang tight behind Roy Hall's back bumper for the entire race. Vogt said later that it looked “like a car getting towed.” Hall was also impressed and after the race asked Byron, “Why didn't you pass?”

  “You were going pretty good,” Byron responded. “I was satisfied.”

  Byron respected Hall but had often been wary of going head-to-head with a man who drove with a frenzy and fury that the more cerebral Byron didn't quite understand. Now, with a NASCAR championship and dozens of first-place finishes under his belt, Byron no longer feared moonshining Roy Hall.

  On October 16 at North Wilkesboro, it became clear that Hall might still be an instinctively shrewd dirt-track driver but he was now far from the sport's best. Byron led most of the race, making sure he kept clear of Hall, who wasn't necessarily a threat to win the race but could doom Byron's championship chances by running Byron off the track.

  Unfortunately, while he managed to keep his distance from Hall, who was scraping fenders amid the pack, Byron had pushed his engine too hard, and it blew up seventy-seven miles into the hundred-mile race. He and his car limped into the pits and watched the rest of the race. Despite a desperate last-lap attempt by Lee Petty, Bob Flock took the checkered flag, followed by Petty and brother Fonty Flock. Hall finished sixth.

  Byron was fortunately given credit for sixteenth place, but he would still have to wait for France to tally the season's points and announce whether his sixteenth-place finish was good enough for a championship.

  Two weeks later, Hall proved that his audacity now definitely outranked his skills.

  He took cousin Parks's Ford to Tri-City Speedway near High Point, North Carolina, for the year's final NASCAR modified division race. Hall had long been a master of sprinting ahead of the rest of the field and into the first turn, then staying there and driving wide to the finish. This time, as Hall punched the gas and tried to take an outside groove around the others, he cut too sharply into the first turn, and the Ford lurched onto its right wheels and kept going. It rolled and rolled. Hall wasn't wearing a seat belt, and his head and body slammed against the roof, the dash, the windshield. When the car finally came to a stop, he was bloody and unconscious.

  Hall would spend the next month in the hospital, in critical condition, drifting in and out of consciousness as he recovered from serious head wounds. Friends said he was never quite himself after that. It seemed as if his racing career was really over for good.

  Byron, meanwhile, had firmly established himself as the best stock car drive
r in the land. He didn't attain the folk hero status of murdered Lloyd Seay nor the bootlegger cachet of Hall. No songs would be written about disabled, bald-headed Robert Nold Byron. But over the past eleven years, Byron had learned to combine Seay's intelligent cautiousness and Hall's controlled aggressiveness and had far outlasted them both.

  When Bill France tallied the numbers for 1949, he announced that Byron had finished with 842 points to Lee Petty's 725 to become NASCAR's Grand National champ.

  This time, there had been no heroics in the season's last race, no poignant, dramatic finale against an aggressive foe at the same track where a boy had been killed. It was a quiet victory for Byron, but hardly insignificant. Byron had won two of the division's eight events and twice placed third. Those four top-five finishes were worth forty-eight hundred dollars, and he'd receive an extra one thousand dollars for being the champ. Combined with the few hundred bucks from his victories in midget races at Atlanta's Peach Bowl that year, and a few wins in NASCAR modified events, Byron's racing income was finally keeping him financially afloat. In November, he competed in a non-NASCAR event at Lakewood Speedway—the same track where his stock car career had begun back in 1938. This time, before thirty thousand fans, Byron was victorious and took another two thousand dollars home to his family.

  If stock car racing survived and Byron kept up his winning ways, and the monthly disability checks kept coming from the U.S. Army, it might not be a bad way to string together a living. He had always dreamed of being a full-time professional racer, without the worries of, say, running a garage or a restaurant on the side. Then again, he'd soon learn that Bill France had the final word on who did or didn't make a living in NASCAR.

  Despite the approach of war in Korea, the years since World War II had been prosperous ones, and America marched onward as the gas-powered powerhouse of the world. That prosperity was reflected on the highways.