Driving with the Devil

by Neal Thompson

  Car ownership was at an all-time high, as were auto accident fatalities, averaging thirty thousand a year. By a two-to-one margin, most of those deaths were on rural roads. But in urban areas, pedestrians comprised the majority of traffic deaths. In downtown Atlanta that fall, Margaret Mitchell was killed by a drunk-driving taxi driver while crossing Peachtree Street on her way to see a performance of The Canterbury Tales.

  Though Atlanta would fifty years later rank among the nation's more industrial and traffic-choked cities, on the eve of 1950, its soul was still purely southern, which meant corn liquor still reigned among the more profitable industries.

  And whiskey trippers still dominated the stock car world.

  Not counting Lloyd Seay's championship in 1938, eleven “championship” titles were handed out by southern stock car-racing organizations between 1939 and 1949. Eight of those trophies had a moonshiner's name etched on them, including Roy Hall, Fonty Flock, Eddie Samples, and Buddy Shuman. Two other champions—Bill France in 1941, Red Byron in 1948 and 1949—drove cars owned by ex-moonshine baron Raymond Parks. Furthermore, every stock car champion of merit between 1939 and 1949—except Shuman from Charlotte and Bill France himself—had come from Dawsonville or Atlanta, or divided his time between the two. And nearly all of those championship cars had been created by the best whiskey mechanic of his day, Red Vogt.

  As the 1940s came to a close, moonshining Ed Samples was named champion of Bruton Smith's NSCRA group for 1949, having won quite a few lesser-known, non-NASCAR races across the South. (Moonshining Buddy Shuman, who was the NSCRA champ in 1948, would again become NSCRA's champ in 1950.)

  But a decade of southern moonshiners dominating all aspects of stock car racing was ending. Indeed, moonshine's dominance of NASCAR had peaked.

  As NASCAR transitioned into a new decade, many of the sport's early heroes, founders, and champions would find that NASCAR no longer had room for them. One by one, France would alienate the men—especially the moonshiners, and even his friends—who had helped create his sport but whom he now deemed expendable.

  Even Red Byron's NASCAR days were numbered.

  * Across the next fifty years, only a handful of women would race with any regularity in NASCAR, most notably Janet Guthrie in 1978 and Shawna Robinson in 2001. In 2005, Danica Patrick finished fourth in the Indianapolis 500, but in NASCAR, while women occasionally compete in minor-league races, no female driver has finished atop any of NASCAR's major races in recent years.

  A man L· divided into two parts, body and spirit…

  the body is like a house: it don't go anywhere.

  But the spirit is like an automobile: always on the move, always.

  —FLANNERY O'CONNOR

  17

  “No way a Plymouth can beat

  a Cadillac. No way”

  If not for the hundred-mile-an-hour pace, they might have been mistaken for a couple of American tourists. Raymond Parks sat in the j passenger seat in his straw hat and open-collar shirt, while Red Byron, in his jaunty cap and aviator glasses, manned the wheel of the long, sleek 1949 Lincoln coupe with “26” stenciled on each door.

  The Mexican countryside blurred past, fields of farmers and empty stretches of burnt orange desert. As the road entered small villages, it twisted, crossed bridges, and cut close to the roadside homes of the townspeople who'd come out to watch, forcing Byron to ease off the gas a little. In one village, they sped past a small house with a race car punched through the front wall. In another town, they saw the remains of a car that had rolled off a bridge into a dry riverbed. More wreckage littered the mountainsides.

  Billed as “the biggest, toughest and most adventurous race ever held,” the inaugural Carrera-Panamericana Mexico—the Mexican Road Race, for short—had begun days earlier just across the border from El Paso. Created as a sort of publicity stunt for the completion of Mexico's section of the north-south Pan American Highway system, this was an endurance test to the extreme, a sadistic twist on the famous annual Le Mans twenty-four-hour race west of Paris. The border-to-border race was broken into nine legs over six days, ending at the Guatemalan border. The winner would get six thousand dollars, a purse with enough zeros to lure Parks and Byron farther from home than they'd been since the war.

  Byron had kicked off the 1950 season with two top-five finishes and was quickly NASCAR's Grand National points leader once more. Then, just as quickly, he stopped racing. Satisfied with two championships in a row, Byron chose to cherry-pick only a few of the high-paying NASCAR races of 1950. If they added up to enough points for a third championship, fine. But after following Bill France's rules for two years, Byron had decided not to let NASCAR define him and to follow a few of his own rules. He limited his excursions to stock races within a few hours of home, regardless of who promoted the event, and sometimes took Nell along with him, leaving Robert Jr. home with an aunt. The lighter schedule was easier on his leg and gave him more time at home with the family, which would soon include a baby daughter.

  But when he heard from other NASCAR drivers about the Mexico race, Byron convinced himself that he could win and bring home his share of the substantial winner's purse. Since most of the 2,178 miles were dirt, the course should have favored a dirt-track racer such as Byron and an ex-bootlegger such as Parks. If they survived.

  Some drivers arrived weeks early to scope out the course and practice. But most arrived just in time for the May 5 start and winged it. Parks and Byron drove from Atlanta straight to the starting line, the trunk and backseat crammed with extra tires, tools, and clothes, along with canned food, jugs of water, and tanks of gas.

  In no time, they learned that Mexico's new, mostly unpaved highway was far more treacherous than any dirt track they had raced on. Byron had counted on transferring his experience with red-dirt tracks directly to Mexico's orange-dirt highway. But in none of his previous races had he contended with sheer cliffs, loose gravel, hairpin turns, and elevations up to eleven thousand feet. One ill-prepared Guatemalan racer slid off the highway just seventeen miles from the start and was killed. After the body was removed, the codriver, who hadn't been seriously injured, took the wheel and continued racing.

  Of the 132 two-man teams from a dozen countries, most were American or Mexican. Among the Americans, most were Indy racers from California and Texas. The southern stock car crowd was barely represented. In addition to Byron and Parks, Bob and Fonty Flock shared a car, as did Bill France and his newfound friend Curtis Turner, who in Byron's recent absence from the NASCAR circuit had become its points leader. France and Turner had become friends during the 1949 season and would drive a Nash sedan loaned to them by a dealer in Texas. They flew together in France's airplane to El Paso, where they picked up the Nash and took a few practice runs outside town. Turner could be a bit too wild in his lifestyle and driving habits for France, but France saw the race as a good promotional opportunity for NASCAR—if they won, that is.

  Across the first two days, Byron and Parks lagged far back in the latter half of the pack. But as the heat and the dangerous roads took their toll, handfuls of cars dropped out each day with overheated engines or burned-out brakes or worse, and the Atlanta duo began inching up in the standings. In the fourth leg, they finished sixth out of ninety-three cars and moved into twenty-second place overall. In the next leg, they moved up to nineteenth overall and, on the leg after that, bumped up to eighteenth, with three legs to go.

  Bob and Fonty were never even contenders. They had talked a Lincoln-Mercury dealer in Atlanta into loaning them a Lincoln, but the engine block cracked halfway through the race. The Bill France-Curtis Turner team, meanwhile, got off to the fastest start among the stock car teams and after three legs was in third place overall, with Turner behind the wheel averaging ninety-five miles an hour across the first seven hundred miles.

  But France was becoming uneasy with Turner's apparent disregard for the sheer drop-offs and the unstable gravel surface. At one point, a small boy ran into the road, waving his arm
s, and they skidded to a stop. The boy warned them about the upcoming mountain and its dangerous series of esses, where another team had flown off a cliff and crashed five hundred feet below. Still, Turner barely eased up. Churning through back-and-forth turns, to the top of the mountain and down the other side, the twosome sped past yellow highway signs warning Despacio (Slow) and Bajada (Descent). Finally, Turner encountered a sharp right-angle turn that exceeded his considerable skills. He slammed on his brakes, but the Nash was unable to grab the loose road. The car spun backward and slid toward the edge of a cliff. After an interminable slide, the Nash finally came to a precarious stop with one wheel over the edge. France furiously clambered over Turner and out the driver's door, landing in an angry heap on the dusty road. “I have a wife and kids at home,” France yelled. Turner sheepishly promised to drive slower.

  The roadside crowds grew thicker as the race entered the outskirts of Mexico City, where half a million spectators lined the route. Mexican soldiers on horseback tried to control the crowds, often yanking on the hair of fans standing too close to the road and flinging them backward away from the course. One racer said that driving so close to the curious crowds was like “rubbing your door handles against their tits.” For Byron, it seemed as if he were driving into a wall of people at one hundred miles an hour and surely gave him flashbacks to that terrible day when he did drive into a crowd. But every time, just before he slammed into that mass of cheering Mexican fans, the wall would suddenly open a crack and then close in tight again behind him.

  Byron and Parks almost saw their race come to an end in Mexico City. After a ceremony at which drivers met Mexico's president, the after-race celebration continued in the streets of downtown, where someone lifted Parks's wallet. It contained more than two thousand dollars, cash they'd need to finish the race. Parks had to call his sister in Atlanta and have her wire him more money, which arrived just in time for the start of the next day's leg.

  Parks wasn't the only naive southerner to lose cash in the big city; Curtis Turner was also pickpocketed. At one point that afternoon, a photographer for Speed Age feared for his own welfare when a large, unsmiling Mexican man wielding a three-foot knife approached him and, without a word, hurled his knife into the air. It lopped a coconut off the tree above them. The man hacked the top off the coconut and offered the terrified photographer a drink of its milk.

  Back on the highway for the final stretch south to the Guatemalan border, it had become clear to Byron and Parks that they were not going to win. Byron slowed the pace a little, and the two men tried to enjoy the remainder of the race in relative safety. A handful of drivers had already been killed or seriously injured, so Byron figured there was no sense in pushing their luck.

  The France-Turner team had also slowed a notch, in keeping with Turner's promise to deliver France home alive. The team began an inevitable slip in the standings, back to eighth, then fourteenth, then fifteenth. They suffered numerous flat tires, the intense heat causing the rubber to slough off in fist-sized chunks. They were so despondent over losing their shot at the six thousand-dollar winner's purse that, during one of their tire-change stops, they even turned down a villager's offer of cerveza fria. Only after they were back on the road did they ask each other where a poor farmer would have gotten an ice-cold beer.

  On the second-to-last leg, Bill France took over the driving. In an ill-advised attempt at a shortcut, he veered off a highway curve and through a section of grass. The front wheel found a hidden rut, and the sudden jolt cracked the radiator. Speed Age photographer Jack Cansler snapped a photo of France and Turner wearing sombreros against the sun, sitting beside a huge cactus trying to hitchhike a ride to the next town.

  That night, finding themselves in twentieth place on the eve of the final leg, Turner and France decided to split up. The current eighth-place car was another Nash, whose driver had been stricken with a terrible case of what they euphemistically called “tropical sickness.” The driver, a Texas car dealer named Roy Conner, asked Turner to take his place, beside codriver Robert Owens. France agreed to drive the last leg alone, loaning Turner to the team with the better chance at victory. It wasn't generosity. France was relieved to be rid of Turner and his disregard for life and limb. France also figured Turner's chance to actually win the race would be good publicity for NASCAR.

  The next day, to prevent a clog on the final, narrow stretch of highway, the cars were started at four-minute intervals, which meant Turner and his new copilot, in eighth place, started twenty-eight minutes behind the leader. Turner drove furiously and, despite his codriver's panicky screams, passed all seven cars that had started ahead of him. He seemed to be headed for victory not only in that particular leg but for the entire race. Then, ten miles from the finish, he had a blowout. While he was changing the tire, two racers passed him. Turner managed to get back on the road and finish. His time was fast enough to win the 160-mile leg (due to the four-minute intervals between starts), but only enough for third place overall. Turned out it didn't matter. When race officials learned he had swapped cars the night before, Turner was disqualified.

  As Byron and Parks limped toward the finish line, they were exhausted and eager to be done with it. The two-day drive from Atlanta to El Paso and then two thousand miles of racing, with limited amounts of sleep at night, marked the longest period of time Byron and Parks had ever spent in each other's company. Neither man was a big drinker, so they didn't party late into the night with Turner and the others at the boozy postrace events. They had spent nearly every moment of their six days in Mexico side by side.

  These two veterans should have had a lot to talk about, but neither had ever been much for small talk. Above the drone of their Lincoln's engine, one thing they did discuss was their simmering concern about the uncertain future of a career in France's NASCAR.

  Byron told Parks he'd been thinking of spending more time on the midget circuit. Those six-foot versions of open-wheel Indy cars had been gaining in popularity. Byron knew it was a compromise. But with his imperfect health and his promise to stay closer to home, racing midgets at Atlanta-area dirt tracks seemed like the perfect plan, like combining his love of open-wheel cars with his dirt-track racing skills.

  Parks said he'd give some thought to investing in a new midget car for Byron, and Byron relaxed a little after that. But by the final day of the race, Byron seemed irritable and spent, and Parks began to worry that his partner might just pass out at the wheel. Byron's face was drawn. He had fresh blisters on his calloused hands. Parks could only imagine from the wincing and grimacing what Mexico's highway was doing to Byron's war-wounded leg. But he declined Parks's offer to take the wheel. Then it happened.…

  With just an hour's drive to the finish, Parks's fear came true and Byron's exhaustion caught up with him. Byron's eyes flickered, drooped, then shut; his head pitched forward; and he slumped against the door. Before Parks knew what was happening, the Lincoln left the road and was barreling toward an embankment. Parks reached over and tried to grab the wheel, barely managing to steer away from a head-on collision with the embankment that might have killed them both. Still, Parks couldn't reach the brake, and the car crunched at an angle against the wall of dirt and rock, the evil sound of sheet metal against rock waking Byron from his brief sleep. The car bounced and bucked, knocking the two into their doors and each other. Supplies in the backseat—including a half-filled gas can, tools, and cans of food—went flying.

  Fortunately, they had been traveling at less than full speed, and both were wearing lap belts, or their injuries would have been far worse. Still, the front left of the Lincoln was smashed, and it was no longer roadwor-thy. As other cars sped past, Byron and Parks sat helplessly by the roadside waiting for a tow truck, bruised and scratched, stinking of spilled fuel and food, but otherwise uninjured.

  They weren't alone. Fewer than half of the 132 starters reached the finish line. Byron and Parks joined a casualty list that included Bill France, who crashed into a culvert
fifty miles from the finish and again damaged his radiator.

  Byron and Parks decided to leave their wrecked Lincoln behind, selling it for a couple of hundred dollars. With that and the cash Parks's sister had wired him, they traveled back to Mexico City, bought plane tickets, and flew home to Atlanta.

  Bill France wasn't content to let NASCAR remain a sport in and of the South and had spent much of the previous year flying, in another new plane, to racetracks across the country, negotiating with track owners and promoters in other states. For the 1950 season, only nine of nineteen Grand National races would take place at the racetracks of Dixie. The other ten races would be spread across the eastern half of America.

  Byron's talks with Parks during their time in Mexico seemed to have encouraged him to finally, fully break from France's unseemly grip on his career and income. After Mexico, Byron planned to rejoin NASCAR, but only on his terms and in a very limited way, which meant only races with a worthwhile winner's purse.

  Rather than chase a third championship by obediently following the NASCAR circuit to Ohio and New York, Indiana and Pennsylvania, Byron stayed close to home, allowing newcomers such as Curtis Turner to dominate in his absence. Byron followed through on Parks's offer to invest in his midget-racing career. Parks bought him an expensive new midget racer called a Kurtis Kraft, and Red Vogt, ever the Ford devotee, removed the car's engine and installed a Ford V-8. They called the rebuilt car the M-l.

  Byron began making local headlines for his weekly success at the Peach Bowl. He skipped all of NASCAR's Grand National races that summer.

  Then, because it was close to home and at one of his favorite racetracks, he decided to compete in a non-NASCAR race at Lakewood Speedway, which for years had been dominated by France's rival promoter, Sam Nunis. The ban imposed back in 1945 on drivers with criminal records had kept France from bringing NASCAR to Lakewood, since many of his drivers were bootleggers. That had allowed Nunis to make Lakewood his home base, where he hosted some of the largest stock car crowds in history.