Driving with the Devil

by Neal Thompson

  He never woke up. He was forty-four.

  Failed attempts to create drivers' unions during the 1960s meant that veteran NASCAR racers had no health insurance and received no such thing as a pension. What money Byron had managed to save ran out quickly, and his wife eventually moved their family back to the rural Georgia community she'd escaped during World War II. They now live there in very modest obscurity. “He was a good man,” says Nell, who now suffers from Alzheimer's. “He was one of the best men I've ever known.”

  Byron's role as one of NASCAR's creators and its first champ was slowly recognized in the years after his death. In 1966, he was posthumously inducted into the National Motorsports Hall of Fame. Thirty years later, his face appeared on a Kellogg's cereal box. And in 1998—in one of many commemorations of NASCAR's fiftieth anniversary— Sports Illustrated named him one of NASCAR's fifty greatest drivers.

  RAYMOND PARKS

  Parks never wore his racing fever on his sleeve. It didn't cause him to break out in a sweat or froth at the mouth. But if one looked closely, the signs were always there. In business, he strived for honesty (with customers, anyway), cleanliness, and perfection. Similarly, on the racetrack, a Parks car stood out for being the fastest and the cleanest. If Hall or Byron crumpled a fender, Parks would have Vogt fix it, even if it didn't affect the performance. Parks wanted his cars to look their best, smooth and polished. But the best cost money. And by 1951, Parks realized for the umpteenth time that, for all his powerful engines and smooth fenders, “I'm spending more than I'm making.” Parks's deep pockets had also begun to elicit some suspicion. Sportswriters such as Bill France's friend Bernie Kahn began to wonder in print about the “mysterious young Atlanta millionaire who foots the expensive bills that building these cars requires.” Drivers wondered about the fairness of a millionaire's backing in a workingman's sport. “Every car that Byron has driven at Daytona Beach loses $10,000,” one racer complained, anonymously. Other car owners didn't have the luxury of throwing away such money, and their drivers suffered for it. Until Kiekhaefer came along, no one in NASCAR was spending as much as Parks on his race cars.

  In 1951, Parks finally decided it was time to move on. He sold his race cars and focused on his moneymaking businesses. In 1952, he briefly owned a racetrack—Asheville-Weaverville Speedway in North Carolina. But for reasons that Parks says were never explained to him, Bill France refused to schedule a NASCAR-sanctioned race there. Parks eventually sold out. “I loved racing and I loved winning, but it was costing too much money,” he said. “I had to start making a living.”

  Parks was thirty-seven when he quit NASCAR. Over the years, he had spent tens of thousands of dollars on racing. Parks's moonshine-soaked money supported not only his team but the sport itself. He never spoke of the cash he sometimes loaned Bill France. But colleagues who witnessed such transactions say that that cash helped France and NASCAR get past a few financial rough spots, hard times that otherwise might have compromised NASCAR's ability to survive.

  Through the 1950s, Parks sponsored local baseball teams and helped build churches, but a ballpark never gave him the same thrill as a racetrack, his life's true house of worship. Parks acknowledged that NASCAR was still deeply a part of him. And NASCAR gradually came around to acknowledging the role Parks had played, though it has mostly steered clear of any reference to Parks's prison record or corn liquor career.

  Parks eventually bought a condominium in Daytona. During France's long battle with Alzheimer's, when he seemed to want to reconnect with friends from the past, he'd frequently call Parks—sometimes a few times a day—to talk about cars and racing.

  At times in his life, if Parks ever felt wronged by a friend or business partner, he could sever the relationship in an instant, often never speaking to the offender again. But he never shut France out of his life, never dwelled on any money owed or wrongs inflicted. Like Red Vogt, he never blamed France for profiting from the sport they all created together. He truly felt that the future success of stock car racing was more important than any hurt feelings, that NASCAR was more vital than any of them.

  Dale Earnhardt, Richard Petty, and other legends of the 1960s and ′70s, who'd heard about Parks from their fathers, eventually sought out and befriended him. Earnhardt called Parks “the other man of Daytona.” Parks was sitting in his box seat that day in 2001 when Earnhardt slammed into the wall at Daytona and died.

  By the 1990s, a few hard-core NASCAR fans and amateur historians had also pieced together enough bits of Parks's story to know how important he was to NASCAR. They began to visit him at his office on Northside Avenue, next to the liquor store where his brothers and brothers-in-law still worked. The office had become a shrine to Parks's stock car and moonshine days, the walls and shelves busy with memorabilia. Even in his nineties, Parks arrived early at the office each day. There, he was surrounded by the faces in photographs and the names etched on trophies of the men he'd outlived. And it would break the heart of his lovely wife, Violet (his fifth), to see his memory fade each year.

  But Parks was never one to dawdle. So he'd work all day, go home for supper, and most nights return to the office and work a bit longer. He remained what he'd always been: a hard worker who took nothing for granted. He was still doing what he did when he escaped from Dawsonville three-quarters of a century earlier, almost as if he couldn't let go of the enterprise that brought him to the big city that changed and defined his life.

  He was still selling liquor to Atlantans.

  BILL FRANCE AND NASCAR

  France dedicated every day of his life, and his family's, to racing. His wife managed the books and tacked publicity posters to telephone poles. His kids sold crushed ice and collected tickets. France handled such menial tasks as directing fans in the parking lot and cleaning up their trash once they'd left. At night, he'd spread all the cash out on the living room floor and start counting. A silver plaque he used to keep on a bookshelf in his in office read, “Money isn't everything, but it does tend to keep the children in touch.”

  In the late 1980s, after Big Bill was diagnosed with Alzheimer's, the disease progressed rapidly, terribly. At first, he would telephone Red Vogt and Raymond Parks and some of his old friends, men he'd known since before World War II. He seemed to want desperately to talk about the old days. But the disease advanced and his health declined, and as one colleague said, he “wasn't in this world anymore.”

  In early 1992, France's wife of sixty years, Anne, died. A few months later, France lost his battle with Alzheimer's and died. He was eighty-two.

  NASCAR's fan base doubled in the 1990s and was expected, with attendance growing at 10 percent a year, to remain the fastest-growing sport of the new millennium. More and more fans are now college-educated, middle-class, and female. Women and kids are an increasingly attractive target for NASCAR's advertisers.

  “It's all about marketing,” admits handsome NASCAR phenom Jeff Gordon.

  And the numbers are astronomical. NASCAR's top racing series, the Nextel Cup, is one big ad, or as one Yankee writer put it, “40 extremely mobile billboards circle a track for three hours, driven by men in jumpsuits that make bowling apparel look sharp.” Cars, drivers, and crews are splashed with the bright colors of benefactors who pay ten to twenty million dollars to host “the No. 8 Budweiser Chevy” or “the No. 20 Home Depot Monte Carlo.” NASCAR's revenues average more than three billion dollars a year—and rising—and NASCAR fans cough up two billion dollars for merchandise each year, with most of the profits going to the lone family that still owns the whole sport.

  Bill built family into the business: way back in 1972, France named his son Bill Jr. as NASCAR's president; his grandson, Brian, took over as chairman and CEO in 2003. Granddaughter Lesa France Kennedy is president of ISC, and son Jim is its CEO. Together, the France family is worth billions; the children and grandchildren ranked on Forbes magazine's list of richest Americans.

  France's own personal legacy remains strong. His name is mentione
d during race broadcasts on ESPN, FOX, or NBC. They call him “visionary” and “founder.” Even 60 Minutes, in a late-2005 segment, credited France as the patriarch of “the family that founded” NASCAR, which Leslie Stahl said was “born in Daytona Beach.” France would have been pleased that his version of NASCAR's creation survived in his absence.

  The story of France's coming to the South and single-handedly creating NASCAR, thereby becoming the savior of redneck racers who couldn't figure out how to run their own sport, is indeed the enduring and romantic legend. Of course, that's just part of the story. Richard Petty once summed up the impression many racers had of France: “NASCAR got this big by being a dictatorship.”

  France surely deserves his lionized place in automotive history— even Red Vogt once said, “Who the hell would do any better?” Given all the effort France put into stock cars, he never felt guilty when his family business turned into one of the biggest success stories in the history of American sports. But in his final days, with his mind addled by Alzheimer's, he'd get nostalgic and teary-eyed at the sound of long-ago names such as Seay, Hall, Flock, Byron, Vogt, and Parks.

  France couldn't have done it without them. Even a dictator has a sense of history. Abraham Lincoln once said, “No man is good enough to govern another man without that other's consent,” and Winston Churchill said, “Dictators ride to and fro upon tigers which they dare not dismount.” In the end, France had to know that even if they didn't always go along willingly, NASCAR's moonshining cofounders were indeed his heroic tigers.

  * In 2005, just days before Christmas, George W. Bush issued eleven presidential pardons. Three of them were to convicted moonshiners.

  * Holman-Moody's Fords dominated NASCAR for the next two decades.

  I feel totally reL·xed in the race car. I can tune everything else out.

  In a way, it's my retreat. It's probably the place where I'm most at home.

  — DALE EARNHARDT, “THE INTIMIDATOR”

  Epilogue: This is what

  NASCAR has become…

  ATLANTA MOTOR SPEEDWAY, 2005

  Half a century after the departure of Raymond Parks, Red Byron, and Red Vogt, NASCAR has changed so much and yet remains so much the same.

  Lakewood is no longer a red and dusty racetrack. It's an overgrown field near Atlanta's Hartsfield Airport, which is named for the mayor who had banned bootleggers from racing in the 1940s. The old brick Ford factory that manufactured so many bootleggers' cars during and after Prohibition still stands on Ponce de Leon Avenue. It's now home to the east-side branch of Atlanta's Police Department.

  In place of Lakewood, race fans have Atlanta Motor Speedway, twenty miles south, built in 1960 and still owned by Bill France's longtime combatant Bruton Smith. Jimmy Carter once worked as a ticket vendor there and later celebrated his election to the governor's mansion by inviting NASCAR racers to a barbecue dinner. The huge speedway boasts Gone with the Wind-themed condos and office buildings such as Tara Place, the Tara Ballroom, and Tara Clubhouse.

  To better understand where NASCAR came from, I have tried to grasp what it ultimately became and, in that exploration, enlisted help from two able assistants. In a reprise of my somewhat reluctant childhood trips to races with my father, I have taken my two sons to Atlanta Motor Speedway for their first race, the Golden Corral 500, to get their perspective on NASCAR—and to gauge my own.

  I had moved my family to the South in 2002, largely to be near the research for this book. Yet I sometimes worry that my two Yankee-born offspring, who know plenty about life north of D.C., still haven't been sufficiently exposed to southern culture. As we walk toward the enormous racetrack, through a parking lot-sized prerace carnival, my concerns seem justified. The boys walk gape-mouthed through it all, and their questions and comments pop like popcorn beneath a late-winter Georgia sun.

  Daddy, how come there are so many pickup trucks? Yeah, and how come almost every car is American, except ours?

  Seems like everyone is white.

  Yeah, Daddy, don't black people like NASCAR?

  Daddy, what's Skoal?

  Who's Jack Daniels?

  Can I get a T-shirt?

  We're two hours early for the race, but it seems as if we're latecomers to a party that's been fermenting for quite a while. Apparently, we've missed the point of NASCAR, which goes something like this: the actual race is an afterthought, just the icing on a big, beer-soaked, red-white-and-blue cake that's been baking for three days.

  Stock car races have grown too big to be contained in a Sunday afternoon. Fans start surging toward their mecca, often drunkenly, midweek. They come by the busload—church groups and scout troops, bowling leagues and the Sons and Daughters of the Confederacy, husband-and-wife motorcyclists revving engines alongside packs of black-leathery bike gangs. By Thursday, the traveling circus has established its encampment. Gaggles of RVs, big as eighteen-wheelers, with satellite dishes and wooden viewing stands bolted on top, have crammed into the infield and fired up gas grills and generators to power their TVs. Blue tarps shade makeshift patios from the sun. As my observant assistants pointed out, most of those who came on four wheels did so in burly, American-made pickups, nearly every one bearing bumper stickers declaring their favorite driver as “8” (Dale Earnhardt Jr.) or “24” (Jeff Gordon). Or with that cartoon kid Calvin mischievously pissing on “Ford” or “Chevy” or “work” or “24.” NASCAR fans are patriots (“These colors don't run”) and soldiers' parents (“Bring the troops home”). And if you believe the bumper stickers, God and Jesus are hard-core NASCAR fans, too.

  As we join the giddy crowd—nearly two hundred thousand strong, slowly jamming itself into a town-sized stadium—my sons take note of the dress code: cutoffs or jeans and a mostly white T-shirt colored loud with a racer's name or number or some rowdy declaration such as “Born with the Need for Speed.” We're among the few families not pulling a wheeled cooler of beer. Confederate flags rival the American flags catching the breeze. As one magazine writer recently put it, after visiting a NASCAR race at Talladega, “It has not come to the attention of eastern Alabama that the Civil War ended.”

  Race time is still an hour away, but the outer perimeter of the track rages, a pulsing festival of vices—music, food, sexuality, alcohol, tobacco—and marketing. Beautiful women strut beside display booths promoting Viagra, power tools, and Tide detergent. Fans dance inside the Skoal chewing tobacco tent, with its hard-rocking country band and free tins of tobacco. (Me, to Sean: “No, you can't have one.”) At a booth promoting a muscle-building protein supplement, chubby men line up to take a shot at an arm-wrestling pro. (Me, to Leo: “No, you can't try it.”) The pressure to spend is intense, and I finally cave, contributing fifty dollars to the France family fortune: Sean gets a Dale Earnhardt Jr. T-shirt, and Leo gets an Atlanta Motor Speedway hoodie.

  We parade into the stadium and climb grandstands that rise behind thick cables and fencing that will separate us from the potential carnage of the steeply banked, 1.54-mile rectangular track. (In the 1990s, at least three dozen spectators were killed by cars or flying debris at various U.S. auto racing events.) We shuffle away from the more aggressive fans, such as the guy in the one hundred-dollar front-row seat sucking a Bud tallboy, wearing a Confederate flag T-shirt with the Faulkner-esque declaration, “It's a Southern thang, y'all wouldn't understand.” We reach the Petty “Family Section,” which doesn't allow alcohol, but in a brilliant stroke of forethought, I have brought along a flask of moonshine, compliments of Sean's ex-teacher (procured from a source named One-Eyed Ronnie). It's my tithe to the past, my offering up to the Roy Hall generation and NASCAR's whiskey-making, whiskey-drinking forefathers. Plus, researching this book has required me to become an expert on moonshine and corn-based liquor in general. It's just my job.

  But surely not even the flashiest of Roy Hall-era whiskey trippers could have imagined a scene such as this.

  Of the scores of football and baseball games I've attended, not one has come close
to the emotional intensity accompanying the start of a NASCAR race. Take the National Anthem, which ranks among Leo's favorite songs (along with the theme from “Rocky”); he's got a scratchy LP record version, and I've seen him get beautifully teary-eyed at the crescendo. As a country music star starts singing “The Star-Spangled Banner,” Leo looks up at me and screws up his face, as if he'd just swallowed lemon juice. “Sounds weird,” he says. But then, at the anthem's off-key climax, all heads tilt backward as a military jet—now a staple of NASCAR races—screams overhead. The hairs on my neck stand up, and I resist an unexpected reaction: I actually choke up. Then a nearby fan screams back, “USA, yeah! Screw the rest of the world!”

  The crowd quiets as a preacher thanks Jesus for the freedom to race in America. An announcer then wails the real invocation of the day: “Gentlemen, start your engines!” Forty-three cars, most shaped like Chevy Monte Carlos, Ford Tauruses, or Dodge Intrepids or Chargers, blast to life and start their slow, gruff, phlegmy warm-up laps. When the green flag waves, each $150,000 car, about as “stock” as a thoroughbred on a carousel, accelerates to speeds twice as fast as I've ever driven, the angry symphony of 750-horsepower V-8 engines more deafening than the prerace jet. Noise is an insufficient word. It's inhuman and inhumane, painful and thrilling. It grinds into the chest, hammers the bones. The air fills with the warm stench of burning tires, burning oil, like the stink of a car fire. “God, I love that smell,” a nearby fan screams.

  A high-pitched, mechanical whine precedes the pack as it approaches our section, and then the drone of the lead car's engine suddenly drops in pitch as it passes with a “MEEEEE-OW,” followed instantly by the staccato rush of forty-two others, “MEE-YOW, MYOW, MYOW, MYOW-YOW-YOW-YOW, YOW-YOW-OW-OW-OW …”