The Oneida Daily Dispatch (Oneida, NY)
Backstories surface from one-hit wonders
In last week’s edition of NASCAR This Week, we highlighted onetime winners throughout NASCAR history. There have been 60 drivers who have scored only one win over their short or very long careers. NTW looked at 10 of those drivers and their special day at the race track. Among those highlighted were Jim Roper, who won the inaugural NASCAR Cup Series race in 1949 at a now defunct dirt track in Charlotte, North Carolina, and Sam Mcquagg, whose only victory in 62 starts came in the 1966 Firecracker 400 at Daytona International Speedway. It was noted that Mcquagg’s win was helped along when Chrysler engineers added a rear spoiler to the trunk lid of his Dodge. But it turns out there was more trickery in Mcquagg’s only triumph. Bob Guy, 82, from Revere, Missouri, said he worked on the car that had been built and engineered by Ray Nichels. Guy and the boys in the shop rigged the front left end of the chassis to drop when it passed through the once notorious bumps around Turn 4 of Daytona’s 2.5mile tri-oval. “The lower the car is to the ground, the faster it goes,” Guy said in a recent telephone interview. “Sam was 1 to 2 mph faster than any other car on the track that day.” Guy said Richard Petty and Mcquagg were running side by side in the opening laps in the early going and when Mcquagg’s stock car dipped in that area, Petty got out of the gas thinking his opponent had broken a chassis part and was about to crash. Mcquagg finished 66 seconds ahead of second-place Darel Dieringer, driving a Mercury. “It was cheating, but if you didn’t get caught, it wasn’t cheating,” Guy said with a laugh. “Sam was a great guy,” he added. “We worked hard but we had a lot of fun together. You know in those days drivers were in the shop helping get the cars ready.” Meanwhile, a 13-year-old kid by the name of Hill Overton watched the very first Cup Series race at Charlotte Speedway won by Roper. The now 83-year-old Overton said he bugged his father into taking him to the track that day. By the time they reached the ticket window, the grandstand was sold out. Undeterred, Overton watched the race with his father from the side of hill next to the track in Turn 3. “You could see over the fence into the track from that area,” Overton said. Over the years, Overton, who works as a racing radio announcer, discovered that Humpy Wheeler (11 at the time), the famed president at Charlotte Motor Speedway, and Richard Petty (12) were also witness to that history-making moment. Petty’s pop, Lee Petty, competed in that first race. He rolled and crashed his 1948 Buick in that race. “You know, that car that Lee Petty raced, he had drove it down from Level Cross,” Overton said. “They had to hitch a ride home. Lee was worried about how he would explain all this to his wife.” Of course, 10 years later Lee Petty won the inaugural Daytona 500 and all was forgiven. Overton, who lives in Monroe, N.C., said he thought it was an exciting idea to race passenger cars that were modified for safety. “I got hooked on them,” Overton said of the Cup Series concept. “I told myself, ‘This is so novel and neat seeing cars compete like we see on the street.’ The sport has come a long way since 1949.”