France Sr.’s big dreams remain vibrant
Daytona hosting double celebration
For the 60th time, race cars traveling at ridiculous speeds will run the 200 laps of the Daytona 500 on Sunday, renewing a motor sports tradition that began a few miles from giant Daytona International Speedway on the sands of the Atlantic Ocean.
The hard-packed sand of the Atlantic had attracted men and their fast machines to the Daytona Beach area as early as 1902. Eventually, single-car speed runs on the sand led to stock car racing on courses that included the beach surface and the parallel asphalt of Highway A1A. And that racing, along with bumper-banging spectacles at crude short tracks in backwater towns across much of the country, led to the formation of NASCAR in 1948.
Thus, it’s a double celebration of sorts in Daytona Beach this month as DIS drops the green flag on the 60th
500, the first and most important stock car race of the year, and NASCAR (National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing), founded and still headquartered in the city by the sea, observes its
70th anniversary.
Richard Petty, 80, has been around for virtually all of it. He watched his father, Lee, run in the first NASCAR Strictly Stock (now Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series) race in Charlotte in 1949 (NASCAR was organized a year earlier). He ran in the first Daytona 500 in 1959 (finishing 57th with a blown engine before Lee won the race in a disputed finish).
And Petty won what would become NASCAR’s crown jewel a record seven times, first in 1964 and for the final time in 1981. It’s not a stretch to claim that the track and Petty grew up together, the speedway gaining a bigger reputation each year as stock car racing’s wild frontier and Petty piling up wins and becoming NASCAR’s most visible superstar.
When racers drove through the DIS twin tunnels and into the speedway’s sprawling infield in 1959, they saw a landscape unlike any other in the sport. The track stretched 2.5 miles, with steep banking on the eastern and western ends, and the infield looked big enough to be its own county.
“The fastest place we had ever run was Darlington, so it was unreal to run around a racetrack and never think about taking your foot off the gas,” Petty said. “That was the big surprise to the whole deal. But once you did it, it was pretty dang easy.”
Well, mostly. The air does funny things when race cars plow through it at 130 mph, and drivers enjoyed a learning experience each time they pulled off pit road and onto the racing surface.
“The cars wanted to lift off the track, but nobody knew what they were doing because we hadn’t gone that fast,” Petty said. “It was really different when the wind was blowing (which it often does in Daytona Beach). You’d come down the frontstretch, and there was an open area there at the end of the grandstand, and the wind would come across the track and move the car over a half-car length. That was different.”
Drivers soon figured out how to make the wind — and the airstream that flowed across cars in front of them — work for them, and the stock car version of drafting was born. The concept of two cars linked together running faster than a single car alone has changed over the years as speeds have increased and car bodies have evolved, but the draft has remained a staple of big-track racing in NASCAR circles.
“Daytona just sort of fit in with my career,” Petty said. “The speedway opened about the time I started, so I was fortunate. People like my dad, Junior Johnson and those guys, they had to relearn after running all the short tracks. I didn’t know anything, so I just started with nothing and then learned. It was good timing from my standpoint.”
Petty’s record of seven Daytona 500 wins might stand forever. The only current driver with multiple victories in the race is Jimmie Johnson (with two), and he almost certainly won’t drive long enough to approach seven.
Four miles east of the speedway is Streamline Hotel, the recently renovated art deco building where NASCAR was formed in a series of meetings in December 1947 (the organization was incorporated in February 1948). NASCAR founder Bill France Sr. called meetings of numerous drivers, race promoters and mechanics at a bar atop the hotel before Christmas in ’47, and they hashed out the rules and procedures for a “national” stock car racing organization over a period of four days and over an unending supply of whiskey.
France had moved to Daytona Beach a decade earlier, leaving behind the winter cold of Washington, D.C., for a warmer climate. An additional attraction was the racing on the beach, the area having gained prominence because of the wild nature of the timed speed runs on the sand.
“Daytona was already world-renowned by the time they ran the first stock car race,” said NASCAR historian Buz McKim, a Daytona Beach resident. “When the well-to-do guys brought their fast cars down here just after the turn of the (20th) century, publicity followed, and everybody pretty soon knew about Daytona.”
France headquartered his new racing organization downtown, took over the beach racing and soon launched plans to build DIS, fulfilling his goal to create a monster track for stock car racing so that his side of the sport could compete with Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
Since 1959, France’s big track — and his big race — have brought thousands of fans to the Florida coast in the heart of winter.
Most sports wait until the end of their seasons for their major event. NASCAR flipped that script many years ago, leaping as a 10-year-old organization into the mainstream of American sports with the race that would come to define the heart of stock car racing.