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Fastest Growing Sport In America

On December 14, 1947, a group of mechanics, promoters, and race car drivers met in Daytona Beach, Florida, to bring some order to the chaotic world of stock car racing. One of them, Big Bill France, Sr., insisted that “stock car racing has got distinct possibilities.”

He was right. The National Association of Stock Car Auto Racing, which they formed at that December 14 meeting in the Streamline Hotel, became one of the biggest success stories in the history of American sports. Today stock car racing is the fastest growing sport in America, and NASCAR is a fixture of our national culture.

How We Got…NASCAR 65 million B.C. Dinosaurs rule the Earth, then croak. Millions of years later, their bones have transformed into either museum pieces or NASCAR nectar. 3 A.D. Roman chariot races become popular. Horses trade hair, slave pit crews form, and imperial sponsorship pays the bills. 1885 The internal-combustion engine is invented, killing any hopes for a National Association of Steam Car Automotive Racing. 1903 Henry Ford is determined to sell every American an automobile, ushering in mass production of stock cars and, eventually, air fresheners. 1940s Tax-man-dodging bootleggers leave burnouts all over the South. This combines three things important to NASCAR. 1948 William France creates NASCAR by merging several floundering racing tracks. He’s the Elvis of the racing world. 2005 NASCAR is the best excuse to inhale car exhaust, cheer heavy metal carnage, and wage war in the Middle East.

The star driver Richard Petty once said that auto racing began “the day they built the second automobile.” He wasn’t far off. In the 1890s, steam-powered “quadricyles” raced one another at speeds that hit 5 miles an hour. Racing began in the Northeast, then moved with the industry to Indiana and the Midwest, convenient to manufacturing centers like South Bend, Indianapolis, and Detroit.

This was “open-wheel” racing, with cars constructed from scratch for maximum speed. The legendary driver Barney Oldfield averaged 84 miles an hour racing at the big Indianapolis speedway in 1909. A brick surface was added two years later, and drivers broke 100 mph in 1919. An early observer asserted that car racing “dwells in the very bloodstream of America—a virus of velocity.”

Racing with specialized vehicles was a rich man’s game. In the 1930s a new kind of competition began to attract participants of more modest means. Amateur enthusiasts would buy an old car, make some alterations to improve its acceleration and handling, and race their pals around cow pastures. The sport was especially popular in the South. Among the most enthusiastic racers were moonshiners, who transported their product to market in fast cars and developed their driving skills while outrunning the law on country roads. Officials at the American Automobile Association, which at the time was the organizing body for professional racing, scoffed at the new stock car events and refused to sanction the races.

Bill France was one of several promoters who tried to standardize stock car racing in the late 1930s. He saw it as a democratic sport, for “plain, ordinary working people” who couldn’t afford a custom racecar. But NASCAR itself wasn’t to be democratic. After the 1947 meeting, France quickly gained control, and he ruled the sport as a dictator for decades. He eventually bought the NASCAR organization outright; to this day his family controls the sport in its entirety.

The hard-packed sands of Daytona Beach were the nation’s principal early proving grounds for land speed trials. The first Speed Week there took place in 1904. In 1936 France organized a race at Daytona in which the cars tore along the beach, looped around, and returned on the nearby highway. But just as the races were beginning to gain popularity, the sport was put on hold by a World War II ban on auto racing.

When racing resumed after the war, whiskey runners (who were still delivering untaxed moonshine from rural stills), hot rodders, and other racing enthusiasts brought out their souped-up cars, planning to start where they had left off. But France, always conscious of the sport’s image, wanted to get rid of the prewar “jalopies.” In 1949 he made the “strictly stock” division the premier level of racing. drivers had to use relatively new cars with no modification. He correctly surmised that fans would respond to seeing cars just like their own going head to head on the racetrack.

Early races had mostly been on dirt tracks, often at county fairgrounds. In 1950 a paved speedway opened in Darlington, South Carolina, and the first 500-mile stock car race on asphalt was held. The drivers competed for a $25,000 purse. From there the trajectory of NASCAR was steadily upward. By the mid-1950s auto manufacturers were taking notice. “Win on Sunday, sell on Monday” became an industry motto. The cars remained strictly stock, but the definition of “stock” produced endless controversies. Automakers could gain a racing edge by offering to the public models with beefed-up horsepower and performance.

High-compression engines, overhead valves, and other innovations were put into production partly in response to the needs of the racetrack, which served as a research lab for new car features. It wasn’t long before the car companies were working closely with racing teams to beat out the competition.

American passenger cars became increasingly muscular. The 1955 Chrysler 300 hemi could do 130 mph right off the lot. At the same time, highway deaths mounted. The National Safety Council criticized automakers for the trend. The companies grew skittish, and they officially pulled out of stock car racing in 1957. But they returned a few years later.

In 1959 Bill France moved racing at Daytona to a new super speedway, a steeply banked 2.5-mile “tri-oval” (a sort of an oval made triangular by a bulge in one side) designed for high speeds and big crowds. Other promoters built similar courses. Speeds increased, and the cars had to be modified for safety. Though they retained the outward appearance of production models, they increasingly evolved into specialized racing machines. By 1970 drivers were recording the first 200 mph laps.

The auto companies again drew back from the sport that year, but the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, banned from television advertising, took over NASCAR events, putting up prize money in exchange for exposure. Top drivers began to compete for the Winston Cup.

Richard Petty dominated the sport during the 1960s and ’70s. His father, Lee, had been a star driver in the early years, and Richard exuded the southern charm and drivers-old-boy aura that fans loved. In a fierce duel at Daytona in 1976, he and his rival David Pierson crashed together on the final turn of the last lap. Petty spun off the track and his engine stalled. Pierson got his damaged car to limp across the finish line at 20 mph, and he won the race.

A wider cohort of Americans began to notice stock car racing in the 1970s as television coverage expanded. The trend accelerated when the next big star came on the scene. Dale Earnhardt, known as the Intimidator, was one of the most successful drivers ever, winning races for more than two decades. Fans loved and hated him for his aggressive, no-holds-barred driving style. His death in a racing accident in 2001 sent legions of NASCAR fans into mourning, attracted widespread attention to the sport, and further boosted its popularity.

NASCAR continued to roll. When R. J. Reynolds dropped its backing, in 2004, Sprint Nextel Corporation was willing to pay $750 million to become lead sponsor. Television coverage increased. In 2007 five networks will broadcast even more NASCAR events under a new $4.8 billion TV deal. Annual racing revenues are over $3 billion and rising, and merchandising adds another $2 billion to NASCAR coffers.

Some purists complain that NASCAR has turned its back on its working-class, Southern, outlaw roots (Dale Earnhardt, Jr. was fined $10,000 in 2004 for using strong language on television). Most fans today are middle-class, and nearly half are women. They come from all parts of the country. The cars serve as billboards for Tide and Betty Crocker as well as for Skoal snuff. “It’s all about marketing,” says Jeff Gordon, one of the sport’s contemporary stars.

Critics have also blasted the sport for its noise, danger, monotony, pollution, and profligate waste of fossil fuels. But one of the organizers at that 1947 meeting perhaps had an inkling of the nature of the “possibilities” when he observed that stock car racing was “kind of like country music. Nobody likes it except the public.”

Early racers were, strictly speaking, not stock car racers at all. They were professional “trippers,” drivers in the liquor racket who used expensively souped-up automobiles to outrun revenue agents. Trippers drove every variety of car, but they generally preferred 1939 and 1940 Fords, with easily available spare parts that could be modified for greater speed and better suspension, and with generous trunk space to accommodate their cargo. Trippers tended to be mountain folk and thus had had to master the blind curves and nonexistent shoulders of old hill-country roads. Dexterity and speed were imperative; losing the race meant prison.

Many trippers took to racing for sport and occasionally for prize money in their spare time. Some early NASCAR greats like Junior Johnson and the Flock brothers—Bob and Fonty—got their start hauling homebrewed whiskey for their parents and only gradually found themselves drawn to the racetrack. Even as his competitive racing star ascended in the 1950s, Johnson faithfully plied his talents for the family business. He was arrested in 1956, served 11 months for liquor trafficking, and returned to the track in 1959 in time to participate in a fierce NASCAR run at Charlotte, North Carolina, where he drove another contestant into a wall.

Informal car racing flourished in the 1940s, when war production gave Southerners unprecedented capital to put into cars and wagers. Tim Flock, an early NASCAR Grand National champion and younger brother to Bob and Fonty, insisted that modern stock car racing was inaugurated immediately after the war in a “cow pasture right outside Atlanta, Georgia,” where drivers competed for cash prizes that could total as much as $20,000. For the most part these early races were rowdy affairs, their fans notorious for boozing, womanizing, and supremely proficient cursing.

It took a visionary to realize the commercial potential of stock car racing in a modernizing South. William Getty France, a service station owner in Daytona Beach, Florida, and an occasional participant in so-called outlaw races, understood the appeal this raffish new sport held for the country migrants in their newfound factories. On December 14, 1947, he convened a summit of three dozen leading mechanics and racers to form a sanctioning body for stock car competitions. Thus was born the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing (NASCAR). “Big Bill” France became the organization’s first president.

From its inception NASCAR embodied the split personality of postwar Southland culture: at once urban and market-oriented, yet still close to its rural, precommercial roots. Locked at first in tough competition with four other sanctioning organizations, France’s NASCAR sponsored standard races featuring modified cars, but it also launched a 150-mile contest at Charlotte whose participants were allowed to drive only automobiles that were “strictly stock”—that is, wholly unenhanced. The ploy was a great success with many fans, who enjoyed seeing professionals race the same cars an ordinary consumer could own. It was an even bigger hit with the car companies; they quickly recognized the marketing potential in NASCAR and invested accordingly. Keeping his eye on commercial strategy, France also enforced stern discipline. Even such driving legends as Tim Flock, Lee Petty, and Red Byron found they could pay a high price, in cumulative points lost, if they participated in unsanctioned races or otherwise bucked Big Bill’s authority.

Yet if NASCAR was big business, its success was intimately related to its self-styled reputation as a place of last refuge for Southerners who missed the wild pulse of old country ways. So NASCAR promoted its drivers as cowboys on wheels, drinkers, skirt chasers and partygoers, whose much-publicized (and often exaggerated) debauches offered spectators to behave just as raucously—or at least to dream of it. drivers like Curtis Turner gave NASCAR fans plenty of legend to revel in. Decked out in his trademark silk suits, Turner partied with movie stars and burned through enormous sums of money—$6,000 a month, according to some sources. His fellow driver Smokey Yunick remembered spending “a lot of time with Curtis, drinking, chasing women, racing, raising hell, teaching people how to turn around in the middle of the road at 60 miles an hour, putting cars in swimming pools.”

Over the years, as its fans climbed the socioeconomic ladder, NASCAR angled for a more respectable image. In the 1950s it banned women from the pit, thus drawing to a premature close the racing careers of drivers like Sara Christian, Louise Smith, and Ethel Flock Mobley. As the organization steadily moved North, where millions of white transplants demonstrated as much enthusiasm for the sport as their Southern cousins, it began to look less like itself. By 1960 the Southern circuit had eight paved courses; in the 1970s officials introduced organized prayer services at the start of races. In time the tracks came to resemble big-city sports arenas. At Darlington, South Carolina, spectators who can afford $500 tickets are now ushered off to the Azalea Terrace; others vie for even more expensive chairs in the President’s Suite or the Fourth Turn Club. In perhaps the most conspicuous example of NASCAR’s self-reformation, drivers are now fined $10,000 for fighting.

If skeptics had any lingering doubt about NASCAR’s stature as a national pastime, the coverage of the Daytona 500 put the issue to rest. NBC bumped its coverage of the Winter Olympics in Utah in favor of the race at Daytona Beach. The decision reflected NASCAR’s immense profitability to its sponsor networks. In 2001 NEC’s stock car ratings jumped 34 percent over the previous year; among men earning $75,000 and more, a phenomenal 74 percent. NASCAR is no longer a Southern phenomenon.

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