American stock car racing began with men who knew how to outrun the law on back roads, and it ended up running 200-mile-an-hour laps on banked concrete. These stories reach from a hotel meeting in Daytona Beach in 1947 to a wall built to crumple, by way of a fish pond in South Carolina, a monkey in a driving suit, and a champion who drove with his leg bolted to the clutch.
Every tile in a Stock Car Racing game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Drivers
nine stories
1The win they would not put in victory lane
On the tile: Wendell Scott1963
On December 1, 1963, Wendell Scott beat Buck Baker at Speedway Park in Jacksonville, Florida, and became the first Black driver to win a race at NASCAR's top level. He collected the prize money but not the trophy. Nobody in charge wanted him in the victory lane ceremony, where a young white woman traditionally handed over the trophy with a kiss. Scott started 495 premier series races and finished in the top ten 147 times.
Red Byron flew 57 missions as a tail gunner on a B-24 before his bomber was shot down over the Aleutian Islands. Doctors spent more than two years rebuilding his left leg, and he was told he would never walk again. He went back to racing in February 1946 with the leg set in a steel stirrup bolted to the clutch. He won eleven races and NASCAR's first championship in 1948, then won the first Strictly Stock title in 1949.
Tim Flock's car owner, Ted Chester, spotted a rhesus monkey in an Atlanta pet shop and decided Jocko Flocko had a nice ring to it. Jocko got his own seat, helmet and driving suit and rode in eight races in 1953, including a win at Hickory, North Carolina, on May 16, where Flock's Hudson Hornet led from about lap 30 on. Two weeks later at Raleigh the monkey worked loose and stuck his head through the floor hatch used to check tire wear. He took a blow to the head, and Flock had to pit and hand him to a crewman.
Curtis Turner tried to organize NASCAR's drivers as a local of the Teamsters union. The effort collapsed, and NASCAR banished him for life. Four years later Bill France Sr. lifted the ban, and Turner returned to win the American 500 at Rockingham, North Carolina, the most lucrative victory of his career, at the age of 41. He had also conceived Charlotte Motor Speedway and gotten it built on hardly enough money, only to lose it soon afterward.
Bobby Isaac was the second-youngest of nine children in a North Carolina family. At 12 he went to work in a sawmill and saved until he could buy a new pair of shoes. By the late 1950s he was racing full-time in NASCAR's Sportsman series on dirt tracks across the Southeast. In 1970 he won eleven races and the championship in Nord Krauskopf's Dodge. The following September he took a Dodge to the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah and set 28 world-class records, including 217.368 miles an hour in the flying kilometer.
Janet Guthrie was a pilot, a flight instructor and an aerospace engineer before she was a race driver. In February 1977 she became the first woman to compete in the Daytona 500, and in May of the same year she became the first woman to compete in the Indianapolis 500. Her best NASCAR finish came that season at Bristol, where she placed sixth. Her helmet and driving suit went to the Smithsonian Institution.
Herb Thomas won the 1951 championship driving a Hudson Hornet and took a second title in 1953, which made him the first driver to win two premier series championships. What sets him apart is a rate rather than a total. He won 48 races in 228 starts, a winning percentage of 21.05 that is still the best of any driver with more than 100 starts, and he was the first driver to win the Southern 500 at Darlington three times. Serious injuries in a race at Shelby, North Carolina, in October 1956 effectively ended his career.
8Twenty-seven wins in a season, ten of them in a row
On the tile: Richard Petty1967
Richard Petty's 1967 season is the one nobody has approached. He won 27 races, ten of them consecutively, took more than half the races he started, and led 44 percent of the laps he ran that year. Across his career he won 200 races and seven championships, seven of those wins in the Daytona 500. The Hall of Fame calls 1967 the greatest single season in NASCAR history.
9Seven championships, and one race that would not come
On the tile: Earnhardt1998
Dale Earnhardt won seven championships, matching Richard Petty's record, and 76 races, and fans knew him as the Intimidator. The Daytona 500 held out on him for two decades. He came close time after time without winning the race he wanted most, and when he finally took it in 1998 it was his twentieth attempt at it.
From 1949 through 1958, NASCAR's top series raced at Daytona on a course that was half highway and half beach. A lap of a little over four miles ran south on the pavement of A1A, swung around onto the sand, and came back north along the shore. The ocean could have the last word. In 1952 the race started late so an unexpected crowd of 20,000 could find parking, and an incoming tide ended it early, after 37 laps. The top series ran its last race there on February 23, 1958.
Bill France Sr. wanted banking steep enough to carry real speed and to let people in the grandstand see the cars, so the turns went up to 31 degrees, with 18 degrees at the start-finish line. All that fill had to come from somewhere, and it came out of the infield. The high water table did the rest: the hole filled with water and became Lake Lloyd, named for Joseph Lloyd of the local speedway authority. The track opened in 1959.
Harold Brasington saw the Indianapolis 500 in 1933 and wanted a big race like it for stock cars in the South. He built his track on farmland in Darlington, South Carolina, next to a pond where the landowner, Sherman Ramsey, raised minnows, and Ramsey did not want his fish disturbed. So Brasington made one end of the track tighter and narrower than the other, and the track has been egg-shaped ever since. The first Southern 500 was run there on Labor Day, 1950.
H. Clay Earles bought thirty acres outside Martinsville, Virginia, and had a dirt track running there by 1947, before NASCAR's premier series existed. It is the shortest track in the series at 0.526 miles, flat and tight, paved in 1955 and given concrete corners in 1976. It has been on the schedule every year since 1949. Winners do not get a cup. Since 1964 they have taken home a grandfather clock.
The men who built North Wilkesboro Speedway in the North Carolina hills started with an investment of $1,500, and it did not stretch as far as they had hoped. Grading on the dirt ended early, which left the track with a front straight that runs downhill and a back straight that runs uphill. Nobody planned it that way. The first race was held in May 1947, months before NASCAR was founded, and a bootlegger named Fonty Flock won it. Wilkes County was once known as the moonshine capital of the world.
6One continuous corner, and a spot called Puke Hollow
On the tile: Langhorne1926-1971
Langhorne Speedway in Pennsylvania opened in 1926 as a one-mile dirt circle, one continuous corner known as the Big Left Turn. The dust was worst between the first and second turns, where the track broke into a potholed washboard through a dip, and that stretch became Puke Hollow, though accounts of how it got the name differ. In 1940 Langhorne staged one of the first stock car races in the Northeast, and NASCAR's top series raced there through 1957. The track held its last race in October 1971, and stores stand on the site now.
7The first modern superspeedway to race after dark
On the tile: Night racing1992
Charlotte Motor Speedway spent 1.7 million dollars in 1992 on a Musco lighting system of 1,200 fixtures, an idea from Bruton Smith and track president Humpy Wheeler. The track's first night race was The Winston, NASCAR's all-star race, billed as One Hot Night. It drew a sellout crowd, and Davey Allison won it while crashing with Kyle Petty at the finish line. Charlotte became the first modern superspeedway to race at night, and it was the largest lit sports arena until Daytona added lights in 1998.
Middle Georgia Raceway, near Macon, began holding NASCAR premier series races in 1966. In 1967 federal agents arrived looking for something other than a race, and found a trapdoor in the ticket office. Below it were a ladder and a tunnel 125 feet long. Under the third turn sat a 2,000-gallon tank for cooking illegal liquor and a 1,200-gallon tank for fermenting it. The sport had grown up out of moonshine country, and at that track it had not grown far out of it.
An avid pilot, Bill France noticed an old horse-racing track while flying over a farm beside the Eno River near Hillsborough, North Carolina. He and his partners built a dirt oval there, and it held a race in NASCAR's first Strictly Stock season, in 1949. Richard Petty won its last race on September 15, 1968, and its fall date went to France's new track at Talladega. Nobody ever paved it. Pines and cedars grew up in the infield, and a walking trail now crosses the old track in Eno River State Park.
The Hudson Hornet's floor dropped down between the frame rails instead of sitting on top of them, so the car rode low and handled well. Its 308-cubic-inch straight six, the largest six-cylinder engine in a mass-produced car at the time, came close to the power of the V8s that Oldsmobile and Buick were selling. On the dirt tracks of the early 1950s the combination was nearly unbeatable. Hudsons won 27 of 34 NASCAR races in 1952 and three straight manufacturers' championships, and in 1954 the company merged with Nash.
2Plymouth had to build 1,920 street cars to race one
On the tile: Superbird1970
To race a car in NASCAR, a manufacturer had to sell it to the public. When Plymouth followed Dodge's winged Charger Daytona with the Superbird, NASCAR had just raised the requirement from 500 cars to one for every two dealers, which meant Plymouth had to build 1,920 of them with the pointed nose cone and the tall rear wing. Richard Petty, who had spent 1969 racing Fords, came back to Plymouth and won 18 races in 1970. For 1971, NASCAR held winged cars to smaller engines or much more weight, which left them uncompetitive.
After Bobby Allison's car climbed into the catchfence at Talladega in 1987, NASCAR decided the cars could not go on getting faster. It tried smaller carburetors first. The teams objected, and the compromise was a plate fitted under the carburetor to choke the air an engine could draw, cutting power and speed together. Plates went on at Daytona and Talladega from 1988 and stayed there until a tapered spacer replaced them after the 2019 Daytona 500.
A stock car's bodywork is shaped to press the car onto the track. Spin it around so the air arrives backward and the car begins to act like a wing, and it can lift off the ground. After cars flew at Talladega and at Michigan in 1993, NASCAR's Gary Nelson and General Motors engineer Gary Eaker turned to a flap like the one NASCAR already required at the cowl, and Jack Roush's company built it into the roof. The flaps pop up when a car spins and spoil the lift. NASCAR ordered them for Daytona in February 1994.
A concrete retaining wall does not move when a race car hits it. Dean Sicking's group at the University of Nebraska designed a barrier of welded steel tubes backed with bundles of closed-cell foam and strapped over the existing concrete, so the wall soaks up part of the car's energy and spreads the blow along a longer stretch. It went up at Indianapolis in May 2002, and by 2006 every oval that held a NASCAR Cup or IndyCar race had it.
Dr. Robert Hubbard, a professor at Michigan State University, and his brother-in-law, the racer Jim Downing, saw drivers being killed by basilar skull fractures because nothing restrained their heads. Hubbard filed a patent on a head restraint in 1985, and Downing first raced a prototype at Daytona in November 1986. Downing later recalled that only about 250 had sold when Dale Earnhardt died in the 2001 Daytona 500. Then 250 sold in a single week, and 3,000 by the end of the year. NASCAR required head and neck restraints that October.
Early pit crews used repair-shop floor jacks that weighed more than a hundred pounds. The Wood Brothers replaced them with a lightweight jack, and Leonard Wood, the team's chief mechanic, modified it to raise the car in two pumps instead of eight or nine. He also made the fuel cans flow faster and the lug nuts come off quicker, choreographed every move, and cut stop times in half or better. Eventually every team copied him. In 1965 Ford and Colin Chapman hired the Woods to service Jim Clark's car at the Indianapolis 500, and Clark won.
Seventy-five cars started NASCAR's first 500-mile race, at Darlington in 1950. Johnny Mantz bet that ordinary car tires would not last. By one account he took up Firestone's offer of a tire built for asphalt; by another he fitted slow but durable truck tires. Either way he drove a slow pace down on the apron while rivals kept pitting for rubber, some using more than sixty tires. Mantz won by more than nine laps, averaging about 75 miles an hour against a pole speed of 82.
Smokey Yunick ran a Daytona Beach shop he called the Best Damn Garage in Town, and built cars for Herb Thomas, Fireball Roberts, Bobby Isaac and others. The stories go that he worked all sorts of sleight of hand into those cars, and they have been told and retold ever since. Yunick himself maintained that the retelling had embellished them a good deal. What is not in doubt is the record: his cars won four of the first eight major stock car races at Daytona International Speedway, starting in 1959, and Roberts drove three of those winners.
On December 14, 1947, Bill France Sr. gathered nearly forty drivers, owners, promoters, mechanics and writers at the Streamline Hotel in Daytona Beach. Their complaints were practical ones: fly-by-night promoters who failed to pay drivers as promised, rules that changed from track to track, and a crowd of rival sanctioning bodies. Out of those meetings came one rule book, guaranteed purses and an insurance plan. The mechanic Red Vogt coined the name.
2The first winner was disqualified for his springs
On the tile: Spring wedges1949
On June 19, 1949, on a three-quarter-mile dirt track in Charlotte, NASCAR ran the first race of the series that became the Cup. Glenn Dunaway won it by three laps. Then inspectors found steel wedges welded to his rear springs, an old bootlegger's trick for keeping a car sitting level under a load of whiskey. Dunaway lost the win and the 2,000-dollar prize went instead to Jim Roper.
The first Daytona 500, in 1959, ended with Lee Petty and Johnny Beauchamp crossing the line side by side. Officials first gave the win to Beauchamp, who went to victory lane, while Petty insisted he had won by a good two feet. Bill France Sr. studied photographs and newsreel footage, and a picture taken at the line by T. Taylor Warren settled it. On the Wednesday after the race, three days later, Petty was declared the winner. He went on to take the championship that season, the third of his career.
Talladega opened in September 1969 so fast that tires were coming apart in testing. The Professional Drivers Association, led by Richard Petty, wanted the race postponed until a tire could stand up to the track. Bill France Sr. would not move it, so most of the regulars loaded up and left. France filled out the field with drivers from the support race and offered ticket holders free admission to a later race. Richard Brickhouse stayed, and took the only win of his top-series career.
On March 24, 1970, Buddy Baker took a 1969 Dodge Charger Daytona with a 426-cubic-inch Hemi engine around Alabama International Motor Speedway at 200.447 miles an hour. By Baker's own account, drivers had run that fast before, just never officially. His was the lap that NASCAR timed and certified, which made him the first driver officially clocked above 200 on a closed course. The track is known now as Talladega.
6Both leaders crashed and one kept his engine running
On the tile: 1976 finish1976
David Pearson and Richard Petty came off the last corner of the 1976 Daytona 500 together, touched, and both spun into the wall. Petty's car died in the infield grass about a hundred yards short of the line. Pearson had pushed in his clutch as he went around, so his engine was still running. He put the wrecked Mercury back in gear and limped across the finish line to win.
7A snowstorm, a live broadcast and a last-lap crash
On the tile: Live on TV1979
The 1979 Daytona 500 was the first 500-mile NASCAR race shown live from green flag to checkered flag on national television, on CBS. A massive snowstorm had kept much of the East Coast indoors, and many people tuned in. On the last lap the two leaders, Donnie Allison and Cale Yarborough, crashed, and Richard Petty came through to win his sixth Daytona 500, a record at the time. In the infield afterward Yarborough and the Allison brothers got into a brawl, and brief moments of it went out on national television.
On July 4, 1984, Richard Petty edged Cale Yarborough at the start-finish line to begin lap 159 at Daytona, and that was the margin that gave him the 200th win of his career. Ronald Reagan had given the command to start engines from Air Force One, then landed and watched from the press box, the first sitting president to see a NASCAR race in person. Afterward he ate fried chicken with the drivers in the garage area. The 200 wins are still the record.
With six races left in the 1992 season, Alan Kulwicki was 278 points out of the championship lead. He was a mechanical engineer from Wisconsin who ran his own team and had turned down offers from the powerhouse operations in order to keep racing for himself. He closed the whole gap over those six races and won the championship by 10 points, the tightest margin in the series to that time.