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, at Speedway Park in Jacksonville, Florida, Wendell Scott became the first Black driver to win a race at NASCAR's top level, though not at the finish line. He was scored a lap down, and Buck Baker was declared the winner and given the trophy. A scoring review that ran into the night, long after the crowd had gone home, found Scott had completed 202 laps. NASCAR blamed a scoring error. Scott and others there were convinced officials had not wanted him in victory lane, getting the traditional kiss from the young white woman presenting the trophy. He got the $1,000 check, but not the trophy.
2The champion whose clutch was bolted to his leg brace
On the tile: Red Byron1948-1949
Red Byron flew 58 bombing missions out of the Aleutian Islands in a B-24, as flight engineer and sometime tail gunner. On the last one, over Paramushir in the Kuril Islands, he cut a hung bomb loose and an explosion shredded his left leg. Amputation seemed inevitable, but the leg was saved, and he spent 27 months recovering in a Colorado military hospital. To race again in 1946, he had a clutch pedal made that bolted to his leg brace. He won eleven races and NASCAR's first championship in 1948, then the first Strictly Stock title in 1949.
3She borrowed the family car and wrecked it at Daytona
On the tile: Louise Smith1940s-1956Legend
Louise Smith, the story goes, drove to Daytona Beach in her husband's brand-new Ford coupe meaning only to watch the races on the sand. When she got there she could not stand it. She entered the shiny family car in the beach race and wrecked it, and the news was all over Greenville, South Carolina, before she ever got home. The wreck did not slow her down much. She raced until 1956, won 38 races, and in 1999 became the first woman inducted into the International Motorsports Hall of Fame.
Tim Flock's sponsor, Ted Chester, found a rhesus monkey in an Atlanta pet shop, named him Jocko Flocko, and outfitted him with his own helmet, goggles and racing suit. Jocko rode along 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 slipped out of his harness and stuck his head through the trapdoor used to check tire wear. He was hit on the head, went wild inside the car, and Flock had to pit to hand him to the crew.
Curtis Turner dreamed up Charlotte Motor Speedway and, with hardly enough money to pay for the land, got it open in 1960, only to lose it soon afterward. Then he tried to organize NASCAR's drivers as a local of the Teamsters union. The effort failed, and NASCAR banished him for life. Four years later Bill France Sr. lifted the ban, and in 1965 Turner, at the age of 41, won the American 500 at Rockingham, North Carolina, the most lucrative victory of his career.
Bobby Isaac grew up in a large North Carolina family and went to work in a sawmill at 12, saving his money until he could buy a pair of new shoes. He grew tired of the sawmill and decided to make his living driving race cars instead. He won 37 races in NASCAR's top series, eleven of them in 1970, when he took 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.
Janet Guthrie was a pilot, a flight instructor and an aerospace engineer, and she had raced sports cars for years before she turned to stock cars. 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.
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 all 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.
9The nickname came from a baseball, not a race car
On the tile: Fireball1948-1964
Edward Glenn Roberts Jr. picked up the name Fireball as a hard-throwing high school pitcher, not behind the wheel. Baseball was never his real interest, though. Racing was. He started on the sand at Daytona Beach at 17 and wrecked on the ninth lap of a Modified race. He went on to win 33 premier series races in 207 starts, and in 1962 he won both the Daytona 500 and the Firecracker 250, the first driver to sweep the speedway's two races in one season.
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.
2The minnow pond that bent Darlington out of shape
On the tile: Darlington1950
Harold Brasington came home from the 1933 Indianapolis 500 wanting to build a big speedway in rural South Carolina. Part of the land he built on belonged to a farmer named Sherman Ramsey, who had a minnow pond there and insisted that it stay. So Brasington bent his layout around the pond, making one end of the track tighter and narrower than the other. Darlington has been egg-shaped ever since. It opened with a 500-mile race on Labor Day, 1950, the first Southern 500.
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.
Enoch Staley and his partners built North Wilkesboro Speedway on farmland in the North Carolina hills with $1,500, which did not stretch as far as they had hoped. The grading stopped early, and by accident the front straight runs downhill and the back straight runs up. The first official race was held in May 1947, nearly a year before NASCAR was founded, and a bootlegger named Fonty Flock won it. Wilkes County was once called the moonshine capital of the world.
Bristol opened in 1961 as a half-mile oval with 22 degrees of banking in the corners and seats for 18,000. In 1969 the whole track was dug up and the corners rebuilt with banking advertised at 36 degrees, a figure drivers disputed for years. The rebuild stretched the lap to about 0.533 miles. The surface changed from asphalt to concrete in 1992, and a new backstretch grandstand begun in 2002 took seating to an estimated 155,000, stacked around the track like the sides of a bowl.
6The first big speedway that could race after dark
On the tile: Night racing1992
Until 1992, NASCAR's big speedways raced only in daylight. That year Charlotte Motor Speedway put up a Musco lighting system of 1,200 fixtures at a cost of 1.7 million dollars, the brainchild of Bruton Smith and track president Humpy Wheeler. The first race under the lights was The Winston, NASCAR's all-star race, billed as One Hot Night. Davey Allison won it while crashing with Kyle Petty as he took the checkered flag. Night racing at speedways is a staple of the schedule now.
Middle Georgia Raceway in Macon held NASCAR races in the 1960s. In 1967 federal agents arrived looking for something other than a race, and found a trapdoor in the ticket office. Below it was a ladder and a tunnel 125 feet long, leading to equipment for making illegal liquor under the third turn. 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.
Pocono Raceway in Pennsylvania has three corners, and no two of them are alike. The first, banked at 14 degrees, was inspired by the now-closed Trenton Speedway. The second, known as the Tunnel Turn, takes after Indianapolis Motor Speedway. The third borrows from the relatively flat corners of the Milwaukee Mile and is banked at just 6 degrees. Richard Petty won the track's first NASCAR Cup Series race on August 4, 1974. The track bills itself as the Tricky Triangle.
The Hudson Hornet's floor dropped down between the frame rails instead of sitting on top of them, which gave the car a low center of gravity. Its handling made it all but unbeatable on the dirt tracks of early NASCAR, even with a six-cylinder engine rated at 145 horsepower against V8 rivals such as Oldsmobile's Rocket. Hudsons won 27 of 34 races in 1952 and took three straight manufacturers' championships. Short of cash, the company merged with Nash in 1954.
Junior Johnson turned up at Daytona in 1960 with a year-old Chevrolet that was hopeless on its own, something like 15 miles an hour slower than the other cars. In practice he tucked in close behind a faster car and found he could hang onto it at half throttle. He admitted later that he had no idea what it was. He rode the tow in the race, won the Daytona 500 after his main rival, Bobby Johns, spun out, and drafting has decided superspeedway races ever since.
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 same shape can act like a wing and lift the car off the ground. After Rusty Wallace's car tumbled at Talladega in 1993, NASCAR and General Motors engineers settled on flaps set into the roof that pop open when the air comes from the wrong direction and spoil the lift. Jack Roush's team built the prototype, and NASCAR has required them since 1994.
A concrete retaining wall does not move, which means a car striking it has to absorb the whole impact itself. 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 crushes and spreads the blow out over time. It went up at Indianapolis in 2002, and within a few years every oval on the schedule had it.
6A safety collar that almost nobody bought for years
On the tile: HANS device1985-2001
Dr. Robert Hubbard, a Michigan State University professor, and his brother-in-law, the racer Jim Downing, set out to stop a way drivers were dying: in a hard crash the belts held the body, but nothing held back the head. Hubbard filed a patent in 1985, and Downing raced a prototype in 1986. For years almost nobody bought one. After Dale Earnhardt died in a crash in the 2001 Daytona 500, a device that had sold 250 since it went on sale sold 250 in a single week. That October, NASCAR required head and neck restraints.
Early pit crews wrestled floor jacks weighing more than a hundred pounds. Leonard Wood, chief mechanic of the Wood Brothers team, switched to a lightweight jack and modified it to raise the car in two pumps instead of eight or nine. Then he choreographed every move with his crewmen brothers, and they cut their stop times in half or better. In 1965 Ford and Colin Chapman hired the Woods to service Jim Clark's car at the Indianapolis 500, and Clark won it.
Seventy-five cars started NASCAR's first 500-mile race, on the new paved track at Darlington in 1950, and the asphalt ate tires. Some cars went through more than sixty. Johnny Mantz, who started 43rd, stayed low in the turns on tires that lasted and stopped far less often. Accounts differ on what those tires were: truck tires, a Firestone tire built for asphalt, or ordinary street tires. He won by nine laps, averaging about 75 miles an hour.
Smokey Yunick ran a Daytona Beach shop he called the Best Damn Garage in Town, and he built cars for Herb Thomas, Fireball Roberts, Bobby Isaac and others. Stories about his sleight of hand in preparing those cars have been retold for decades, each version a little better than the last, and Yunick himself said the retelling had embellished them significantly. What is not in doubt is that his cars won: four of the first eight major stock car races at Daytona International Speedway, three of them with Roberts driving.
1The 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 the springs of his car, 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, and officials gave the win to Beauchamp. Petty protested. Bill France Sr. studied photographs and newsreel footage, and a photograph taken 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. 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 promised ticket holders free admission to a later race. The full 500 miles were run without a major incident, and Richard Brickhouse, who had broken with the boycott, took the win.
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. Drivers had claimed the number before, but never officially. Baker's run was clocked by NASCAR's chief timer, Joe Epton, which made him the first driver officially timed above 200 on a closed course. The track is known now as Talladega.
5Both 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.
The 1979 Daytona 500 was the first 500-mile NASCAR race shown live from the green flag to the checkered flag on national television, on CBS. A snowstorm had much of the Northeast and parts of the Midwest stuck indoors that afternoon. On the last lap the two leaders, Donnie Allison and Cale Yarborough, crashed, and Richard Petty came through to win. Then a fight broke out in the infield between Yarborough and the Allison brothers, and the cameras caught it. The Hall of Fame counts it among the most important races in NASCAR history.
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 was at the track, the first sitting president to watch a NASCAR race in person, and afterward he went to the garage and ate fried chicken with the drivers. 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.
Indianapolis Motor Speedway opened in 1909 and ran its first Indianapolis 500 in 1911, and for eighty-three years afterward it never allowed a stock car to race there. That ended on August 6, 1994. Official attendance was listed at 350,000, the largest crowd ever to watch a NASCAR race in person, and more than five million watched the ABC broadcast. Jeff Gordon, who grew up in Indiana, won it two days after his twenty-third birthday.