Driving with the Devil

by Neal Thompson

  It has been my experience that folks who have no vices

  have very few virtues.

  — ABRAHAM LINCOLN

  6

  “All the women screamin' Roy Hall”

  T iypically, when a speed-minded southern boy caught the racing bug, his first stop was the junkyard, where he'd hunt down an orphaned, mid-1930s Ford body and offer the junkman, say, fifty dollars. He'd then tear out the seats, maybe weld shut the doors. Next, he'd return to the junkyard for a rusty old V-8, preferably a 1932 or 1934, which he'd get for another fifty dollars. Back home, he'd bore out the cylinders and, if he had a little extra cash, splurge on a new cylinder head, an extra carburetor or two, and some good tires.

  The finished product was as ugly and mean as a junkyard dog, but far cheaper than an open-wheel racer—and damn, it could fly. Such mashed-together vehicles, called “modified stock” cars, would hardly be allowed in a “strictly stock” race, which restricted excessive modifications and aftermarket parts. But strictly stock races were rarities in the late 1930s. Most races were for beat-up, secondhand, ingeniously modified stock cars. No one bought new cars for racing. No need to when, for a total investment of less than five hundred dollars, you could become a race car driver.

  Then again, if you'd earned a small fortune off moonshine, why not race a couple of new 1939 Ford V-8s, which, in Raymond Parks's mind, were “the pick of the litter”?

  The ′39 Fords had hydraulic brakes and a gear shifter on the floor, which moonshiners loved. The cars were built right there at the Ford factory on Ponce de Leon Avenue, with cast-iron heads, high-compression cylinders, and dual manifolds. They were also fairly cheap and, with a bit of voodoo, could be made to go very fast.

  Parks's first step as stock car racing's first team owner was to deliver his two new ′39 Fords to the twenty-four-hour-a-day garage on Spring Street. No need to call ahead. Red Vogt was always there, and he immediately started dismantling both cars. In no time, Parks's new Fords had their guts ripped out and lay in pieces on Vogt's clean floor.

  Vogt had long dabbled in all forms of racing. He went to Indianapolis every year and often worked on racing machines of the AAA world, such as midget and sprint cars, both smaller versions of the larger cars that ran at Indy. But the appeal of this new stock car sport was particularly strong, especially the challenge of taking Henry Ford's passenger vehicles and transforming them into racing vehicles. His work on whiskey cars had been satisfying and lucrative, but the results were elusive—he couldn't be there to watch Roy Hall outrun a revenuer on Highway 9. But he could be there to observe his workmanship on the racetrack.

  At the time, Ford V-8s and other Detroit-made vehicles were already fast, solid cars. Some amateur racers simply fine-tuned them, adjusted the timing, taped up or removed the headlights (so they wouldn't smash on the racetrack), put special bolts on the right-side wheels (so they wouldn't tear off), and then drove them right onto the track, a true “stock” car with a white shoe-polish number on its sides. The smart ones also tacked on any number of aftermarket modifications, such as a mesh cage bolted to the front end, a so-called shaker that would catch mud kicked up by other cars and shake it off, preventing it from reaching and clogging the radiator.

  Vogt went way beyond those minimums. No one was quite sure where he got his ideas, or his enormous talents. His formal schooling had ended before high school, and, except for some on-the-job training at the Cadillac dealership back in Washington, everything he knew was self-taught and experimental. But he had a deep curiosity that led him to seek out engineers and other experts, especially those at Atlanta's Ford assembly plant, whose brains he picked incessantly. Vogt also seemed to have some innate understanding of engines, like some sort of horse whisperer fluent in the secret language of metals and machinery. In a rare father-son moment, Vogt once explained to his son, Tom, that engines were simple if you knew how to view them from the right perspective. “An engine is nothing more than an air machine,” he said. “It sucks air in, and it pushes air out.” If a mechanic could find ways to get more air sucking into and blowing out of the engine, he could nearly double an engine's horsepower.

  In addition to adding extra carburetors, which helped the car inhale more fuel and air, Vogt added extra pipes to the exhaust manifold, to help the engine exhale. He bored out the cylinders to accommodate wider pistons, then shaved down the bottom lip of each piston to save weight. He also shaved away portions of the engine block to make it lighter and installed aftermarket aluminum cylinder heads, which were lighter than the factory heads that gave the “flathead” V-8 its name. He widened the intake and exhaust ports (called porting) to increase the engine's breathability (called volumetric efficiency) and lengthened the stroke of the pistons (called stroking). He adjusted the transmission gears to achieve maximum torque and ground down the camshafts to help the engine more efficiently inhale its fuel-air mixture and exhale its exhaust.

  Vogt admired some of Ford's factory-made parts but felt a few things needed improving, primarily the valves and cams. So Vogt ordered hand-machined cams from a shop in Philadelphia. Cams are oblong metal parts attached to a cylindrical “camshaft,” which spins and is responsible for opening and closing the engine valves—key to the air-in, air-out process. Most cams are factory-built, but Vogt felt the precision of those particular parts was crucial to an air-sucking engine and worth the extra cost. At the time, not many racers could tell the difference between handmade or factory-made cams or camshafts. Vogt was in a league of his own and, in the beginning, was able to slip many of his creations into allegedly “stock” cars and their engines. Still, he wanted the work done out of town, so no spies could leak word about how he used specially made cams.

  Vogt also made some parts himself, with a lathe and other equipment kept in the secret room of his garage. The back room became the perfect place to experiment with strange and crafty modifications to Ford's engines.

  Neighborhood kids liked to hang around Vogt's shop after school and on weekends. Vogt and the moonshiners kept an eye on one boy, a curious fast-talker named Billy Watson, whose parents owned a nearby bakery. Roy Hall even taught Watson how to drive. Up around Dawsonville, Hall would let Watson take the wheel, and every time he made a mistake, Hall punched the kid's thigh. “The right side of the road is the Atlantic, the left is the Pacific,” Hall would tell Watson. “One mistake, you drown.”

  Watson became a mascot of sorts at Red Vogt's shop, eventually dropping out of school. The moonshiners all teased him and treated him like their pet, but he worshipped them, especially Hall. “I didn't want to be a steelworker or a laborer like the other people in my neighborhood,” Watson recalled. “I wanted to be like him.”

  Watson brewed moonshine in the woods for Legs Law, sleeping in a tent for weeks at a time. Another of Raymond Parks's drivers, Norman Wrigley, took Watson along on deliveries. Wrigley always stopped at church before a moonshine delivery, making Watson wait in the car, tending the whiskey. Watson started hauling liquor himself at age fourteen but would never make a successful transition to the racetrack.*

  In time, Red Vogt took Watson under his wing, and he became one of the few whom Vogt let into the secret room; Vogt's own sons rarely went back there. One day, Vogt had a Ford V-8 engine cracked open and asked Watson, whom he called “kid,” for two pennies. Using the round end of a ball-peen hammer, Vogt tapped the pennies into two cooling holes in the block; they fit perfectly. He pieced the engine back together and fired it up. Billy thought it sounded “mean.” Vogt explained that the cooling holes were extraneous, and that blocking them up would help the engine heat up quicker and run faster, without harming its overall ability to cool itself. To be safe, he drilled a few minuscule holes around the exterior of the engine block to help cool air reach the engine.

  Many of Vogt's modifications would eventually become illegal under the ever-changing rules of stock racing, particularly after NASCAR became the officiating entity. But that was still nearly a decade awa
y. During the anything-goes racing seasons of 1939, 1940, and 1941, the main rule was that there are no rules. A saying that would later be adopted by other pioneering NASCAR mechanics was: It's not cheating if you don't get caught. That was Vogt's motto right from the start.

  Vogt was a cranky loner and misfit, working at night, often until dawn, forgetting to sleep, incessantly smoking and drinking coffee, nurturing an obsessive-compulsive disorder that had him constantly washing his hands, cleaning car parts, and neatly aligning tools on shelves. Yet, as with the German engineering he admired, a Vogt-built motor ran like a German watch. “I had some great drivers,” Parks liked to say. “But none of it would have happened without the abilities of car builder Red Vogt.”

  And none of it would have happened without Parks's whiskey money.

  Until they started racing together in 1939, Lloyd Seay and Roy Hall had been the best of friends. They delivered whiskey together, though neither drank much themselves. In many ways, they were more like brothers than cousins. They both knew what it was like to emerge intact from a family of drunken, thieving, lying, cheating men—men with chips on their shoulders, mad at the world, out to avenge the lousy hand they'd been dealt.

  In adulthood, the two deeply admired their dapper, successful older cousin, whom folks in Atlanta now called “Mr. Parks” or “sir.” Parks knew what his younger cousins wanted: “They knew I had money,” he'd say. “And I worked with Red.” But Parks also knew that they needed a father figure, just as he had. Someone to keep them from veering too far toward the darker side, which constantly lurked.

  This wasn't too difficult with Seay. He was thoughtful and, except on the racetrack, gentle. Seay took eagerly to Parks's subtle tutelage. And in time, Parks would come to think of Seay as more son than cousin. Parks and Seay even looked alike. A newspaper reporter once said, “The look-alikes could pass for brothers.” Seay was six feet tall and had a narrow face and squinted eyes that avoided your gaze. A “bashful young Atlantan” with a “baby face”—that's how some newspapers described him.

  Hall, on the other hand, was sultry, smoky. The more alpha of the two, he loomed above Seay—more handsome, more eloquent, more dangerous. He wore jaunty fedoras, flowery shirts, and matching ties beneath herringbone-plaid jackets. He had the look of a movie star playing a criminal. With a full face, broad nose, bushy brows above dark eyes, and a hardened, unafraid “I'll kill you” smirk, Hall's was the kind of look a young Marlon Brando—whom he resembled—likely practiced in the mirror. Across the next decade, Hall hammered that demeanor at the federal agents who arrested him, the judges who sentenced him, and the prison guards who came to know him by name.

  In a picture taken in those days, Hall and Seay are kneeling beside a car, a black puppy sitting on the running board between them. Seay looks lovingly at the precious little dog. Hall, barefoot, looks as if he could eat it.

  They called themselves “the team,” but the 1939 racing season quickly became the Roy Hall Show. Seay's lone victory at Atlanta's Lakewood Speedway in late 1938 would soon seem quaint.

  Although Seay and Hall had the same new ′39 Fords, wrenched the same way by Vogt, something deep inside Hall exploded on the dirt tracks of Fort Wayne, Indiana; Salisbury, North Carolina; Langhorne, Pennsylvania; and Atlanta's own Lakewood. He was scary to watch, and Parks feared that, in no time, Hall would push too far.

  Hall never denied it, either. He once told a reporter that he lived hard and, in truth, would likely die young. “Until then, I have nothing to lose,” Hall said, before sticking a wad of bills from that day's victory into a hip pocket and stalking off.

  As bootleggers, Seay and Hall were both fast and fearless. But Hall seemed to race with more anger, as if he had something to prove, taking it out on the accelerator. Because his rap sheet was growing longer and he knew the police and revenuers were always looking for him, Hall sometimes raced in disguise or under a false name. He was a bit of a goofball, too. As it turned out, Hall's entertaining showboat qualities were exactly what racing fans wanted to see. He went on a tear that summer of 1939.

  Seay, meanwhile, seemed to be biding his time, on the racetrack and in life. During the first half of a race, he'd lag back and let the other racers knock one another out and burn up their engines. Then he'd begin weaving through the thinned-out field until he was in striking distance of the lead. It was a wise tactic and one that would soon pay off for Seay and be copied by many others. But in the short term, Hall was always out front.

  Take Fort Wayne's quarter-mile, steeply banked track. In the tight turns, racers would drive right at the top edge of the bank, then shoot down into a short straightaway. Seay handled those turns smoothly, consistently. But in early 1939, Hall raced like a wild man at Fort Wayne, cutting jagged turns and sliding and fishtailing, flirting with the top of the bank as if he were about to sail right over the top edge of the track. That's exactly what happened to drivers who got in Hall's way. Just a small bump from behind, and they'd be airborne. And Hall would never look back.

  In the words of the press, Seay was a smoother, more likable driver: “youthful Lloyd… the Atlanta speedster.” Hall was more like a demented clown: a “dirt-smeared, wind-burned Georgian” who learned to drive by “piloting hooch.” But during the nation's first two semilegit-imate stock car racing seasons—1938 and 1939—there was no denying Hall's skills, nor his unabating disdain for the law.

  Seay finally beat his cousin at the 1939 Fourth of July contest at Lakewood. But Hall racked up many more victories than Seay that summer, including Lakewood's Labor Day contest. Hall's luck off the racetrack was not as strong and actually ran out weeks before that Labor Day victory. Police from Atlanta and two nearby counties cornered him on the highway and dragged him into court. After two years of chasing him, federal agents and sheriff's deputies had compiled a long list of charges, from running liquor to speeding to reckless driving.

  Hall was released after Parks paid the $2,300 bond, but his driver's license was suspended and he was ordered to return later for sentencing—an order he would ignore. Following his Labor Day victory, the newspapers stoked the flames of Hall's rising fame by reporting for the first time how “Reckless” Roy's racing career often conflicted with his moonshining career. “For two years, Hall gave chase to Atlanta police, being charged with running liquor, but proved to be a veritable will o' wisp, always outspeeding the law,” said the Atlanta Journal. The paper even quoted an unnamed cop who called Hall “a genius at the wheel.”

  Hall's arrest only bolstered his renegade appeal among Atlantans, who loved such underdog stories. As Rhett Butler said in Gone with the Wind, that summer's blockbuster movie, “Southerners can never resist a losing cause.” Still, none of Hall's brushes with the law stopped him from continuing to ramble across the South to races.

  At that time, and for many years to come, most racers were free agents. In an era long before financial support flowed from national sponsors that would advertise their company name on a race car's flanks, driving stock cars was a bit like joining a pickup basketball game. You show up, you play. You race your own car, work on your own car, and drive to and from races yourself, maybe with the wife beside you, the kids in the back. If you're lucky, you can pay for gas and tires with a few bucks pitched in by a local garage or tavern, in exchange for painting its name on your car door.

  Parks and Vogt created a more sophisticated three-way collaboration: owner, mechanic, racer. In the latter months of 1939, the Georgia Gang—Seay, Hall, Vogt, and Parks—caravanned to races in two-man teams, each towing a race car. They usually left Vogt's place around midnight and raced each other along two-lane roads at one hundred miles an hour, driving through the night and arriving groggy and twitchy at dawn. After competing in that day's race, they drove straight home that night, or on to the next race.

  Sometimes the team was joined by young racers Bob Flock—the “wild-eyed Atlantan”—or his loony brother, Fonty, both moonshiners who delivered for their older brother and
who had gotten to know Parks while hanging around Red Vogt's garage. Bill France even raced for Parks when, for example, Roy Hall was in a courtroom or behind bars.

  But Parks's star was still Hall, and across the last months of 1939, he won four races in a row, including the year's finale, a one hundred-miler at Salisbury, North Carolina, where he edged out the leader, Bill France. Sportswriters called Hall a “nerveless, don't-give-a-damn young man” and said the “young Atlantan has no respect for life or limb.”

  A few auto magazines and newspapers named Hall 1939's national stock car racing champ, more of an honorary title than an official one, since there was no official stock car association. An informal system had developed in which racers accumulated points for victories and top-ten finishes. The crude system, agreed upon by various regional stock car clubs, is what led to Seay's “championship” in 1938 and Hall's in 1939.

  Even France conceded at the time, “Hall had the best of me.” However, France was determined not to let that happen again in 1940. The first big race of the 1940 season would be one of France's own races, at Daytona Beach. “If I can't beat him here, I never will,” France said as that contest approached. “But I think I'm going to beat him.”

  When Hall arrived in Daytona Beach the morning of March 5, 1940, he boasted to a reporter—with no mention of his suspended license, of course—”I left the Cracker City [Atlanta] seven hours ago and averaged 62 miles per hour.” This was before interstates existed along the 450-mile route of winding two-lanes through small towns. Five days later, ten thousand fans watched in disbelief as Hall put on a new kind of driving show.

  Most racers at the Beach-and-Road course accelerated down the two straightaways but drove conservatively through the soft sand of the tricky north and south turns, where it was too easy to roll over, sometimes into the crowd, which always gathered too close to the track. But Hall had a different approach. He simply kept his foot mashed on the accelerator. At one point early in the 160-mile race, Hall was running second and, in an effort to overtake the leader, drove wide around the north turn. The left side of his Ford lifted into the air as the right-side tires dug into the sand. It looked as if Hall's car was going to flip right into the lap of Daytona's mayor, Ucal Cunningham. At the outer edge of the turn, just feet from the grandstands, Hall dropped back to four wheels and spun toward the leader, spraying sand all over the mayor and his guests.