Driving with the Devil

by Neal Thompson

  Hall amazed fans and competitors alike with his two-wheeled move. Another driver, Larry Grant, tried the move but flipped and rolled his car, coming to a stop beside Mayor Cunningham, unconscious. As he was being loaded into an ambulance, Grant awoke and yelled, “What's going on here?” The ambulance crew told Grant he needed a checkup at the hospital. “'Fraid not,” Grant said. “Lemme outa here.” He stumbled to his car and asked two nearby National Guardsmen to help get his upside-down Ford rolled back onto its wheels so he could rejoin the race. But there was no catching Roy Hall.

  At the time, a normal pit stop took about two minutes. Crews had to jack up the car, unscrew the lug nuts, remove the old tire, slap on a new one, then replace the lug nuts and tighten them with a lug wrench. Red Vogt used specialized air-powered equipment that he had brought— precursors to the pneumatic drills used today—and managed to change Hall's tires and refuel in an incredible forty seconds.

  Hall held the lead for the entire second half of the race, finishing more than a mile ahead of the nearest competitor. France finished fourth, getting spanked in his own backyard. Hall decided to rub France's nose in it. “I feel like going another 160 miles,” he said, boasting that Vogt's workmanship kept his Ford averaging ninety-five miles an hour. When asked if he'd return for the next race, Hall said, “Sure … if I'm still alive.”

  Despite all efforts to the contrary, Hall was indeed still alive for the July 7, 1940, race at Daytona. But he had a previous engagement that kept him from racing that day. Daytona's newspapers helpfully explained his absence: “The foot-loose and fancy-free daredevil… is now serving a short sentence on a prohibition charge.”

  Lloyd Seay also missed that race. Without Hall or Seay in the field, Bill France managed to jump into the lead and never looked back. With Hall in jail, and Seay missing the Daytona race and a few other races that summer of 1940, France saw an opportunity to insinuate himself, not only to the top of the year's points standings but into the hearts of southern racing fans. He knew how much the fans loved Hall and Seay, and it galled him. So France traveled to every race he could find and won an impressive majority of them—a couple of times with Red Vogt as his mechanic.

  But fans would never cheer for France the way they would for Seay and Hall. In fact, the two twenty-one-year-olds had come to symbolize everything a poor Georgia boy aspired to be. They were folk heroes at the fairgrounds and makeshift racing ovals of the rural South. On Sunday afternoons, tearing around the red dirt, arms dangling out the window as if it were just a Sunday-go-to-meeting drive, Seay and Hall gave people a break from their farm-bound routines. Fans crammed into rickety grandstands to watch the famous two-wheeled “bicycle” move. Like Hall, Seay was also learning to lurch his car up onto the two right wheels and squeeze between two competitors. Just as NASCAR legend Dale Earnhardt would many years later, Seay and Hall oozed a fearlessness and insouciant cool that gave people something to dream of, to hope for.

  An Atlanta bluesman even put such admiration to music. The drunken, spider-fingered guitarist Blind Willie McTell (rumored to have been blinded by bad corn whiskey) strolled through the parking lot of the Blue Lantern on Ponce de Leon Avenue, singing and playing for tips. If someone gave him a bottle, he'd cackle, “Just throw away the cap.” Among Blind Willie's most-requested songs was the one about Roy Hall.

  He's trouble in a Cadillac, He's a mess in a Ford V-8.

  I got to repeat, he don't never retreat, he's the runninest guy to hit

  this state.

  Don't get funny, wait and save your money. All the women

  screamin Roy Hall.

  For Bill France, the growing legend of Seay and Hall was a mixed blessing. It was great for the sport of stock car racing, of course, but maddening for every other racer, himself included. And it frustrated France that a small group of southern moonshiners was monopolizing his sport. But then a North-versus-South battle erupted among rival racing groups, which created a temporary peace in the growing Daytona-versus-Atlanta scrum by putting France and the moonshiners on the same side of a fight. For a while.

  Ever since stock cars had roared onto the motorsports scene two years earlier, they had been competing with other forms of auto racing, particularly AAA-sponsored Indy-style races and their open-wheel, open-cockpit racing machines.

  In an effort to slap down the upstart stock cars, a AAA promoter in Langhorne, Pennsylvania—one of the North's racing capitals, along with Paterson, New Jersey—announced that summer that he was banning all “southern” racers from his track. The promoter, Ralph Hankinson, considered stock car racing an unruly southern sport and its drivers “outlaws.” Not only would he not allow stock cars at his track, but he wouldn't allow known stock car drivers to compete in any of his AAA races there, either. Hankinson then visited his onetime friend Bill France's hometown and tried to convince Daytona's city officials to allow him to promote AAA-sponsored Indy races at Daytona, to replace France and his stock cars with more sophisticated real racing cars. After listening to Hankinson's pitch, the city decided to stick with France, the local boy, and his increasingly popular stock cars.

  With the momentum of stock cars working against him, Hankinson grudgingly rescinded the ban he'd enacted against southern drivers in July of 1940, allowing stock cars to begin spreading into AAA-controlled territory up north. Daytona's newspaper gloated, claiming that by letting stocks onto his track, Hankinson “is admitting that some of the country's better speed demons come from our section of the good ol' USA.… The cracker boys do a pretty good job of showing in the first 10 when the final flag is finished.”

  Indeed, most of the stock car races in 1940 (and more than a few open-wheel races) were won by a southerner. Seay won at Allentown, Pennsylvania; High Point and Greensboro, North Carolina; and twice at a dirt track in Deland, Florida. Hall won at Daytona and Lakewood, although legal troubles kept him from racing during the latter half of the season. The Flock brothers, Bob and Fonty, each won a couple of races. And France, after finishing second at a late-summer race on Hankinson's track in Langhorne, by season's end had won enough races to be declared the 1940 national champion.

  All of which established 1941 as stock car racing's breakout year.

  That's when a three-way contest would be waged among the champions of the three previous years: France, Seay, and Hall, who would be released from prison just in time for the 1941 season. Fans looked forward to witnessing a season of racing that would prove who was better: Georgia's whiskey boys or Daytona's beach boy.

  For three years, the partnership of Hall and Seay the racers, Vogt the mechanic, and Parks the moneyman had been wildly successful. With dozens of victories between 1939 and 1941, Seay and Hall became celebrities throughout the South. But could Hall and Seay become folk heroes beyond the relatively small stock car racing regions of North Georgia, Florida, and North and South Carolina? With continued resistance from AAA promoters and open-wheel Indy racing tracks in other states, could stock car racing succeed beyond the South?

  When stock cars first came to Daytona in 1936, an Indy racer from Philadelphia presciently called it the sport of the future. “Every car owner in the country wants to see how the automobile of his choice will stand up under the competition,” said the driver, Doc Mackenzie, who added—again, with remarkable foresight—that stock car races at Daytona would benefit the automotive industry more than “any other race in history.”

  Mackenzie also claimed to know a bit more than his southern counterparts about how to tame tracks such as the Beach-and-Road course, although in that regard, he proved less insightful. “The guy who uses his head more than his foot is the man who's going to win,” he said. “Getting in a car and just keeping the accelerator jammed to the floor won't be what is needed.” During his cautious first attempt at qualifying at Daytona, Mackenzie skidded into the Atlantic. His theory on cautious driving was soon loudly debunked by the success of accelerator-jamming bootleggers such as Roy Hall and Lloyd Seay.

  Hal
l proved with his Daytona wins in 1939 and 1940 that using more foot than head was his ticket to the winner's circle. He intended to prove more of the same in 1941.

  Seay was ready to prove that his 1938 championship hadn't been pure luck.

  And Bill France desperately wanted to show Atlanta's whiskey boys that he was just as fast as they were, that his championship the previous year was no fluke.

  Since taking over as promoter of the Daytona races three years earlier, in 1938, France had installed more grandstands and a scoreboard. He got local businesses to pitch in with prize money, in exchange for advertising. He fine-tuned some of the rules, which had been largely lacking, even though France's “rules” were applied or ignored at will.

  In addition to prerace engine inspections, France appointed a “technical inspector” to tear apart the engines of top finishers, in search of illegal modifications. This practice often pitted him against his cunning friend Red Vogt. A little bribe could sometimes encourage an inspector to overlook, say, two pennies stuck in a cooling vent. Then again, an inspector might decide to overturn a racer's victory if, say, the number two finisher was a friend. Still, little by little, France was attempting to legitimize the new sport, and that legitimacy was beginning to turn him a bit more profit.

  France's take from his 1938 races had been about two thousand dollars. Not much, but neither was it the twenty thousand-dollar loss that Daytona city officials sustained when they'd sponsored their race in 1936. The crowds grew larger in 1939 and again in 1940, and so did the winner's purse, which attracted more racers and began putting more money in France's pocket.

  Thousands of fans would pay a dollar apiece to watch the sport's rising stars. When the bleachers filled, many fans simply stood alongside the track, just feet from where forty cars raced by at one hundred miles an hour. On race day, the newspapers would implore fans to “stay off the track today. … A fatal accident might be caused by a foolhardy decision.” Public address announcers also pleaded with fans to move back, but the fans ignored such requests—sometimes to their regret. Errant cars regularly tumbled into the naively incautious crowds, and more than a few lives were spared by quick-thinking drivers who would cut a hard-right turn into the Atlantic rather than mow down an ignorant fan walking across the racetrack. At one race, an elderly woman stumbled into the sand, face-first, and a driver coming full speed at her had to swerve into a sand dune to save her life. Afterward, the driver furiously complained that the old woman never even apologized.

  Still, stock car racing was on the rise, and the best drivers planned to kick off the 1941 season at France's 160-mile Daytona event, on March 2. In addition to France, Hall, and Seay, other notable racers included the ex-Georgian, ex-whiskey tripper Smokey Purser, who now lived in Daytona and often helped France with his races; a few moonshiner/racers from the Carolinas; and Atlanta's moonshining Fonty Flock. The newspapers claimed that half of the forty-one starters were “champions” of some title or another. They made no mention that half were also probable bootleggers.

  At midnight on March 1, Red Vogt dialed the number of Bill France's garage and Amoco service station on Main Street in Daytona.

  “We're on our way,” Vogt told his friend.

  He said they'd see him by 7:00 a.m., at which France scoffed. The 450-mile drive could take a normal driver twelve hours.

  Roy Hall had been released from prison just days earlier and joined the Georgia Gang's high-speed caravan down from Atlanta. Racing along narrow roads, through small towns, at two or three times the speed limit, they stopped for gas three times and a quick bite for breakfast but still managed to reach Daytona before seven o'clock, a new record.

  That Saturday, during a qualification race for the next day's main event, Seay flipped his Ford in the north turn, landing upside-down in a sand dune. Later, Hall smashed his car, too. Parks was furious. “Two cars and they're both wrecked before the race even begins,” he complained. “This is my last race.”

  Before their wrecks, Seay and Hall had driven fast enough to qualify for Sunday's race, but Vogt had to work through the night to repair the cars in time. The next afternoon, ten thousand eager fans crowded around the track. Most of the racers were southern—Georgia boys, Carolina boys, Florida boys—except for skinny, bald, cigar-chomping Red Byron, who had made his stock car debut at Lakewood's 1938 race but had then switched back to mostly open-wheel racing. Byron had recently moved from Colorado to Alabama and drove a Ford that had been wrenched by a one-legged Alabama mechanic. Looking like a scrawny Barney Oldfield—white coveralls, dark goggles, an unlit cigar clamped in his jaw—Byron lined up at the start and watched as Bill France jumped ahead of him and into an early lead.

  On the paved straightaway, Roy Hall roared from the pack and caught up with France. In the south turn, he cut inside France and broad-sided him. As the two battled for the lead, sometimes bumping and scraping against each other, a driver named Joe Littlejohn lost control in the north turn, skidded over the lip of the embankment, and rolled straight into the crowd. Fans ran and dove for cover as a local carpenter and a schoolteacher were struck by the tumbling Ford and had to be rushed to the hospital.

  The track announcer again begged fans to step back off the track, but as usual, they paid no heed. A South Carolina driver named Massey Atkins then tumbled into the imprudent crowd. Incredibly, no one was hurt, except for one woman who fainted and had to be carried away.

  For the next fifty miles, racers flipped and spun into sand or surf. Every few laps, another racer was taken to the hospital. After rolling into the grandstands, Massey Atkins rejoined the race only to lose control again on the paved straightaway. Massey was driving a convertible and wasn't wearing a seat belt. As his car flipped into the palmettos, he flew into the air and landed, amazingly, on his back in a soft sand dune. He stood up, brushed himself off, and walked back to the pits, but that was the end of his race.

  A few laps later, Atkins's brother, Elbert, took the south turn too wide and roared straight at a fan standing alone at the edge of the track. It must have dawned on the fan in that instant why no one else was standing with him. He tried to jump clear, but Atkins's right fender caught his trousers and ripped off one of the pants legs, which clung to the fender for another three laps. Even the public address announcer had to drop his mike and “run like hell to the bushes” more than once when cars careened too close to his booth.

  A hundred miles into the race, with Hall having nudged France aside and vaulted into the lead, Seay began to pick his way through the now depleted field. A few times, he took the north turn so fast that his left wheels lifted off the sand and he managed to squeeze between two other cars on just two wheels. When Hall came into the pits to refuel, his cousin shot ahead and into the lead. But four laps later, when Seay again lifted his Ford up onto two wheels, the right front tire caught a rut and he flipped. Hall retook the lead, while Seay and a few helpful fans rolled his V-8 back onto its wheels. Seay rejoined the race, flipped again a few laps later, and still managed to finish seventh.

  Hall won the race, and $475, which he accepted with a bloody right hand that he'd gashed on his gear shifter. “It's nothing,” he said. “Just part of the game.” The local papers dubbed him “Reckless Roy… the 20-year-old Atlanta madman who drives a stock car as though he were operating a tank with wings.” Daytona had never seen anyone like Hall, “a boy with speed on his mind and a reckless devil spurring him on.”

  Later that same month, on March 30, the Georgia Gang returned to Daytona. Seay's car fell victim to uncharacteristic mechanical trouble, and Hall seemed headed for another victory until his engine began to overheat on the final lap and died on the homestretch. Hall was beaten by a local favorite, the colorful ex-tripper Smokey Purser. “That old man drove a hell of a race,” Hall said of Purser, who was twice his age.

  On July 27, the Georgia boys returned to Daytona once more, the third time in four months; 1941 was on its way to becoming the biggest stock car racing year ever, wi
th dozens of new tracks competing against one another to lure racers to their town. France's efforts to hold as many races as possible in Daytona were part of a plan to wrest away from Atlanta and Lakewood Speedway the title of “home to stock car racing,” to establish Daytona Beach as the sport's headquarters. This time, Bill France also intended to finally win in his own backyard. He'd been having great financial success promoting the summer's races, but he was anxious to get back to victory lane.

  Fifty cars entered the race, but France decided to limit the field to thirty-three. So, the day before the race, drivers had to drive qualifying laps. The top thirty-three qualifiers were entered in the next day's race, with the fastest qualifier assigned the enviable first, or “pole,” position. France, however, drove one of the slowest qualifying laps and failed to qualify for his own race. So did Daytona's other star, Smokey Purser, and it looked as if France would have to sit and watch Atlantans dominate his race once more.

  But in a move that presaged the self-serving decision-making style of the future NASCAR, France broke his own rules and allowed Purser— and himself—to join the race. At the time, no other racer was willing to challenge France, which in subsequent years only heightened his willingness to bend and break the rules.*

  The July 27 Beach-and-Road race started with two bootlegging Atlantans, Roy Hall and Fonty Flock, fighting ahead of the pack, with Flock slightly out front. In the south turn of the first lap, Hall bumped Flock hard to the right, and Flock's car sped up the embankment and right over the edge. His ′39 Ford flipped end over end while also spinning, finally landing on its roof in the palmettos. The roof collapsed, and Flock was crushed inside. He was taken to the hospital with a broken pelvis; bruised kidneys, lungs, and back; as well as severe shock. Doctors couldn't even x-ray him for two days, for fear the procedure would kill him. He remained in Florida for weeks, bandaged practically from head to toe.