Driving with the Devil

by Neal Thompson

  After speeding back to the racetrack, France watched Saturday afternoon's final qualifying heats. Things didn't look good. The pounding summer sun had dried the track to a parched oval. Crews had watered it that morning, but by afternoon, it was once again a dust bowl. Red dust kicked up by cars taking their qualifying laps had swirled off the track and onto Wilkinson Boulevard, coating the windshields of passing family cars and blinding the drivers. Several fender benders had lured the state police, who ordered France to control the dust. If he didn't, they threatened to shut down the next day's race.

  France fortunately found fifty bags of calcium chloride that had been stored in a shed beside the track. Calcium chloride helped reduce dust at racetracks by drawing moisture from the air. He borrowed a fan's pickup truck and drove around the track, dumping the bags over the side, dragging a mesh screen behind the truck to mix the gritty chemical in with the dirt. Normally, it took tens of thousands of pounds of calcium chloride to be effective. But the state police seemed satisfied with France's token effort and allowed the race to proceed.

  Race day dawned, a bright sunny day that quickly turned stifling hot.

  Previous races at Charlotte Speedway had drawn only a few thousand fans. On June 19, more than twenty thousand arrived for France's show—twice what he had hoped for. They lined up outside the gates, their cars clogging Wilkinson Boulevard and its dirt tributaries for miles around. Roughly thirteen thousand actually paid the entry fee, ranging from $2.50 for general admission to $4.00 for a seat in the grandstands, while more than five thousand gate-crashers swarmed over and around fences, pouring into and spilling over the shaky wooden grandstands. The state police were called to help turn away thousands more.

  Fans crowded up against the flimsy wood-post fence that separated them from the racetrack as Charlotte radio personality Grady Cole barked through the loudspeaker his order for the gentlemen—and one lady, Sara Christian—to “start your engines.” When the starter's exuberant wave of a green flag signaled the start, the air exploded with the roars and red dust and rebel-yell cheers that were becoming NASCAR's rowdy trademarks.

  Bob Flock immediately carved an aggressive path into the lead, but the strictly stock engine of his Hudson was hardly built for fast laps around a cow field and began to overheat. He gave up the lead when his motor blew on lap twenty-five. Bill Blair, an easygoing stock car veteran from nearby High Point, took the lead in a Lincoln he'd borrowed from a stranger the previous afternoon. Blair seemed uncatchable, and at the halfway point, half the other cars sat lifeless in the pits, unable to sustain one hundred miles at the outer limits of their performance. Wheels snapped off, and radiators became clogged with red clay and exploded. “Strictly stock” cars clearly didn't have the staying power and performance of a whiskey car, nor of a “modified” Ford V-8 racer.

  One of the sidelined vehicles belonged to Lee Petty, the bakery truck driver who had come with his wife and two sons, ten-year-old Maurice and eleven-year-old Richard.

  The Petty family watched in horror as Lee's suspension cracked in turn three and he lost control of his borrowed Buick. Petty rolled four times, pieces of Buick flying in the air and his body flopping around inside. When the mangled car finally came to a crunching stop, after a tense moment of silence Petty crawled through the window and waved to the relieved crowd to let them know he was okay. Petty then sat beside the track, nursing a cut on his hand, wondering how to tell his neighbor he'd wrecked the guy's family sedan. Another driver said he actually saw Petty cry.

  The Petty family would hitchhike home, but the experience apparently had no effect on Petty's son Richard, who would go on to become a NASCAR legend.

  One driver rolled his car into a clump of bushes and, though uninjured in the wreck, landed on a bees' nest and was attacked by an angry swarm. He went running toward the pits, wildly waving his arms. Fans thought he was on fire.

  Leader Bill Blair came into the pits to get his radiator refilled and take on an extra quart of oil. But a drunk on the pit crew cracked the top of the radiator and couldn't screw the cap back on. Blair had no choice but to rejoin the race and hope for the best.

  “It'll burn up!” he warned the car's owner before pulling away.

  “Just run it until the motor won't turn no more,” the owner said.

  Five laps later, at lap 150, Blair's water-depleted engine seized.

  A relative unknown named Glenn Dunnaway then pulled to the front of the field. Like more than a few drivers, Dunnaway had shown up that morning without a car of his own. He convinced an acquaintance to loan him a 1947 Ford coupe, one of the few Fords entered in the event. He took control at lap 151 and settled into a winning groove. His Ford hugged tightly to the track, and nothing that Byron or Flock tried could narrow the growing gap. Dunnaway finished three full laps ahead of the next driver, a Kansan named Jim Roper. Fonty Flock finished third, followed by Byron in fourth.

  Contented fans streamed off late that afternoon, their ears still buzzing, and newspaper writers began typing their glowing stories. Everyone, especially Big Bill France, seemed convinced that the first strictly stock race had been a major success. But as dusk turned to night, a mechanic named Al Crisler found something suspicious beneath Dunnaway's Ford.

  Crisler's job as NASCAR's first “technical inspector” was to make sure the strictly stock cars hadn't been modified in any way. All of the top finishers' cars were taken to a hangar at the nearby airport and disassembled. Crisler had been suspicious of the way Dunnaway's car carved the tight track's corners, rode smoothly over the bumps, and how he managed to finish two miles ahead of the rest.

  Then Crisler found his culprit: steel wedges had been welded to the springs of Dunnaway's suspension—an old bootlegger's trick that helped cars tote heavy loads of moonshine by preventing the suspension from sagging too low. On the racetrack, the wedges had helped keep the car steady, which, in turn, helped Dunnaway drive faster.

  Bill Tuthill milled around Crisler during the entire inspection. At one point, Crisler looked up and commented that Dunnaway's probably wasn't the only whiskey car on the track that day. In fact, in Crisler's professional opinion, it was possible that Jim Roper's Lincoln was the only car among the top finishers that hadn't been illegally modified. But since they weren't inspecting all of the cars, Dunnaway was merely the only one to get caught. Tuthill called France back at his hotel and broke the news. “Okay,” France said. “We'll just have to disqualify Glenn and move Jim Roper up to first.”

  Dunnaway, of course, claimed he didn't know that his 1947 Ford was a whiskey car, nor that the man who'd loaned it to him, Hubert Westmoreland, was a bootlegger. It turns out Westmoreland's car had actually been used earlier that week to haul moonshine. But Dunnaway's protests were to no avail.

  France's decision bumped everyone up a notch, so that Jim Roper and his borrowed Lincoln won the race—and its two thousand dollars. Fonty Flock came in second, and Byron got credit for third. Other drivers, led by Byron and the Flock brothers, felt sorry for Dunnaway and passed around a hat to raise five hundred dollars for the frustrated racer.

  France's decision to disqualify Dunnaway stoked the increasingly uneasy us-against-them relationship between himself and NASCAR's moonshining faction.

  Westmoreland, owner of the disqualified car, immediately sued NASCAR, claiming that his car crossed the line first and he had won the race fair and square. In seeking ten thousand dollars in damages, he also argued that inspectors had checked his car before the race and never mentioned the altered suspension. Judge John Hayes, after lengthy testimony from a Ford factory worker and many other witnesses, ruled in France's favor and dismissed the case. Hayes said flatly that Westmoreland's whiskey car was properly disqualified “because of illegal equipment.” Hayes's ruling reinforced France's message: there's no room in NASCAR for moonshiners or cheaters. And France's word was final.

  France was euphoric over the turnout for his first strictly stock race and was especially happy to pull it off
in the hometown of his rival, NSCRA president Bruton Smith. Despite the lawsuits and the plane crash and the flap over Dunnaway's disqualification, France had collected at least $2.50 from more than thirteen thousand happy fans. The “guarantee” paid to the winners was five thousand dollars, which meant NASCAR's take was in the thirty thousand-dollar neighborhood. Even after paying the track owner, the salaries of those who worked the race, the insurance costs, and putting some money into the escrow account for the end-of-year points fund, France made some good money that day.

  But the courtroom victory was a particularly important landmark.

  France had worried aloud that losing the Dunnaway case would “put a crimp” in his plans by setting a precedent in which race results could be disputed in court. But having a judge declare NASCAR's way of doing things to be legitimate only proved to the racing world that NASCAR was becoming, as France put it, a “stabilizing influence in racing.” Hayes's ruling also verified, in a court of law, that France was legally empowered to lead NASCAR as he saw fit, which only engorged his existing sense of authority.

  After the success of that first race, France quickly scheduled seven more strictly stock races for 1949, all of them with equally large purses of five thousand dollars or more. He would soon rename the strictly stock series NASCAR's “Grand National” division, a term he borrowed from horse racing. He thought it added a touch of class to NASCAR. (It was later renamed the Winston Cup series and is today known as the Nextel Cup.)

  Grand National races quickly surpassed modified races as the fans' favorite, and 1949 would later be known as the year NASCAR truly began; 1948, it turned out, was just a warm-up—a qualifying heat.

  The second Grand National race, a 166-miler, was scheduled for July 10 at Daytona Beach. The winner would again earn two thousand dollars— more than Red Byron's entire bonus for the 1948 championship. Byron had hoped to stick to races closer to his wife and child. But if winning a single race in France's lucrative Grand National series could earn him more than a dozen smaller races, he had no choice but to compete.

  In fact, he'd follow France's new Grand National circuit wherever it led.

  They're not going to lick me. I'm going to live through

  this and when it's all over, I'll never be hungry again.…

  If I have to lie, cheat, steal or kill.

  — SCARLETT O'HARA, IN MARGARET MITCHELL'S

  Gone with the Wind

  16

  “It's not cheating if you

  don't $et caught”

  T he postwar explosion of newer, faster car models contributed to a growing interest in all kinds of auto racing. Open-wheel races in the Northeast and Midwest were luring record crowds. Even Hollywood latched onto the rising popularity of racing.

  The Big Wheel hit theaters in 1949, with Mickey Rooney as the son of a racer who died in a fiery Indy 500 crash. And ten years after starring in Gone with the Wind, Clark Gable, a racing enthusiast, had begun filming To Please a Lady, in which he played a ruthless Indy driver. In the expanding racing culture of the South, NASCAR's founders and participants were all looking for new ways to make money off engines and cars, to diversify beyond the time-tested formula of stock car racing and moonshining.

  Bob Flock had gone into partnership on a new racetrack, with plans to promote his own races. He and his stout, foulmouthed wife, Ruby, had also opened Flock's Restaurant on Spring Street, whose motto was “Hot Biscuits at All Times.” In keeping with the hot biscuits theme, Bob and Ruby were rumored to be running a profitable whorehouse on the side. Red Byron had added his Speed Shop to his own racing career and wrote occasional magazine articles about building race car engines. Gober Sosebee, Ed Samples, and Buddy Shuman were also running their own speed shops, while still dabbling in moonshine. Except for Fonty Flock, an admittedly lousy mechanic who supplemented his racing income with door-to-door vacuum cleaner sales, racers and mechanics throughout the southern stock car-racing world were trying to scratch out a living in part by cashing in on the nation's growing taste for speed.

  For Red Vogt, selling hot biscuits or vacuum cleaners was hardly an option. He remained—would always remain—exclusively a mechanic. But Vogt worried a little about where his mechanical skills would fit in NASCAR's new strictly stock series.

  Vogt's expertise had long been as a master of modification. Through dozens of technical procedures—boring, stroking, and porting; grinding and drilling invasive new holes and shapes into the engine block; casting spells on gear ratios—he could nearly double an engine's horsepower. Those procedures had mostly been permissible during the first decade of organized stock car racing. The new “Grand National” division, however, now banned many of Vogt's proven techniques, and he had to wonder about his future job security in a NASCAR rife with mechanical restrictions.

  But Vogt was not one to quit and never exactly viewed the new system as a career breaker. For one thing, he knew engines better than anyone else in NASCAR. And, for that matter, he knew Bill France better and longer than the rest. So he figured, if he could stay one step ahead of France by devising horsepower boosters undetectable by the average NASCAR inspector, he could retain his title as wizard of stock cars.

  First, the wizard had to transfer twenty years of experience with Fords to Oldsmobile and its impressive new overhead valve V-8 “Rocket.” The first thing Vogt noticed about the Rocket was the oil pressure, which, at fifty-five pounds per square inch, seemed too high. So he drilled tiny holes into the oil pump, which lowered the pressure to thirty-five p.s.i. The holes were intentionally difficult for a NASCAR inspector to detect.

  Vogt squeezed extra horsepower from the engine in pony-sized increments, exploiting every crack and imperfection in NASCAR's rule book. If the rules didn't specifically outlaw something, Vogt did it. If the rules banned it, he devised hard-to-detect methods of adding horsepower while eluding a NASCAR inspector's eyes.

  He still worked late into the night, often until dawn. Alone in his shop, he experimented with minute reductions in the length of the push rods, or minuscule shavings off the lobes of the camshaft. Vogt was obsessed with perfecting an engine's timing, and much of his creative ingenuity was focused on a dozen or more small procedures that, when combined, improved timing to what he called “the absolute peak of performance.”

  In tiptoeing around NASCAR's rules, Vogt was establishing unwritten rules of his own. Those rules would be adopted by subsequent generations of NASCAR mechanics, whose greatest thrill was to slip small, creative, undetectable illegalities into an allegedly “stock” race car. Any mechanic who didn't bend the rules as much as possible would not last long. And Red Vogt was their godfather.

  One student of Vogt's brand of rule bending, in response to NASCAR limits on gas tank size, developed a huge fuel line that held a few extra gallons. Following a postrace inspection, with the gas tank disconnected and sitting on the garage floor, he fired up the car and drove off. Baffled inspectors reluctantly let him go.

  That protege was Smokey Yunick, a handsome, lascivious, chainsmoking World War II pilot. He had opened a garage in Daytona Beach in 1947 and would spend the next four decades in constant battle with Bill France, often scoffing openly at the idea of a sport in which a driver's fortunes rose and fell not on strict, black-and-white rules but on someone's interpretations of the rules. Namely, France's interpretations.

  Yunick would say aloud many of the things Vogt only muttered to himself. “How in the hell do you legislate a fraudulent concept?” he'd complain. Stock cars had never been truly stock. Men such as France knew that perfectly stock cars would make for lousy races, which is why modifications had been allowed right from the start. Because the list of allowable modifications was always in flux—and continues that way today—Yunick called stock car racing “at best, a good-natured lie.”

  Vogt's response to that lie was to beat the rule makers at their own game. Whatever Vogt did during his late-night, chocolate-and-Coke sessions, one thing's for sure: Red Byron's car
was more modified than it was supposed to be. But if no inspector figured that out, once the car passed through the NASCAR inspection line, it would be declared legal. That sly game became as much a part of stock car-racing strategy as tires and pit stops. And as Vogt liked to say, “It's not cheating if you don't get caught.”

  On the afternoon of July 9, 1949, Vogt had the Olds 88 ready and waiting for Byron to tow to Daytona Beach for the next day's race, the 166-miler that would be the second of NASCAR's eight strictly stock races that year.

  Byron first squeezed in a Saturday night midget race at Atlanta's Peach Bowl, which he won. He then drove all night and reached Daytona a few hours before race time.

  Despite some vocal complaints from other drivers, France allowed three women to race: Sara Christian (the Atlanta bootlegger's wife, who'd raced in the previous Grand National race); Ethel Flock Mobley, sister of the Flock boys; and Louise Smith, a bawdy driver from South Carolina. France hoped the prospect of three women battling crusty moonshiner/racers on the beach, not to mention four Flock siblings on the same track, would draw a record crowd. But rainy weather caused a sparse showing of five thousand.

  Dawsonville's Gober Sosebee led the early laps, with Tim Flock and Red Byron stalking from behind. Louise Smith flipped her Ford in the chopped-up and rutted north turn, landing upside down and dangling from her seat belt. A dozen fans ran to her aid, but Smith insisted she wasn't hurt and asked if they'd help roll her back over so she could get back in the race. Smith stayed put in the driver's seat while the men flipped her car back onto its wheels, and she took off. Sosebee held the lead until losing a tire with six laps to go. It gave Byron the perfect opening to jump into the lead.