Speed, Guts, and Glory

by Joe Garner

  When asked by a reporter how he handled the difficult track at Darlington, Shuman unabashedly replied, “I take the car through the straightaways, and Lord Calvert [whiskey] takes her through the turns.”

  Whether or not Lord Calvert was copiloting Shuman's ride during NASCAR's first venture onto Canadian turf, in 1952, will remain a mystery, but the thirty-seven-year-old speedster ran like canned heat over the half-mile Stamford Park horse track at Niagara Falls. Shuman led the final 64 swings of the 200-lapper to take the victory in his '52 Hudson Hornet by two full laps over future Hall of Famer Herb Thomas. Eleven of the race's seventeen starters watched the final action of the wreckful contest from the sidelines.

  Shuman collected a grand for the win and $4,210 for his fifteen races and seven top ten finishes that year. But his responsibilities as a mechanic and a NASCAR inspector kept him from running much, and over the next three years he'd compete only seven times. Shuman's Niagara victory would remain the only win in his twenty-seven-race NASCAR career.

  By 1955 the forty-year-old retired racer would be working with Ford to develop a competitive answer to Chevy's dominance on the Grand National circuit when he was burned to death in a Hickory, North Carolina, hotel room. It was an exit some attributed to a lethal combination of nightcaps and bedtime smokes.

  In 1957 NASCAR introduced the annual Buddy Shuman Memorial Award to honor individuals whose efforts on and off the track have contributed to the advancement of NASCAR competition.

  Jim Hurtubise: Racing's Lazarus

  In this era of drive-thru nose jobs and on-demand tummy tucks, body alteration has become as commonplace as dew in Dixie. But racer Jim “Hercules” Hurtubise is probably the only man to ever have his hands molded to fit a steering wheel.

  “People said I was nuts having my hands that way,” Hurtubise once said, “but auto racing was the way I earned my living, the only thing I could do and the only thing I wanted to do.”

  Hurtubise's hands and face had been horribly disfigured in a fiery Indy-car crash in 1964, along with half his body, and the driver spent an excruciating year in the hospital, undergoing dozens of painful skin grafts and physical therapy to restore what was left of his skin and muscle tissue. Though told at the outset he would never race again, the thirty-one-year-old demanded that doctors surgically sculpt his mangled hands to allow him to grip a wheel.

  Hurtubise had never been one to let go of a dream. Throughout the late 1950s, the New Yorker had traveled state to state, looking for sprint car competition and living out of the trunk of his Pontiac. When he finally got the call from Indy in 1960, the young wolf took a big bite out of the Brickyard, winning Rookie of the Year honors for his qualifying performance in the 500 and becoming a fast crowd favorite for his take-no-prisoners, pit-bull attitude on the track.

  Despite horrific injury, Hurtubise rides again.

  “The people just loved him,” said fellow racer Parnelli Jones. “They knew he never sandbagged. He drove as hard as he could, even if the car was a dog.”

  Those fans stood gape-jawed when, just weeks out of recovery, Hurtubise rejoined the open-wheel circuit. But while he ran strong on occasion, he didn't seem to have the old knack. Having spun a few Grand National races in the years preceding his crash, Hurtubise decided to shift his attention to NASCAR.

  He started the 1966 season with a sixth-place finish at Riverside and followed with a fourth at the Daytona 500. By then his folk status was growing and everyone wanted to see this racing Lazarus pull one out.

  They got their wish three weeks later on March 27, at the Atlanta 500. In a hard-fought 334-lap battle that saw only seventeen of forty-four cars finish, Hurtubise jousted for the lead with top guns Richard Petty, David Pearson, Curtis Turner, and Ned Jarrett before rocketing over the last 120 laps to win, leaving runner-up Fred Lorenzen nearly two miles behind.

  As he made his way to Victory Lane, Hurtubise received an extended standing ovation from the crowd of 71,000.

  “I never saw anything like that day, because most of the fans hollering had tears running down their cheeks,” Petty recalled. “Only race I ever ran when I was almost glad I didn't win.”

  Hurtubise would run Indy and stock cars (including twenty-five NASCAR Cup races) until 1978 but would never win again. He died of a heart attack in 1989.

  Frankie Schneider: The Old Master at Old Dominion

  Few individuals outside of politics and kung-fu movies can carry a nickname like “The Old Master” with a straight face. Frankie Schneider is one of them.

  During his thirty-year career, Schneider won more car races than anyone who ever strapped on a seatbelt. The exact figures are hazy, but it's estimated that from 1947 to 1977, the former New Jersey farmer copped nearly 750 checkered flags, including a mind-boggling 100 in 1958 alone. His secret?

  “I'd run anything there was.”

  Whether midgets, sprints, late models, stockers, or his particular specialty, modifieds, it made no difference. He'd run on dirt, clay, asphalt, grass, on half-miles, quarter-miles, and bullrings. If there was a race on, Schneider was there, seven days a week and twice on Sundays.

  But there was more to his success than sheer quantity. Schneider, quite simply, was an exceedingly smart driver. Eschewing the hard-charging, blood-and-sheet-metal style so prevalent on the early dirt tracks, Schneider opted for safety and stamina, carefully side-stepping his way through minefields and preserving his ride for late-race runs, when he'd sail smoothly past the bashed and wheezing wrecks of his competitors.

  “I think I was just a better driver, and a good mechanic,” he once explained of his longevity.

  The conservative approach served him well, helping him capture NASCAR's Modified championship in 1952, a year in which he won nearly ninety races, and Eastern States titles in 1962, '63, and '67.

  While known primarily as a modified driver, Schneider did make forays into NASCAR's Grand National ranks. He ran nineteen races between 1949 and 1957, lodging six top five finishes and ten top tens, including one close run at Raleigh in 1957 that was hampered by race officials.

  “I remember my gasman got thrown out of the pits because he wasn't sixteen years old yet,” Schneider recalled. “So when I came in for stops, I got out of the car and refueled it myself. I think I still finished second.”

  He'd have no such problems at Old Dominion Speedway on April 25, 1958. After letting his colleagues overheat and blow transmissions while blistering around the 0.38-mile track for 44 laps, Schneider moved into position and grabbed the point. Despite the best efforts of Lee Petty, Rex White, and Junior Johnson, that's exactly where his '57 Chevy would remain. One hundred and six laps and a half-hour later, Schneider had his first, and only, Grand National victory.

  1958 would be Schneider's best year in a stock car. In addition to his Old Dominion win, he would finish top five four times in just seven races. But his $1,970 overall take wouldn't be enough to keep him going past May.

  “I was a low-buck guy my entire career,” the independent, unsponsored Schneider explained. “I quit Grand Nationals because it was too expensive.”

  Modifieds presented a more lucrative return on his investment, and that's where the Old Master went, finishing out his typically busy year with an astounding 100 wins.

  Chapter Ten

  NASCAR'S DYNASTIES

  Before long Ned Jarrett was racing regularly under an assumed name—until his father Homer found out. Resigned to his son's newfound ambition, he made only one request: If you're going to win, use the family name.

  (Overleaf): Dale Jarrett wins the UAW Ford 500 NASCAR race at the Talladega Super Speedway in Talladega, Alabama.(Left): Bill France with Lee Petty.

  The France Family: NASCAR's First Family

  In August 1961 a group of well-known racers, backed by Jimmy Hoffa's Teamsters, presented NASCAR boss Bill France with a list of demands. They wanted a union. They wanted better purses, a pension plan, and a scholarship fund for deceased drivers' children. They wanted a ha
nd in running things.

  Fat chance. France threatened to plow up his prized Daytona Speedway and plant corn in the infield before he would allow anyone to meddle with his personal fiefdom. He immediately expelled the ringleaders from NASCAR for life. Then he really laid down the law. “No known Teamster can compete in a NASCAR race,” he stated flatly. “And I'll enforce that with a pistol.”

  There was no sense challenging Big Bill. Whether it was his size—he stood six foot five and weighed about 250 pounds—his self-professed skill with a firearm, or his wily political machinations, France managed to impose his will on drivers, auto manufacturers, track owners, and race promoters for more than twenty-five years while transforming a rowdy, backwoods bootleggers' craze into the most popular racing series in the country.

  “It's true France was tough,” said Richard Petty, whose own drivers' union was busted by Big Bill in the late 1960s. “I didn't agree with a lot of the things he did. And what NASCAR did usually reflected what the old man wanted. But what he did for stock car racing and auto racing in general cannot be denied.”

  In the mid-1940s the sport was in its infancy, and it was a mess. At scores of small tracks throughout the Southeast, the same scenes were repeated: crooked race promoters flew the coop with prize money; rankled drivers bludgeoned each other with tire irons; drunken fans fired pistols and heaved bottles, chicken bones, and sometimes each other, onto the track. Cheating was rampant. Dozens of sanctioning bodies made competing claims to “national” preeminence, a good many of them nothing more than letterhead on cheap stationery.

  Bill France Jr. watches during the NASCAR Nextel Cup Series Chevy American Revolution 400 on Mary 15, 2004 at Richmond International Raceway in Richmond, Virginia.

  Into the chaos galloped France, part P. T. Barnum, part John Wayne, part Machiavellian prince. France knew the score; he'd been promoting contests on the Daytona sands since 1938 and competing himself since his youth in Washington, D.C. If “redneck racin'” was ever going to succeed on a national stage, Big Bill figured, he'd have to do it.

  NASCAR Chairman and CEO Brian France stands in front of NASCAR's home office in Daytona Beach, Florida. Brian was handed the reins of the business after his father, Bill France Jr., stepped down in 2003.

  And so in late 1947, at the Streamline Hotel in Daytona Beach, the thirty-eight-year-old gas station owner and mechanic announced the formation of NASCAR (National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing), with himself as majority owner and sole governing sultan. The new sheriff quickly implemented a set of uniform rules for competition, developed a clear-cut points system to determine an annual champion, and personally guaranteed the purses. With a circuit of tracks in the fold, NASCAR ran its first all-stock race in June 1949. Big Bill never looked back.

  Over the next two decades France would grow the sport like hothouse flowers, expanding into new states, building state-of-the-art tracks (including his hallowed temple at Daytona), courting the deep pockets of Detroit's auto manufacturers, and making himself and a number of lead-footed good ol' boys stinking rich.

  France's success went a long way toward muzzling his critics, but his outsize personality and dictatorial approach—racers liked to joke that his board meetings were held in a phone booth—didn't always sit right with Detroit, or the hard-boiled collection of whiskey runners, dirt farmers, and Dixie daredevils who made up a large chunk of racing's early talent pool. But the NASCAR pie belonged to Bill, and if you wanted a piece, you had to quit sniveling and play by his rules.

  After all, if you pushed him, he pushed back harder—and he was never above adding a dramatic flourish to drive home the message. In 1969, when Richard Petty's budding drivers' association threatened to boycott the inaugural race at France's newly built Talladega Speedway over track safety issues, Big Bill scoffed and took a few blistering swings around the oval before opining, “If a sixty-year-old man can drive 176 mph around the track, surely our top drivers can do it safely at twenty miles over that.”

  By the time France handed control of the empire to his son Bill Jr. in 1972, NASCAR had burst out of its small-time Southern shackles to become a multimillion-dollar enterprise and a growing national phenomenon. With the help of his son Brian and daughter Lesa, Bill Jr. would turn it into a bona fide American institution.

  Under the three generations of the France family, NASCAR has exploded with record attendance.

  Under Bill Jr.'s three-decade tenure, the sport exploded, fueled by millions in corporate sponsorship, mega-dollar television contracts, and attendance that topped four million annually by 2000. The stars of the 1970s, '80s, and '90s—drivers like Richard Petty, Dale Earnhardt, and Jeff Gordon—became household names, and race purses and driver contracts began to resemble the gross national product of small countries.

  And while Bill Jr. may not have had the kiss-my-ring mien of his father, he had the savvy and smarts to ensure that all of racing's competing interests generally walked away happy, or at least equally ticked off.

  “Bill [had] a tremendous ability to make all the people in this sport see the big picture…that if we do things a certain way, everybody wins,” Mike Helton, NASCAR's president, said of his boss.

  Today, with Big Bill's grandson Brian France at the helm, the $3-billion-a-year company has expanded into every region of the country—the premier Cup Series runs on twenty-three tracks in nineteen different states—and continues to court an ever-growing fan base, which NASCAR pegs at more than 75 million. NASCAR is second only to the NFL in popularity, and its ubiquitous corporate logo can be found on everything from T-shirts to supermarket broccoli.

  With the third generation of Frances steering the family ship, Bill Jr. takes comfort in knowing that whatever changes the years ahead may bring, NASCAR will persevere.

  Unashamedly aware of his legacy, Big Bill once prophetically proclaimed, “This thing will be growing and full of life long after I'm gone.”

  The Pettys: NASCAR's Royal Family

  It's a little-told tale, but the Petty dynasty started with a resounding thud. In 1949, Lee Petty entered NASCAR's first ever stock event, a 150-mile dirt-track race in Charlotte. His eyes set on the $5,000 purse, Lee ran hard—so hard he flipped his borrowed 1946 Buick Roadmaster four times, sending it to the boneyard.

  “He tore it all to pieces,” recalled Richard Petty, who'd made the 100-mile trip from their home in Randleman, North Carolina, with his father. “Turned out we didn't have a way home.” So while Lee stayed behind to mop up the mess, twelve-year-old Richard was obliged to thumb his way back to the farm and explain to Mama Petty how Pops had turned the neighbors' family sedan into a toaster.

  In 1949, Lee Petty entered NASCAR's first-ever stock event, a 150-mile dirt-track race in Charlotte. His eyes set on the $5,000 purse, Lee ran hard—so hard he flipped his borrowed 1946 Buick Roadmaster four times, sending it to the boneyard.

  So much for auspicious beginnings, but it hardly mattered. When all was said and done, that opening-day disaster would become a quaint footnote in NASCAR's greatest family epic, a saga encompassing four generations of drivers, 2,385 races, 263 wins, 8 Daytona 500 victories, 10 championships, and 1,230 top ten finishes.

  Kyle Petty, center, holds the trophy with help from his grandfather Lee Petty, left, and father, Richard, second from right as the Petty family celebrates in victory lane in Daytona, Florida, after Kyles' first racing win in this 1979 photo provided by the Richard Petty Museum.

  By the time Lee retired from racing in 1964—the same year Richard logged his first championship—he'd won more races (54) and captured more points titles (3) than any other driver. But those marks would soon be wiped from the books, as Richard, playing Hammerin' Hank to Lee's Babe Ruth, raised the bar and forever established himself as “the King” of stock car racing.

  From the mid-1960s to the early 1980s, Richard marauded over the competition—despite gritty opposition from stars like David Pearson, Cale Yarborough, and Bobby Allison—and accomplished feats that
still leave race fans slack-jawed, setting all-time records for victories (200), Cup titles (7), single-season wins (27), consecutive wins (10), Daytona 500s (7), and poles (126).

  As NASCAR grew, so did the King's legend, and there was hardly a red-blooded American who didn't recognize the mustachioed dude with the oversized shades, feathered Stetson, and red-and-white number 43 car as NASCAR's high priest of speed and goodwill ambassador.

  When Richard's son Kyle took up the family mantle in 1979, for the simple reason, Kyle said, that he “was too lazy to work and too chicken to steal,” it was clear there would be no regicide. Although he garnered a respectable eight wins and fifty-one top five finishes over twenty-six years—and continues to compete in the Cup Series—he liked to joke that “the genes for [driving] skill must have skipped a generation,” citing his own son Adam as the true heir to the Petty throne.

  Tragically, Adam Petty never got a chance to prove his mettle. After running only one Cup race, in 2000, the nineteen-year-old was killed in a practice-run crash at New Hampshire.

  Richard and Kyle continue to operate the Petty Enterprises race team, hoping that someday Kyle's younger son, Austin, might step up to carry the flame for a fourth generation. “This is what the Pettys have always done, as a family,” said Kyle. “You just keep plugging along.”

  The Allisons: NASCAR's “Alabama Gang”

  Davey Allison had lost the biggest race of his young career and it was the happiest day of his life. The twenty-seven-year-old phenom was pleased as peaches finishing second in the 1988 Daytona 500 because the old man who'd smoked him on the final lap happened to be his hero—Davey's father Bobby.