The root of all evil.
It’s so hard for me to think about those bills in my wallet that way. It’s easier to think about what I might buy with them next. Let’s not even get started with credit cards.
When it comes to sports, though, the association between money and evil is getting easier and easier to make. In the laughingly mis-named world of “amateur” sports, specifically college football and basketball, it’s impossible to deny.
My graduate alma mater, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, just leaked word – after the football coach’s $10 million compensation package – that the Atlantic Coast Conference isn’t good enough anymore, and a move to the Southeastern Conference is being considered. Bye, bye, Duke, N.C. State, and Wake Forest.
Well, maybe it’s understandable, now that the “Atlantic Coast” includes Kentucky, Indiana, Texas, and California. Who’s slipping down the slippery slope faster – UNC or the ACC? Either way, the relationship between higher learning and sports has gone off the rails.
Speaking of money, Penn State University wants the government to enlarge the local airport, because at present, they can’t bring in planes large enough to fly across the country nonstop. I guess a stop along the way interferes with “amateur” status somehow.
But I’m allegedly writing about automobile racing and NASCAR, so let’s talk about money there.
B.J. McLeod sold his charter last year for $40 million dollars after using it to run near the back of the pack. Holman-Moody was a top NASCAR team from 1957-72, winning a championship, the Daytona 500, and lots of other races, sometimes running multiple cars. When they stopped fielding cars, they got nothing. When guys who couldn’t run up front – Elmo Langley, G.C. Spencer, Wendell Scott, Dave Marcis – closed up shop, they got nothing . . . and unlike McLeod, they had to qualify for every race they ran or go home empty-handed.
Even if you don’t have a charter and a guaranteed starting spot via NASCAR’s welfare system, you obviously have to have some serious jack to start racing in NASCAR. It’s not like 1963, when Larry Manning and Bob Adams drove from Richmond to North Carolina to buy a car, then – pretty much on a whim – took a detour to Hillsborough, N.C., to run the NASCAR Grand National race there. Manning finished eighth, albeit many laps behind.
Absolutely nothing against B.J. McLeod, but I’d prefer the circumstances surrounding Larry Manning’s career to those of Live Fast Motorsports in modern times.
The people getting the money today would disagree, of course, and that’s their right, but my preference is why last Saturday I was at Winchester Speedway (dating to 1936, the oldest track in Virginia built specifically for auto racing) watching limited modifieds, limited late models, RaceSaver economy sprint cars, and front-wheel-drive 4-cylinders race, rather than hanging out at Indy. At Winchester, Larry Manning would have felt at home.
On to history . . .
(At some point in the past, I said I wasn’t going to waste your time with my rants, so in an effort to avoid appearing to have lied that badly, here goes today’s Part II.)
NASCAR, despite efforts to make it appear otherwise, is a footnote in the history of Indianapolis Motor Speedway. The first Cup race took place more than 80 years after the track opened and long after it had established itself as the most storied track in the country.
Indy was built on what are generally known today as “Indy cars,” and earlier were known as championship cars, “big cars” (as opposed to midgets) and – all the way back to the beginning – just race cars. For the other, smaller tracks not that far from the Brickyard, it was much the same story, but stock car racing eventually appeared, and it was popular.
It just wasn’t all NASCAR. In the early 1950s, when sanctioning bodies began to proliferate (and more race records were kept), Indiana tracks pop up in AAA (succeeded by USAC) and MARC (later ARCA) schedules. Then there was NASCAR, with its only two Indiana appearances until it began running at Indy just over 30 years ago.
The first race came in NASCAR’s second season for what is now Cup, at the time newly renamed “Grand National” after an inaugural year as “Strictly Stock.”
On Sunday, Oct. 15, 1950, the tour landed at the high-banked Winchester Speedway for a 200-lapper.
Well, sort of. Thirteen cars made the show, and nine of them were from Ohio (mostly the Toledo area), with two each from Pennsylvania and New York. Not a single car was from below the Mason-Dixon Line. Lloyd Moore, an Ohio racer, got the win.
Do you wonder that Winchester didn’t invite Big Bill and his traveling circus back?
Two years later, those memories had faded enough that Playland Park Speedway, a track at an amusement park in South Bend (Isn’t there a college of some kind there that’s decent at sports?), hosted another 200-lapper, and this time the 19-car field had a decent turnout of tour regulars from the South.
Tim Flock got the win over Lee Petty, and the top Yankee was Dick Passwater of Indianapolis, who would win a Grand National race at Charlotte the next year. The top ten finishers were evenly divided on either side of the Mason-Dixon Line.
Nevertheless, Playland Park didn’t reappear on the schedule, either, and it would be 42 years before the banner of NASCAR’s premier class appeared again in the Hoosier state.
The best connection between Indiana and NASCAR since then has been Winchester Speedway, which, even though it hasn’t run a Cup race since 1950 and generally hosts other sanctioning bodies, has run the Winchester 400, one of the nation’s top late model events, since 1970, and it counts a pretty good roster of NASCAR standouts among its past winners: Rusty Wallace, Mark Martin, Ted Musgrave, Kyle Busch, Chase Elliott, Noah Gragson, Carson Hocevar, and three-time winner Erik Jones. Truck Series regular Ty Majeski was last year’s runner-up.
It’s also worth noting that the ARCA Menard’s Series runs at Salem Speedway, another very historic Indiana track. USAC has dominated there over the years, but ARCA has run Salem since the early ‘50s.
If NASCAR wants to keep holding its all-star race at short tracks and changing venues, it might consider Winchester or Salem, both of which would be really interesting shows.
Just for the record, the Cup Series moves to Iowa this weekend, where its past is even closer to nonexistent.
Iowa Speedway ran its first Cup race last year, although it has hosted the Xfinity and Craftsman Truck Series numerous times, along with lower NASCAR series, ARCA races, Indy Car events, and even a major road-racing weekend back in 2007.
Still, out of more than 100 events sanctioned by NASCAR, ARCA, and Indy Car, only one has been a Cup race.
And that is exactly the same number for how many GN/Cup events have been held at other Iowa tracks. Once again, we have a one-and-done. In 1953, Bill France invaded Iowa to race at Davenport Speedway, on the banks of the Mighty Mississippi, across from Moline, home of John Deere.
Well, Big Bill and a few friends showed up, anyway. The top five finishers were also the top five in the final 1953 points standings, with Herb Thomas winning the race and the championship. The other nine drivers were all Midwesterners, and the 14-car field evidently didn’t impress the track management enough to invite NASCAR back.
I’ll give this to Bill France Sr.: through success and failure – and he experienced his share of both – he kept NASCAR going when others might have given up. That’s why that statue of Bill and Anne deserves its place of honor in Daytona.
I think this ramble has gone far enough. Enjoy the Iowa race this weekend and look forward to the Cup Series heading to Richmond in two weeks, returning to a state where it has run more than 300 events at nine different tracks (counting all three configurations of Richmond as one) since 1949.
For me, having watched my first race on the old fairgrounds dirt track there 62 years ago, it’s a homecoming. I hope it’s a good race.
About the cover photo
– This is a typical scene from an early 1950s NASCAR race, when Bill France made the sanctioning body’s rare visits to Indiana. (Photo from Getty Images via the NASCAR Hall of Fame.)
Frank Buhrman