A little history, with lessons (maybe)

Overall, 1954 wasn’t a great year for racing in Richmond, Va. Somehow, the city suddenly had four operating race tracks, which were opening, closing, changing, and otherwise confusing fans at an impressive pace. NASCAR . . . well, we’ll talk about it later.

The big ticket was supposed to have been a “Circuit of Champions” touring stock car race, but the really big ticket turned out to be locals racing basically street-legal cars – and wrecking each other enough that fans of that kind of action turned out in ever larger numbers.

It looked like somebody had found the key to success, but by the next year, the tracks looked like boxers in the 11^th round of a 12-round fight, with two of them shutting down before all the swimming pools were open for the summer.

Can you stand a few stories about all that? Can you stand an opinionated writer’s lame effort at drawing conclusions at the end? If so, read on.

When the calendars turned to 1954, Richmond had three race tracks: the Atlantic Rural Expositions fairgrounds track, a half-mile dirt track built in 1946 when the fair changed hands and moved to the former Strawberry Hill farm; Royall Speedway, a quarter-mile paved track built in 1948 for midget racing but soon mainly used for stock cars (it also had been enlarged, converted to dirt, and then converted back to asphalt, all in a little over five years), and Richmond Speedway, a quarter-mile dirt track across town from Royall, built in 1951, apparently because its owners thought the town needed another track.

Royall and Richmond Speedways operated weekly; the fairgrounds ran as often as a promoter cared to put on a show there.

THEN, Richmond’s city fathers attracted a AAA (high minor league) baseball team with the promise of a new stadium, telling the existing operator of the town’s lower minor league team (and its stadium), “We don’t want you, anymore.” Eddie Mooers responded by moving the team and leasing the ballpark to Royall Speedway owner Nelson Royall, who promptly built a race track on the ballfield, apparently with the idea that it would replace his existing track.

I can only guess that the new track didn’t work out as well as planned, because after a couple of months, Nelson Royall leased Royall Speedway to racer Emanuel Zervakis, who started running races there while Mooers Field (or Speedrome or Speedbowl) sat idle.

Got that so far? Now it gets weirder.

After a few weeks, Zervakis dropped the track’s NASCAR sanction, saying the sanctioning body was requiring a reduced purse that was keeping drivers away. NASCAR responded by telling Richmond Speedway promoter Joe Weatherly to switch his racing to Friday nights (when Royall had been running). For a week or two, nobody seems to have known what was happening, but after one Friday night show at Richmond Speedway, NASCAR and Royall Speedway patched up their differences, and Weatherly got new marching orders from Daytona. He held on for another week, then quit.

MEANWHILE, Mooers Field/Drome/Bowl – remember it? – cranked up again with “Hard-top” races, featuring basically street-legal cars and more-or-less street legal drivers. The newspaper called it “wreck ‘em races,” and the fans loved them. On August 11, a “Hard-top” program drew 2,271 fans; two weeks later, the attendance was 6.348, and the week after that, 7,073. Things cooled off a little after that, but a season-ending 100-lapper on October 18 still drew 5,567.

Success wasn’t automatic, though. Over at Richmond Speedway, Weatherly’s successor started running what he called “hot rod races,” but at the first one, which drew only 1,042, what the newspaper described as “a first-class rhubarb” broke out over the starter waiting 12 laps to stop the race after a first-lap crash. A second rhubarb stretched the delay to an hour, and the track’s hot rod programs apparently never recovered.

Both tracks dropped their NASCAR sanctions while trying the new amateur racing formats.

You would think that the crowds for amateur racing/wrecking at Mooers would have set a long-term change in place, but by 1955, the hard-tops/hot rods where nowhere to be seen . . . and by mid-season, the same was true for two of the tracks. Richmond Speedway, with another new promoter who paved the place, was gone for good by Memorial Day, and Royall ran its last race a week or so later, before shutting down for three years, until J.M. Wilkinson bought the property and brought everything back to life as Southside Speedway. Mooers Field had been sold for development at the end of 1958, so Wilkinson saved the city from having no weekly racing at all.

The lesson here seems to be that novelty can draw attention but may have staying power issues. Actually, the “hot rod” racing format had been successful about four years earlier in Richmond, with the same limited lifespan, and there was one year when “powder puff” racing (for women) burst into popularity but was soon back to every-once-in-a-while.

As NASCAR keeps looking for novel ideas (L.A. Coliseum, Chicago streets, San Diego naval base), it might want to remember that

(A footnote to the story above: When Richmond got its shiny new AAA baseball team in 1954, it built the team a shiny new stadium, ironically on the site of an old race track, the Virginia State Fairgrounds track that ran from 1907 to 1948. All that made the old team’s stadium useless and available to become a race track – lose one, gain one. Parker Field was the new 1954 ballpark, and it was replaced just over 40 years later by The Diamond, which in turn has been replaced this year by CarMax Park. Let the archaeologists dig under all that in a few centuries.

And speaking of NASCAR . . .

Most Richmond racing devotees know that the first NASCAR event in town was a modified race run in 1948. (Less well known is the fact that Bill France put on a pre-NASCAR show there in 1946.) The sanctioning body’s presence wasn’t that notable at first, though.

Before Grand National/Cup racing came to town, promoters gave AAA stock cars a shot on August 3, 1952. “Big-time racing comes to Richmond today,” was how the newspaper story began. The results must not have been sufficiently big-time, though, because the same promoters returned on April 19, 1953, with a NASCAR Grand National program.

Unfortunately, the weather didn’t cooperate, and rain created such bad track conditions that fans were asked to take their cars out onto the track to help dry it out. The results still weren’t optimal, as the newspaper account said:

“The going was heavy because of spray and mud and after a while it became necessary for drivers to drive with one hand and clean windshields with the other. Eventually, the turns became so lumped with mud that they looked like small mountain ranges.”

Tim and Fonty Flock withdraw and went home because of the conditions. Lee Petty eventually won the race at an average speed of about 45-1/2 miles per hour – the pole qualifying speed was less than three miles per hour faster.

The next year was, “Well, let’s try something else,” so the Midwest-based Circuit of Champions came to town and ran, not at the fairgrounds but at Royall, where it appears to have been the last race run before that track closed in 1955.

BTW, the Circuit of Champions returned the following year with convertibles, which ran at the fairgrounds. Eventually, NASCAR acquired the smaller sanctioning body and started its own Convertible Division from that merger.

That 1955 convertible race was promoted by guess-who’s-back-in-town Joe Weatherly, who shortly thereafter joined up with Paul Sawyer, also with a Tidewater background. “Little Joe,” as he seemed to do in promoting, moved on not much later, but Sawyer stuck around for over 40 years and became NASCAR’s ticket to success in Richmond.

Pulling a lesson out of all that isn’t easy, but let’s try this: Bill France succeeded in no small part because he persevered. He had a LOT of ideas that bombed: Speedway Division, Convertible Division, Grand Touring/American Division, drag racing, etc. But he was dealing with a world where finances were such that he could fail and still move on to the next idea. I have no clue what the financial ramifications are from abandoning the L.A. Coliseum, the Chicago street race, or anything else that hasn’t worked lately, but I can’t imagine that continued “Well, that didn’t work” scenarios won’t eventually take their toll, either in direct revenue loss or loss of financial partners.

I don’t know where you go with that if you’re a NASCAR suit, but I’m glad I’m not backed into that corner.

Frank’s Loose Lut Nuts

I had a long day last Saturday, announcing at a gathering of vintage race cars turning laps on the restored Latimore Valley Fairgrounds race track just south of Harrisburg, Pa., then joining the Pennsylvania Sprint Series (with which I volunteer) for racing at Port Royal Speedway, a truly magnificent weekly dirt track.

One of the cars at Latimore Valley was a Ford Maverick late model (1980s or ‘90s vintage) that had been driven years earlier by Marylander Gary Stuhler, whose career has gotten him into at least one hall of fame. I mentioned to a friend that I wouldn’t be surprised to see Stuhler himself Saturday night; just past his 71^st birthday, he still races, and Port Royal (which races super late models irregularly) is one of his regular stops.

Sure enough, he was in the field, and he drew the pole position for the 25-lap feature. I’m not sure how many guys his age actually get shot out of rockets, but he gave it that appearance Saturday. For 24 and three-quarter laps, the clocks turned back, and Stuhler controlled the race. Then Virginian Trevor Feathers, whose father Bo raced against Stuhler in years past, caught the veteran in the fourth turn of the final lap and crossed the finish line ahead by a tenth of a second.

That was a race that held my attention.

Frank Buhrman