1001 NASCAR Facts. John Close
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before the car broke a rod late in the race. He won nine Indy Car events in 1927 and again finished second in the AAA National Championship chase.
Buoyed by his land speed record of 1927, Lockhart focused on a new project for 1928: the Stutz Black Hawk land speed racer. The car was plagued by bad luck, crashing on its first outing on the beach at Daytona in February 1928. Two months later, Lockhart and the Black Hawk returned to Daytona for another land speed attempt. This time, Lockhart, at just 25 years old, was killed in the crash, cementing his place as a Daytona and racing legend for all time.
47 While best known as a top official for the Automobile Club of America (AAA) West Coast Region during the 1920s and 1930s, Art Pillsbury made a then-unknown giant contribution to NASCAR and the construction of its banked speedways. Pillsbury was the first to apply the Searle Spiral Easement Curve to racetrack building. The concept was pioneered in the railroad industry; the rails were placed at different heights on a gradual incline in the turns, easing the transition from the flat straights into the banked corners. This allowed for greater overall speed. Pillsbury and speedway construction manager Jack Prince first applied this spiral banking formula when building the 1.25-mile Beverly Hills Speedway in 1919.
At the track’s first event in 1920, cars held the track at record race speeds averaging in excess of 100 mph for the entire event, an astonishing mark considering that was faster than the average qualifying speed for the Indianapolis 500 at that time. Thanks to Pillsbury, racing not only got faster, but race car geometry and set up changed forever. Pillsbury went on to build or consult on most major banked superspeedways of the Board Track era. His crowning achievement was a 45-degree banked track at Culver City, California, in 1924. Since then, “Pillsbury’s Principles” have been used in the construction of virtually every banked track in America, including those on the current NASCAR tour.
48 Without a doubt, Englishman Sir Malcolm Campbell was the all-time king of the Daytona Beach world land speed record, setting a new record five times from 1928 through 1935. Campbell’s Bluebird land speed cars were famous worldwide and the 1933 version was the first to break the 250 mph barrier with a 272.465 mph record run. Two years later, Campbell slightly bettered the mark with a 276.710 mph clocking. As Campbell helped put Daytona on the map as the World Center of Speed, he also nearly destroyed that distinction when he moved his land speed record runs to the dry lake beds near Bonneville, Utah. It was there that Campbell realized his dream of becoming the first to break the 300 mph barrier with a 301.129 mph world speed record in September 1935. He promptly retired and never made another land speed record attempt. He passed away from a stroke in 1949.
49 As stock car racing’s first great team owner, Raymond Parks’ accomplishments are often overlooked. Born in 1914, Parks, the oldest of 16 children, grew up in hardscrabble Georgia. He left home at 15 to work in the illegal moonshine business and began fielding race cars for local Atlanta drivers Roy Hall and Lloyd Seay in 1938. Wrenched by legendary mechanic Red Vogt, Parks’ immaculately prepared Fords, with Hall, Seay, and sometimes Bill France Sr. behind the wheel, dominated stock car racing in the south prior to World War II. After the war, Parks returned to racing and his cars won the first two NASCAR championships contested: the modified title with Fonty Flock in 1948 and the first NASCAR Strictly Stock title with driver Red Byron in 1949. Parks, always dressed in a coat, tie, and hat, kept NASCAR alive in its early years, often bankrolling the enterprise for a struggling Bill France. After scoring a fourth-place finish with driver Curtis Turner at Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955, Parks curtailed his support of racing and bowed out as a NASCAR team owner. A member of the International Motorsports and the NASCAR Halls of Fame, Parks passed away in 2010 at the age of 96.
50 Considered by many as the best natural-talent stock car driver of the pre-World War II era, Lloyd Seay’s life was cut short in September 1941 when his cousin shot him to death during an argument over an order of sugar for their moonshine business. Before the tragedy, Seay had translated his “whiskey tripper” driving skills to the racetrack, capturing the first race at Lakewood Speedway in 1938. Driving for his cousin Raymond Parks, Seay won multiple events throughout the South in 1939 and 1940 before scoring one of his biggest victories on the beach at Daytona in August 1941. Two weeks later, Seay again won, this time lapping the field twice in a race at High Point, North Carolina. On Labor Day, September 1, 1941, Seay earned his biggest win to date capturing the 100-mile National Championship Stock Car race at Lakewood. Sadly, the next day, he was shot dead, a premature end to the life of stock car racing’s first great driving star.
51 Considered the greatest mechanic of the early stock car era, Louis Jerome “Red” Vogt is also remembered as the man who gave NASCAR its name. Working out of a small garage in Atlanta, Vogt organized and chartered the National Stock Car Racing Association (NSCRA) in 1929, one of Georgia’s first racing series. He also built Miller engines for the Indy 500 and one year served as the riding mechanic for Peter DePaolo. In the late 1930s, Vogt’s mechanical genius propelled the winning stock car efforts of team owner Raymond Parks and drivers Roy Hall, Lloyd Seay, and Bill France before the formation of NASCAR. Vogt is credited with naming Bill France’s new stock car series “NASCAR” at the now famous Streamline Hotel meeting in 1947. Perhaps more important, he is credited with crafting the first set of rules for the sanctioning body.
Roy Hall looks dapper and relaxed before a NASCAR Modified event. (Photo Courtesy Georgia Racing Hall of Fame)
Back on track, he created winning Vogt Specials for Bob Flock, Fonty Flock, Red Byron, Curtis Turner, Fireball Roberts, and Jack Smith during the early years of NASCAR. Vogt eventually closed his Atlanta garage, lending his talents to DePaolo’s NASCAR factory Ford team, Carl Kiekhaefer’s potent Chrysler 300 effort, and the legendary Fish Carburetor Buicks of the 1950s. Vogt eventually moved to Daytona Beach where he opened his own garage. He retired in 1968 and died at the age of 86 in 1991.
52 In 1972, singer Jim Croce released “Rapid Roy, the Stock Car Boy,” a song inspired by early stock car racing great Roy Hall. One of the best, and fastest, moonshine runners in Georgia in the late 1930s, Hall made his racing debut at the first Lakewood Speedway race in 1938. Driving for cousin/car owner Raymond Parks, Hall was one of the early kings of the Daytona Beach Road Course, winning there in 1939 and 1940. He was declared stock car racing’s “mythical” national champion in 1939 and 1941. Hall, consistently in trouble with the law and often racing under an assumed name to avoid authorities, saw his driving career short-circuited when he was charged and convicted of an Atlanta bank robbery in 1945. He served 31⁄2 years of a six-year prison sentence. Hall returned to racing, wheeling a Parks-owned Oldsmobile to a sixth-place finish in the 1949 NASCAR Strictly Stock race at North Wilkesboro. Two weeks later, Hall was seriously injured in a modified race and never regained his championship racing form. He retired from racing in 1960 and later saw his racing exploits put to song by Croce in 1972. Hall died in 1991 at the age of 71.
53 While mass production is usually seen as the launching point of American automobile culture, it was the development of several tools during the 19th Century that made construction of early cars a reality. Interchangeable parts on cars and their mass production would have never been possible without the milling machines, lathes, metal planers, and standardized control jigs developed in the late 1800s. All of these tools are still commonly used in the construction of NASCAR purpose-built race cars.
54 NASCAR has had countless epic races, but none of them have ever earned the right to be called the “Race of the Century.” That distinction was reserved for the 1895 Chicago to Evanston, and back again, event. Held November 28, 1895, the event is widely considered the first official stock car race held in the United States. The Chicago Times Herald newspaper and publisher, Herman H. Kohlsaat, fanned interest for the event. A total of 83 cars entered for the event originally scheduled for November 2, but when only three cars showed up, the race was rescheduled for Thanksgiving Day. On that day, six vehicles attended