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Wednesday, February 12, 2003
‘Little Bill’ helps his dad from the beaches to the blacktop
By GODWIN KELLY
NEWS-JOURNAL SPORTS WRITER
DAYTONA BEACH — William C. France is rapidly approaching 70 years old and he´s spent 68 of those in Daytona Beach. His parents, William H.G. and Anne B. France, moved here in 1935 from Washington, D.C., and over the years created a business foundation that is today a motorsports giant. Bill France Jr. pushed NASCAR to major-league status with the Winston Cup Series and turned International Speedway Corp. into the industry leader. NASCAR is privately owned by the France family, while ISC is traded publicly.
His current titles are chairman of both the NASCAR and ISC boards of directors, and despite several recent health issues, he reports to his office almost daily.
“I have many fond memories of the old beach course. Not many people know this, but as the crowds grew on the beach, we had to keep shortening the race. I think the race was 250 miles long in the first few years, and by the time we left down there in 1958, we were down to 160 miles.
The reason for that was the tide didn´t change. When it got about halfway out until it was about halfway in, you could do your activities. You have to get everybody in and out. As the crowd grew, it took longer to get them in and longer to get them out.
One year, we nearly trapped a bunch of spectators down there. If you could keep them on the beach, that was a great exit from the race course down there. People who got there late parked down close to the water.
When the tide started coming in after the race, some of the cars got caught by the water right away. And that water kept coming. I was riding around in a truck with a public address system telling everybody to keep moving.
You can drive in the water because it doesn´t drown a car and you won´t get stuck. If you stop, by the second wave you´re stuck for good. I´m out in the ocean with this truck telling people to keep moving. I had waves crashing over that old truck I was riding in, but it kept running.
You didn´t know what kind of race course you were going to have until the tide went out. The racers didn´t go out until we dropped the flag to start the race. We qualified them going up the beach. They didn´t go on A1A or through the turns in qualifying.
So a rookie would see the North Turn for the first time on his first lap of the race. There were some exciting moments down there. My father was a genius. I mean, we were charging people to stand on somebody else´s land.
We couldn´t run races on the beach today. There´s no way we could run down there today with all the regulations and the population on the coast. The wisdom that Dad had at that time was to come in and say, ‘If you want racing to stay here, we´re going to have to build a permanent facility somewhere.’
It still took him five or six years to find the money and get the legislative changes he needed to build the place. He started out to build the track in 1953, and we didn´t break ground until 1957.
When my father finally started building the track, I worked every day. I ran a motor grader some and a bulldozer, but mostly I was on a compactor. I did a little of this, that and the other. I even had a mule out there one time pulling trees out of the swamp there. Everything that was motorized back then got stuck in the swamp. I said, ‘Let´s try a mule.’ That didn´t work either.
There were two things out here that I can recall. The Daytona Beach Kennel Club and a restaurant called Club 92. And there was the airport, a drive-in and Halifax Hospital. That was all that was out here.
The first Daytona 500 in 1959 was something. We had the convertible series in those days, and we had the Grand National Series, which is now called the Winston Cup Series.
The convertibles were Winston Cup cars with the roof cut off. The first year we ran the 500, half the field was convertibles and the other half was Grand Nationals.
The qualifying races were held on Friday back then. The first year, one was a Grand National race and the other was a convertible race. And for the 500, they lined up convertibles on the outside and hard tops on the inside. The Grand Nationals were 8 mph faster than the convertibles. That pretty much was the end of the convertibles on the faster tracks. They weren´t competitive at all.
We had an excellent relationship with Benny Kahn, who was the sports editor at The News-Journal for 30 years, I think. Benny saw the value of having the track here. Now my father and Benny didn´t always get along, and Benny would take us to task every now and then, but by and large he appreciated the track.
I guess right here I should say we appreciate Daytona Beach. This has been our home since back in the 1930s. Building the track was a community effort. A lot of people worked on this. My father kept pushing it along, but it took a lot of people to build it.
Boy, 1958 was busy. We were running the race on the beach and we started construction out here on the track. We broke ground on the Speedway in December of 1957, so we had work going on all through our February event, clearing the land primarily.
We´d have big piles of stumps that we had to burn. I remember seeing a big rattlesnake out here one day. They asked me, ‘Where did you find him at?’ I pointed to where I found it. This one man had an ax and he swung it into a stump and we heard rattles buzzing all over the place. The area was full of snakes. We cleared out of there pretty fast. We went seven days a week for 13 months to build the Speedway. We went from 7 in the morning to 7 at night, and worked in the winter until it got dark.
we´d been in the racing business, the France family, for years. When we opened the Speedway we realized how much we didn´t know, but we learned pretty quick.” -- Bill France
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