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Wednesday, February 12, 2003
Atop a hotel comes lofty idea: NASCAR
By BOB POCKRASS
NEWS-JOURNAL STAFF WRITER
DAYTONA BEACH — Even the first meeting of NASCAR happened on William Henry Getty France´s turf.
France, looking to set up a race sanctioning body that would create a national championship for stock car racing, invited about 35 people to his bar, the Ebony Lounge, at the top of Daytona Beach´s Streamline Hotel on Dec. 14, 1947. During four days of meetings, the collection of drivers, car owners and track operators gave their input on how such a system should be set up.
They chose France as their leader. Ron Vogt, an Atlanta garage operator and race car owner, gave the group his registered stock-car series name -- National Stock Car Racing Association, which would become NASCAR.
“On the outcome of this meeting and the decisions reached here rests the future of stock car racing,” France told The News-Journal at the time. “If we can form a national association, we can establish sound recognition all over these United States.”
The only person alive today who went to the meeting was Sammy Packard, who drove down from Rhode Island. Packard had raced on the beach in the 1930s.
“France put out some feelers to get promoters, mechanics to come to it,” Packard said in a News-Journal interview last year. “He got us all up there. He was the pusher of the whole thing.”
Packard said the organization was important so that drivers knew the promoter would pay them instead of pocketing all the money and hightailing it out of town before the event was finished.
“That seemed to be one of the main problems we were having -- we´d get done running somewhere and the promoter would skip town with the money,” Packard said. “It happened to me several times.”
The organization formed the first somewhat true national championship.
“(The aim is to) eliminate the term ‘national championship,’ which is applied to almost every race, large or small,” France said.
The first sanctioned race was held on a new, 2.2-mile Daytona Beach sand-and-road course Feb. 15, 1948. Bob “Red” Byron won the event. Byron, who had his left shoe bolted to a special clutch because his left leg had been injured in World War II, negotiated the 68 laps around the 2.2-mile beach-and-road circuit in 1 hour, 58 minutes and 30 seconds -- an average of 75.94 mph. He pocketed $1,000 of the $3,500 purse.
About 14,000 people attended the event, the Rayson Memorial 150, which was the eighth annual race promoted on the beach by France.
Six days later, on Feb. 21, 1948, the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing was incorporated.
The first official race under the NASCAR Strictly Stock banner was June 19, 1949, at New Charlotte Speedway at the Charlotte Fairgrounds.
The 200-lap race over the half-mile dirt track was won by Jim Roper of Great Bend, Kan. He was declared the winner after France disqualified Glenn Dunaway for tampering with stock suspension pieces. Roper pocketed $2,000 of the $5,000 purse for the win.
“We drove the car we raced all the way from Kansas,” Roper said in a 1998 interview. “The track was very hot and very dusty.”
On Oct. 16, 1949, NASCAR had its first champion -- Byron. He had won two of the six races and earned $5,800 for the season.
The next year, in 1950, NASCAR began to use “Grand National” to define its top racing circuit.
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