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NASCAR Press Release


First Southern 500 Featured 75 Cars, Many Driven To Track Then Home Again

NASCAR’s Sprint Cup Series history began in Charlotte, NC on June 19, 1949 with Jim Roper’s victory in a 150-mile race over the 3/4-mile dirt Charlotte Speedway.


The foundations of the modern sport, however, were poured the following year with the opening of Darlington Raceway in South Carolina. The track’s 63rd running of the Bojangles’ Southern 500 is set for Saturday night on FOX at 7pm ET.


Before Harold Brasington’s then 1.25-mile track was built – a year-long process – asphalt race tracks were virtually unheard of in the southeastern United States. The Strictly Stock Series competed on paved ovals only twice pre-Darlington, at the 1/2-mile Dayton Speedway in Ohio although Daytona’s Beach & Road Course surface was a combination of pavement and sand.


Darlington, however, was the game-changer leading to construction of paved, banked superspeedways – tracks measuring a mile or longer – over the next decade in Daytona Beach, FL, Charlotte and Atlanta. 


More than 80 cars from all points of the compass turned out for the Sept 4, 1950 Southern 500, driven rather than towed in many cases from small Carolina towns a few miles from the track and more than 2,500 miles distant. Qualifying for the 75-car field took two weeks as Brasington mimicked events leading up to the Indianapolis 500.

1950 Johnny Mantz Southern 500 Winner

Johnny Mantz, a 31-year-old from Long Beach, CA, drove a six-cylinder Plymouth to a nine-lap victory over Fireball Roberts in a race that took more than six and a half hours to complete. Much of the race was run on the track’s flat apron because the banking was rough and abrasive and quickly wore tires down to the cords.


Mantz’s Plymouth, jointly owned by Hubert Westmoreland and Bill France Sr, was the only car in the field equipped with special Firestone racing tires that lasted all day. While his competitors were in the pits for tire changes, Mantz only had to stop periodically for fuel – leading to his enormous margin of victory. He averaged 75.25-mph – not much slower than Curtis Turner’s 82.034-mph pole speed.


Many of those competing in the first Southern 500 are deceased including top four finishers Mantz, Roberts, the season’s champion to be Bill Rexford and 1949 champion Red Byron.


Still living are Cotton Owens, now 87 and a NASCAR Hall of Fame nominee, who finished seventh in a Plymouth. Hershel McGiff, racing the same Oldsmobile 88 with which he’d won the year’s inaugural Carrera Pan American – Mexican Road Race – was eighth. McGiff competed in several NASCAR K&N Pro Series events in 2011 at the age of 84.


America was a far different place five years after the end of World War II. There was little infrastructure, especially in the south, no Interstate highways and not much in the way of hotels in such rural areas as Darlington, SC.


Gasoline cost 18 cents a gallon, a new car, which could be raced in the Southern 500 without modification, went for $1,510 and the average annual salary was $3,210. The price of a black and white television set was $249.95 but it was unlikely you’d find auto racing programming on the few available channels.

Legends of NASCAR Cotton Owens

Owens, whose crew was comprised with relatives and friends, had begun racing close to home with a Chrysler dragged from a wrecking yard. His friends included NASCAR Hall of Famer Walter “Bud” Moore. He “commuted” to the track each day – a three-hour drive – from his home in Union, SC.


McGiff met France and Turner at the Mexican race. “Bill invited me to come to Darlington,” said McGiff, who raced in California, Oregon and Washington. “Otherwise I wouldn’t have known about it.”


McGiff drove his Oldsmobile cross country from Portland, OR, a distance of more than 2,600 miles sharing driving duties with his owner/mechanic Ray Sundstrom. “I slept two or three nights on the county courthouse lawn and went into the bathroom to clean up,” said McGiff, then 22 years of age.


The race itself was spectacular – if only because so many cars were confined to a relatively small space. McGiff remembers the field being lined up and stretching all the way around to turns 3 and 4. “I can’t imagine how they scored them,” he said. “You could go 10 deep the track was so wide. We ran on the flat (apron). You could run on the top part (banking) and go faster but you wouldn’t run far.”


The race was an endurance contest as much in the pits as on the track.


McGiff had found three or four volunteers at a local gas station to service his car. Changing a tire required a heavy floor jack and a lug wrench – air guns and lightweight jacks came to stock car racing much later. Gas was dumped into the car through a funnel.


Mantz, meanwhile, kept up a consistent pace content to let the faster, eight-cylinder cars wear out their tires. McGiff changed 14 – at $15 a tire – “Then we’d go by him like he was standing still.” said McGiff, who completed 374 of the 400 laps and was paid $500.


And afterwards? “I got back in the car and drove home,” said McGiff. “I didn’t get any dents. There was so much room that if a guy wrecked in front of you, you could stop.” Today’s Darlington racing, where speeds exceed 180-mph, obviously is not your grandfather’s Southern 500.


Owens went on to win nine times as a driver and 38 races as an owner. NASCAR Hall of Famer David Pearson drove Owens’ No. 6 Dodge to the 1966 NASCAR Sprint Cup championship. “His hobby was his love, he got to do it as a living and we did it as a family,” said Debbie Davis, Owens’ daughter.


McGiff, named one of NASCAR’s 50 Greatest Drivers in 1998, won four times and finished sixth in 1954 standings. Offered one of Carl Kiekhaefer’s potent Chrysler 300s for the 1955 season, McGiff instead chose to stay in Oregon to run the family’s lumber business.

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This weekend, I was looking forward to watching the Nationwide and Sprint Cup races in Talladega. After all, Talladega is known for its steep banking, restrictor plates, drafting, high speeds and lots of beating and banging between drivers which usually makes for NASCAR racing at its finest. 


As I sat and watched the Nationwide race on Saturday, I found it to be unremarkable by Talladega standards. Watching the drivers, battling it out to the checkered flag was exciting however, during the restart of the green-white-checker an unfortunate chain reaction caused ten cars, including Eric McClure’s, to wreck. Eric’s car slid out of control and collided head-on into the inside SAFER barrier wall of the track. 

At first, I thought it was a routine racing incident with all the cars scattering in many directions. The network narrowed in on a few drivers until their window nets were down and each driver exited their cars frustrated or angry. After a few moments, it was obvious something wasn’t the same with Eric’s situation. His car had undertaken a lot of damage and there were safety workers and medical technicians near his race car but he was still inside. After literally removing the top of his battered car, Eric was eventually assisted from the car, put on a stretcher, placed into a helicopter and taken to a local hospital. He is said to be in stable condition and is remaining there for additional observation through Sunday night. 

Twitter immediately became a firestorm of commotion with drivers, spotters, crewmen, journalists and fans using it as a platform to express their anger over “safety” concerns. Throughout the night, I found no apparent compromise of opinion, although there was formidable passion shown by everyone. As I considered these opinions, there seemed to be two focused areas of blame.

One point of view centered on the fans’ perspective in craving a need for excitement. Over the past few years of racing many of us fans have stated that our overall experience has been boring and therefore, the product of racing is not as good as it needs to be to balance our monetary cost and investment of time in the sport. After years of ‘x-game action sports’, hyped video gaming, and burning candles at both ends, we have a need for action 24/7/365 and our complaints to the governing body of NASCAR is to keep that ‘high’ excitement level or we dare not spend any more money on the sport.

The other point of view for blame was toward the sanctioning body of NASCAR for making changes to quench the fans’ thirst for more excitement by bunching up the cars in ‘packs,’ thus making it more likely to have wrecks and putting the safety of the drivers and crew into jeopardy. The perspective here is that for the purpose of keeping seats filled at the track, driver safety is becoming less important than gratifying fans to keep them engaged in the sport.

There seems to be a lot of blame with no accountability owned by either side. No one wants to admit the possibility that our thoughts, opinions, or persuasive abilities could lead to something like this Eric McClure incident that could result in serious injury. It seems to always be someone else’s fault.  

Official Rodney Wise waves the Caution Flag Photo – Getty Images

Let’s face it, ‘throw the shoe’ for a caution is terminology that many of us have said when we’re bored. But at the same time, when we don’t want a caution for our specific driver, we argue with NASCAR about some seemingly phantom debris caution just to make things exciting by bunching up the field.

So by the end of the Sprint Cup race, I sat back in reflection of the race and tried to dislodge the plank out of my eye as I contemplated whether I wanted to complain to NASCAR about the speck in theirs. I’m as guilty as anyone else in wanting excitement while watching a sporting event; but I also know what it feels like when someone changes your sport in order to gratify the fans and not the participants.

Years ago I use to play Volleyball. I loved the teamwork and camaraderie between opponents, I loved the action and I loved winning!  But, in 1999 the sanctioning body decided to make a major change in the sport. Instead of scoring the game only when you serve the ball, gaining offensive points, they decided to score rally points, resulting in a points benefit to either the offensive or defensive sides on each play. The changes in the rules were to make it more ‘spectator and television friendly’ – I hated the idea. I felt true fans would enjoy the game as it was originally intended. Besides that, I had a powerful serve with mediocre accuracy. Under the old rules, I was an asset to my team, but under the new rules I would have to take ‘heat’ off my serve or become a liability. Appeasing the fans had taken away a large component of enjoyment for me as a participant of the sport.

The comparison here is that the sanctioning body had to make a change to make the spectators happy because their attention span could not handle the game as it was being played. However, as an athlete, I had to adjust to changes in rules and change the way I competed in order to continue in the sport. But where the comparison ends is that the changes made by the Federation of International Volleyball did not have to take into account the health and well-being of me as an athlete. Whether my serve honored a point for my team or the other team, my safety and the safety of my teammates and opponents was never in jeopardy.

  

As I listened to Tony Stewart’s media interview after the cup race, I think his sarcastic answers were in reference to the same emotion as I am feeling from this past weekend. With this realization, it is my opinion that NASCAR’s governing body immediately sit down with the drivers, owners, and crews of this sport that we all love and discuss changes taking driver safety into consideration. Not only are you owners and athletes, but you are also ‘fans’ of your own sport. So, as a viewing fan, I’m willing to trust that collectively you will make the RIGHT decisions.

Continuing on the current course certainly holds the potential of adversely affecting someone’s future, with possible serious injury or worse. The incident this weekend with Eric McClure made it apparent that safety needs to be a serious consideration and without it, whether we are willing to admit it or not, any harmful consequence will be a direct result from all of our actions.   


2 Peter 2:21 It would have been better for them not to have known the way of righteousness, than to have known it and then to turn their backs on the sacred command that was passed on to them (NIV)


By Guest Blogger – Susanne Bowyer

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