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NASCAR Has a Little Moonshine in its Past. By Michael Smith
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NASCAR Has a Little Moonshine in its Past.
By Michael Smith
Let's face it; NASCAR racing is not like football, basketball
or other so-called stick and ball sports. Historically,
football is considered to be an offshoot of soccer and
rugby, and basketball was invented to give bored college
students something to do during the winter. Stock car
racing, on the other hand, is the only sport that arguably
grew out of a criminal pursuit. Young hot rodders hauling
moonshine through the dry counties of the South needed
fast cars to evade local and federal law enforcement
officers.
Naturally, any time two youngsters with fast cars get
together, the time will come when they need to see whose
car is fastest. From humble one-on-one matches, the
contests evolved into multi-car affairs run on makeshift
tracks. Locals, attracted to the excitement of the contests
gathered and it didn't take long for others to see the
money making potential in charging admission to watch
the contests. Thus, the sport of stock car racing was
born, and shortly thereafter, the race promoter.
No doubt the greatest example of a moonshine runner
turned race car driver is Junior Johnson, who at the
age of 14 was racing cars full of white lightening whiskey
through the hills of North Carolina. Johnson's obvious
skill as a driver offered him entry into the arena of
stock car racing, but the money from making and hauling
moonshine was better than the potential winnings from
stock car racing, and Johnson continued to ply his illicit
trade until 1960 when mounting pressure from the authorities,
including more than one arrest and bounties of $5000
to $10,000, caused him to switch to stock car racing
full time. Looking back on those early years, when he
burned the candle at both ends, working within and outside
the law, Johnson recalls that many people probably thought
of him as lazy, seeing him fast asleep on the hood of
his race car at a local track. The truth is, Johnson
admits, he was probably dead tired from running moonshine
late into the previous night.
Junior Johnson would go on to be a successful Daytona
500 winning driver and team owner, responsible for grooming
the early careers of young drivers like LeeRoy Yarbrough,
Charlie Glotzbach, Bobby Allison, Cale Yarborough, Darrell
Waltrip and Terry Labonte, to name just a few. In 1998,
Johnson was named the greatest NASCAR driver of all
time by Sports Illustrated magazine. Furthermore, Johnson
is responsible for bringing the Winston name to NASCAR's
premier racing series.
Without a sponsor heading into the early 1970s, Johnson
contacted R.J.Reynolds tobacco. The government had recently
banned tobacco companies from advertising on television
and Johnson saw an opportunity to creat name recognition
for the tobacco giant while getting some sponsorship
for his race team. R.J. Reynolds had other plans, however.
When told how much sponsorship money Johnson required
to run his team, the tobacco company representatives
reportedly claimed to have much more money than that
to spend. So, instead of landing himself a tobacco sponsorship,
Johnson served as matchmaker to bring Winston in as
the main sponsor of NASCAR's elite racing series.
So, today when you think of your sport of stock car
racing, spare a thought for one of its early pioneers,
a man who may have started out flirting with the wrong
side of the law, but who eventually rose to occupy the
ranks of NASCAR's greatest drivers. |
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NASCAR
RACING DEPARTMENTS
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NASCAR
AUCTIONS
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NASCAR
RACING WEB SITES
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