MOTOR RACING

70 years ago, Big Bill started it all

Ken Willis
ken.willis@news-jrnl.com
Many of those from the racing community who gathered at the Streamline in 1947, pose for a group photo on the Streamline roof. "Big Bill" France is the tall one, near the middle of the back row. [PHOTO PROVIDED]

DAYTONA BEACH — Bill France Sr. didn’t invent stock-car racing. They’d long ago started that.

But he most certainly led the effort to organize it. And while it would take decades before it spread beyond its southern roots and truly took on widespread national appeal, the biggest step of all began in Daytona Beach, 70 years ago Thursday.

On Dec. 14, 1947, “Big Bill” gathered about two dozen cohorts from the stock-car racing community — racers, track owners, promoters — for three days of meetings in the fourth-floor Ebony Bar atop Daytona Beach’s Streamline Hotel.

There was a glaring need, France insisted and most others agreed, for a sense of order and cohesion in a growing form of auto racing. The men in that lounge were uniquely qualified, France claimed in opening remarks, “to set it up on a big scale.”

It was stock-car racing’s equivalent of our nation's Constitutional Convention.

In retrospect, a very big item of business was deciding on a name. They settled on the National Stock Car Racing Association. Given what we’ve come to learn about marketing in American society, it was quite fortuitous that they reconsidered when race-car mechanic Red Vogt scribbled the words National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing.

N-A-S-C-A-R. Perfect.

Thursday, NASCAR will celebrate with a private party at the renovated Streamline. Mike Helton, former NASCAR president and current vice chairman, and a man who watched Big Bill and two subsequent generations of the France family drive NASCAR’s interests, will serve as host for what he calls a can’t-miss opportunity to acknowledge what began 70 years ago.

“I just think it’s too good of an opportunity, especially with how the Streamline has been restored,” Helton said. “For our city to have such a landmark, for us to be able to stand there, 70 years to the day, at the very structure, we can’t let that slip through our fingers.”

Helton has read through the minutes of those three days of meetings — minutes that are tucked away in NASCAR’s archives department — and has marveled at the old photos depicting another era of business deals and arrangements.

“I don’t know how many millions of meetings there have been in this country to create big deals, but the history of this one, to us, is phenomenal,” Helton said. “When you research it, when you see some of the old photographs, with the whiskey bottles, cigarettes, ash trays, all the people dapper-looking in their suits … You know the characters in our industry, so you take all of that in and it’s like a Hollywood movie, but it actually happened.”

Jim France, youngest of Big Bill’s two sons, was just a 3-year-old toddler in late 1947. Over the years, though, he would become familiar with some of the older men who’d been part of those meetings. He notes the obvious differences in the way things were done back then, but is quick to draw modern parallels that are owed to simple human nature.

“There were a lot of really great personalities, and there still is,” said Jim France, who serves as a senior officer for NASCAR and the family-run International Speedway Corp. “Passionate people, a few hard-heads, all of the things that existed in 1947, you still have that passion and commitment today.

“It’s a whole different animal, but you still have the same dynamics. The same basic dynamics and skill sets that were required to perform back then, still exist today. The basic DNA of the sport hasn’t changed in that regard.”

In the 1940s, the best-known form of auto racing was organized by the American Automobile Association (AAA), which sanctioned races — including the Indianapolis 500 — that featured open-wheel, purpose-built race cars. Stock-car racing was largely reserved for southern bootleggers on tracks carved into the soil.

Daytona Beach had been a destination for speed enthusiasts in the early years of the 20th century, as car builders brought their equipment to town for straight-line runs on the hard-packed sands of the beach. But over time, Daytona Beach was replaced as America’s prime speed canvas by Utah’s Bonneville Salt Flats.

Seeking to replace the lost attention, the City of Daytona Beach sponsored a stock-car race in 1936, employing a “track” that included the beach and A1A. It was a big financial loser. Bill France Sr. took over as the race promoter in 1937 and continued until World War II halted auto racing after 1941. The race resumed in 1946, and soon thereafter France began itching for more organization for a form of racing where the rules would differ from one day to the next, from one track to the next.

So Big Bill gathered some like-minded businessmen and competitors in December 1947. Over the course of the three-day gathering, some 35 men reportedly attended at least part of the meetings. All have since passed away. The affair began with opening remarks from the host, and those remarks were preserved in the minutes.

“Nothing stands still in the world,” Big Bill began. “Things get better or worse, bigger or smaller. Stock-car racing has been my whole life … I’ve always tried to develop something as I was going. I’ve tried to build up instead of tearing down.”

He went on to say “stock-car racing has distinct possibilities for Sunday shows,” and that it could someday rival the biggest shows promoted by the AAA. He wanted a system that brought a consistent set of rules, along with national standings, for a series of races stretching from Florida to New England and wherever stock-car racing was popular and desired.

“Right here, within our group,” he said, “rests the outcome of stock-car racing in the country today. We have the opportunity to set it up on a big scale.”

By the end of those three days, Big Bill was in charge. He had his friend and Daytona Beach attorney Louis Ossinsky draw up the incorporation papers, which weren’t actually finalized until six days after the 1948 beach race, which in February began the ’48 season.

That first year, NASCAR races involved modified race cars because the auto manufacturers couldn’t yet produce the cars needed for a stock-car series. The following year, NASCAR debuted the “strictly stock” division, which would eventually become the “Cup Series,” with a variety of title sponsors starting in the early 1970s.

In the early 1980s, Helton had first entered the NASCAR world as part of the management team at Atlanta Motor Speedway. In his several years there, he occasionally was part of meetings that included Bill France Sr., who turned over NASCAR to Bill Jr. in the early-’70s, but was still involved in the family’s growing speedway company.

“He was always thinking way ahead of today,” Helton said. “He was focused on things he felt were important to motorsports. We’d be sitting at dinner, and you’re looking at him and realizing he was the catalyst of it all, 30-something years earlier. That stuck with me. To sit with Bill France Sr. for dinner, it was like being in the company of John Wayne or John Glenn.”

Jim France is naturally biased, but to him it was only natural that Big Bill France wouldn’t just call that 1947 meeting to order, but gavel it to a close three days later as the man in charge.

Big Bill died, at age 82, in June 1992 at his home in Ormond Beach.

“He had an ability, I think, to look over the horizon and see things that weren’t right in front of people,” he said. “I think that’s why it was organized and why he was at the center of it. He was, I think, a great driver, a great mechanic, but he had a vision for the sport. He had the vision of the organization and what it needed to grow and become something. He had the great personality to have folks join up with him and help move it forward.

“I think it’s cool that, 70 years later, we can go back to where it all began. Hopefully we’ve got another good 70 years in front of us.”