Quote to Card

Stock car racing was really born out of the inclination of owners of modified stock (meaning: ‘off the sales lot’) cars to show off their vehicles, craftsmanship and driving expertise. The need to ‘soup up’ these stock cars came from the wish to escape the law enforcement agencies chasing them when they were running moonshine or said another way, bootlegging.

For the period of Prohibition, a lot of moonshine whiskey was being made in remote areas of the Appalachians and in particular the Allegheny Mountains, from where it was transported by private carriers in their own stock cars often to the southern states. Many of these drivers souped up their cars in order to have more chance of getting away.

When Prohibition was repealed in 1933, this bootlegging continued in order to avoid paying duty, but it gradually died out. However, the fire had already been lit and the drivers of these cars liked to race them in their free time for pride and reward, especially in the southern states and especially in North Carolina, where most of the stock car teams are still situated.

NASCAR was established by Bill French in 1947 when he crafted the first set of uniform rules and a championship points system so that an overall winner of all the season’s races could be worked out.

However, the conditions in the early days were pretty crude. The cars were often second-hand and worn and the track was just earth and dust. Under these conditions the cars rapidly fell apart, so NASCAR allowed competing cars to be customized or strengthened. Safety aspects for the drivers were also introduced. Nowadays, the NASCAR handbook clearly defines all the alterations that are allowed on competing cars.

These days it is a mistake to call NASCAR cars ‘stock cars’; they are anything but stock cars. NASCAR cars are hand made. The frames are different from stock cars in that they are manufactured from tubes for strength; the tin is sheet steel and the engine blocks start as just that – a bare block. What the engineers do with it after that is a closely guarded secret.

The safety of the driver is also taken very seriously. The driver is shielded from harm by a heavy roll cage. Strong round and square tubes make up the car’s framework, while thinner tubing is employed at the front and back ends to soak up the impact of crashes by crushing gradually. These are called clips and the front clip will also allow the engine to fall away under the car, rather than be forced straight back into the driver.

The bodies of NASCAR cars are not straightforward to make, often taking ten days to finish. However, NASCAR rules encompass the general body shape and they supply thirty templates to make constructing a NASCAR car a little easier.

But it does not stop there. There are different rules and templates for different sorts of races on different tracks, because the cars that race on superspeedways are not the same as those used for short tracks or endurance races.

Owen Jones, the author of this piece writes on quite a few topics, but is at present concerned with thinking about the Poconos Raceway in Pennsylvania. If you would like to know more or check out some great offers, please go to our website at Poconos Vacations.

You will doubtless have heard of NASCAR, but do you know what it means and how much do you know about it? In this short article I will give you a brief history of NASCAR.

NASCAR is an acronym for the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing. Amazingly, it was begun as a family business in 1947 by Bill France Sr. and is still family owned and family managed. It is by far the largest sanctioning business for stock car racing in the United States and the three largest racing series that it approves are: the Sprint Cup, the Nationwide Series and the Camping World Truck Series. In deed, NASCAR sanctions more than 1,500 races at more than a 100 race tracks in thirty-nine states.

For historical causes which we will go into later, NASCAR’s headquarters are in Florida, but its roots are firmly set in North Carolina, where it has no less than four regional offices. They are at Concord, Conover, Mooresville and Charlotte, where the vast majority of NASCAR teams are still located.

A few other remarkable statistics about NASCAR are that NASCAR is viewed more often than any other sport in the United States with the sole exception of professional football and it is broadcast in more than 150 countries world wide. NASCAR also organizes seventeen of the top twenty attended one-day sporting events in the world and its 75,000,000 devotees spend $3,000,000,000 annually on licensed products. This is such an remarkable show of allegiance, that more Fortune 500 companies sponsor NASCAR than any other motor sport.

Daytona Beach became the headquarters of NASCAR more or less by luck, because in the Twenties and Thirties, Daytona was the most successful surface in the world for attaining new world land speed records. Previously beaches in France and Belgium had been used, but maybe the wind on these Atlantic facing beaches was too unpredictable.

Anyway, eight successive world land speed records were set in Daytona between 1927 and 1935. Bonneville Salt Flats, Daytona Beach became synonymous with high speed cars and also became a magnet for racers and enthusiasts too.

In fact, stock car racing has its origins in the moonshine running of the Prohibition years, when bootleggers ran their moonshine from the Appalachians down south to the customers. The drivers tuned up their cars to avoid the law enforcement agencies and became justifiably proud of them. After Prohibition was repealed in 1933, drivers still ran the moonshine, but this time it was to get out of paying revenue.

By the late Forties, drivers of these souped up cars were organizing races amongst themselves. They were particularly popular in the Southern United States, principally in North Carolina. Bill France Sr. was an auto mechanic who moved from Washington DC to Daytona to avoid the Great Depression in 1935 and the stage was set, the players were in place.

Bill France went in for the Daytona races in 1936 but only finished fifth. He took over running the race track in 1938 and began staging races before the war. It was from there that he began what was to become the massive family business called NASCAR that has employed most of his family ever since and given pleasure to many millions of fans worldwide for more than sixty years.

Owen Jones, the writer of this piece writes on many topics, but is currently involved with thinking about the Poconos International Raceway in Pennsylvania. If you would like to know more or check out some great offers, please go to our website at Poconos Vacations.