Real NASCAR: White Lightning, Red Clay, and Big Bill France

Real NASCAR: White Lightning, Red Clay, and Big Bill France

by Daniel S. Pierce
Real NASCAR: White Lightning, Red Clay, and Big Bill France

Real NASCAR: White Lightning, Red Clay, and Big Bill France

by Daniel S. Pierce

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Overview

In this history of the stock car racing circuit known as NASCAR, Daniel Pierce offers a revealing new look at the sport from its postwar beginnings on Daytona Beach and Piedmont dirt tracks through the early 1970s when the sport spread beyond its southern roots and gained national recognition. Following NASCAR founder Big Bill France from his start as a mechanic, Real NASCAR details the sport's genesis as it has never been shown before. Pierce not only confirms the popular notion of NASCAR's origins in bootlegging, but also establishes beyond a doubt the close ties between organized racing and the illegal liquor industry, a story that readers will find both fascinating and controversial.

Drawing on the memories of a variety of participants—including highly colorful characters like Lloyd Seay, Roy Hall, Gober Sosebee, Smokey Yunick, Bunky Knudsen, Humpy Wheeler, Bobby Isaac, Junior Johnson, and Big Bill France himself—Real NASCAR shows how the reputation for wildness of these racers-by-day and bootleggers-by-night drew throngs of spectators to the tracks in the 1930s, '40s, and '50s. They came to watch their heroes maneuver ordinary automobiles at incredible speed, beating and banging on each other, wrecking spectacularly, and fighting out their differences in the infield.

Although France faced many challenges—including a fickle Detroit that often seemed unsure of its support for the sport, safety issues that killed star drivers and threatened its very existence, and drivers who twice tried to unionize to gain a bigger piece of the NASCAR pie—by the early 1970s France and his allies had laid a firm foundation for what has become today a billion-dollar industry and arguably the largest spectator sport in America.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781469609911
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Publication date: 08/01/2013
Edition description: 1
Pages: 360
Sales rank: 1,044,862
Product dimensions: 6.10(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Daniel S. Pierce is professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Asheville. He is author of The Great Smokies: From Natural Habitat to National Park.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

An important book that transcends other works dealing with the complex and mythic background of stock car racing in the post-World War II South. Pierce has cut through the tangle of anecdotal and (self-)promotional writings to boil the first years of NASCAR down to a rich historical broth that needs no embellishment.—Pete Daniel, author of Lost Revolutions: The South in the 1950s



This book is like landing on the moon for the first time. Even those of us who have been around for 50 years will find many new twists to the early days when all of this came together and NASCAR was born, put in diapers, and hurled down the straightaway with unbent fury. This is NASCAR 101 told in a colorful way that you can't put down.—H. A. "Humpy" Wheeler, legendary NASCAR promoter, member of the International Racing Hall of Fame



Each NASCAR event is a cultural experience, and any fan or participant who understands the fundamentals on which this sport was founded must read this book. The research and fact-finding are incredible; this is the best I have ever read on the heritage of this amazing sport.—Brad Daugherty, NASCAR team owner, ESPN and ABC analyst

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