Bill France and the Birth of NASCAR

In December of nineteen forty-seven, a gas station owner and part-time race driver named William Henry Getty France Senior walked into the rooftop bar of the Streamline Hotel, two blocks from this speedway, and called a meeting that would change American sports forever.

France had moved to Daytona Beach from Washington in nineteen thirty-five, running out of money on his way south to Miami and deciding to stay. He loved the beach races and started promoting them after nineteen thirty-eight, but he had one chronic problem: promoters who took the gate receipts and vanished before paying the drivers. Drivers who could not agree on rules from one track to the next. A sport that was technically impressive and financially chaotic.

So France invited about forty people to that rooftop meeting, an improbable mix of drivers, mechanics, car owners, and the occasional moonshine runner who raced on weekends. They talked for four days across December and into the new year. On February twenty-first, nineteen forty-eight, they signed the papers forming the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing. NASCAR.

The first sanctioned race ran that same February on the old Daytona beach road course, a four-mile circuit that used part of the actual beach and a stretch of Highway A-One-A as a return straightaway. But France was already thinking bigger. He wanted a dedicated oval, a facility worthy of what he believed stock car racing could become.

Ground broke for Daytona International Speedway in November of nineteen fifty-seven. The track opened February twenty-second, nineteen fifty-nine, with forty-two thousand fans in the stands for the first Daytona five hundred. The race ended in one of the most dramatic photo finishes in motorsports history: Lee Petty and Johnny Beauchamp crossed the finish line in what appeared to be a dead heat. It took three days of reviewing newsreel film to confirm Petty had won, by approximately two feet.

France's gamble paid off. The Daytona five hundred became the most prestigious event in NASCAR, the season opener, the race every driver measures a career against. France himself built a racing dynasty: his son Bill France Junior ran NASCAR for decades, and his grandson Brian France led it into the television age.