Daytona Beach: Where Racing Left the Sand
Near Daytona, Florida
Daytona Beach was named for a businessman from Ohio named Matthias Day, who bought three thousand two hundred acres here in the fall of eighteen seventy for twelve hundred dollars and built a hotel four years later. He was trying to create a winter resort. What he actually created, without knowing it, was the future of American motorsport.
The beach here is hard-packed white sand, twenty-three miles long and five hundred feet wide at low tide. In the early nineteen hundreds that made it the fastest natural surface in the world. Automobile manufacturers began running speed trials on the Daytona and Ormond beaches in nineteen oh two. Within a decade the Vanderbilt Cup races drew enormous crowds, and land speed records fell here routinely.
The man who turned beach racing into a national institution was William France Senior. France came to Daytona in nineteen thirty-five meaning to pass through and never left. He saw the beach races and understood that stock car racing could become something much bigger if it had organization, rules, and a permanent home. In December of nineteen forty-seven he gathered drivers and promoters in the Streamline Hotel on Atlantic Avenue and founded NASCAR. The championship series launched in nineteen forty-nine.
But the beach could not last. The sand was increasingly crowded, the tides unreliable, the racing surface rough. In nineteen fifty-three France began planning a permanent oval. Ground broke in November of nineteen fifty-seven, and on February twenty-second of nineteen fifty-nine, forty-two thousand people packed the new Daytona International Speedway for the first Daytona Five Hundred.
The finish was so close that NASCAR took three days to declare a winner. A photograph of the photo-finish eventually confirmed that Lee Petty had edged Johnny Beauchamp by inches. It was exactly the kind of race France had built his track to produce.
The beach races ended in nineteen fifty-eight. The World Center of Racing, as the speedway is still called, had officially moved indoors.
