The Track That Built NASCAR

The building you are passing is where modern NASCAR was born.

For the first decade of stock car racing, the sport ran on the beach itself. Literally. Drivers would race north along the hard-packed Atlantic sand of Daytona Beach, turn left onto a paved road, race south, turn left again back onto the sand, and call that a lap. It was fast, it was dangerous, and it was completely impractical as a permanent home for a growing sport. Bill France Senior, the man who founded the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing in nineteen forty-seven, knew that stock car racing needed a real track if it was ever going to be taken seriously.

France began planning Daytona International Speedway in nineteen fifty-three. Groundbreaking came on November twenty-fifth, nineteen fifty-seven, and crews transformed four hundred fifty acres of Florida scrub and swampland into what he called the world's greatest race course. The signature feature was the banking: thirty-one degree turns, steeper than anything built before in American motorsport, designed so cars could carry full speed through the corners. France wanted fans in the grandstands to see the cars at high speed instead of watching them brake down to nothing in every turn.

The track opened on February twenty-second, nineteen fifty-nine, and the inaugural Daytona Five Hundred drew forty-two thousand people. The race delivered more drama than France could have scripted. Lee Petty and Johnny Beauchamp crossed the finish line so close together that NASCAR spent three days reviewing photographs and newsreel footage before declaring Petty the winner. Beauchamp had already been told he won, had done a victory lap, and was posing for photographs in Victory Lane when the reversal came.

Since that day, the Daytona Five Hundred has been run every February, and it remains the most prestigious race in American motorsport. The track has hosted Richard Petty's seven victories here, Dale Earnhardt's agonizing final-lap crashes that kept him winless for twenty years before he finally won in nineteen ninety-eight, and the tradition of standing ovations when the field takes the green flag. France built a track. His successors built a cathedral.