NASCAR and the Moonshiners

The story that NASCAR tells about itself, which is mostly true, goes like this. In the Piedmont and Appalachian counties of North Carolina and Virginia, bootleggers making untaxed whiskey during and after Prohibition needed cars fast enough to outrun the law. They learned to soup up their engines, strengthen their suspension, widen their tires. The drivers who ran whiskey on mountain roads at two in the morning were, almost by definition, the best drivers in the country.

After Prohibition, the cars remained and so did the culture. On Sunday afternoons, drivers raced each other on dirt tracks and grass fields, gambling on the outcome. A promoter named Bill France Sr., who ran a service station in Daytona Beach, Florida, saw a sport. In December of nineteen forty-seven, France gathered the best owners, drivers, and mechanics in a series of meetings at the Streamline Hotel in Daytona and drafted a framework of rules. On February twenty-first, nineteen forty-eight, he incorporated the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing.

Charlotte became the sport's capital almost from the beginning. The Piedmont was the geographic heart of both the moonshine trade and the racing culture that came out of it. Bruton Smith and Curtis Turner built Charlotte Motor Speedway in Concord, just outside the city, opening it in June of nineteen sixty. Within two years the track had gone through bankruptcy reorganization. Smith eventually reacquired it, built it into the premier oval in NASCAR, and added lights in nineteen ninety-two, making it the first major superspeedway to run a night race.

When NASCAR needed a Hall of Fame, Charlotte was the obvious choice. The facility opened in Uptown Charlotte in May of twenty-ten. The inaugural class of inductees included Bill France Sr., his son Bill France Jr., Richard Petty, Dale Earnhardt, and Junior Johnson, the moonshiner who went entirely legitimate.