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Rolling Thunder Stock Car Racing: Road to Daytona

Tom Doherty Associates

High Banks

The old dark-colored Ford and its tow sailed down Highway 151, heading straight into the rising sun. Its passengers, eyes sore from a dearth of sleep, squinted ahead intently, looking for anything that even vaguely resembled a racetrack here in what was, to them, the next best thing to a foreign country. Finally, they realized that all they had to do was follow the growing stream of cars heading the same way they were traveling. Clearly, they were all destined for the same place.

Then, in the misty distance, they saw a towering mound of dirt that seemed to have grown up out of the flat fields of corn and tobacco like something volcanic. That was promising. They were, after all, travelers from the mountainous country to the west. Any kind of hill looked good to them about then.

A mite farther along and the tin roof over the grandstands came into view, the sun glinting off the metal like sharp flashes of lightning. Finally, up ahead, they could see the track entrance where the spectators were already lining up, even though it was still early in the morning and several full days before the actual race they had come to be a part of was to be run.

One of the old Ford's passengers spied the drivers' gate off to one side. They cut out of the line of traffic, and the guard waved them to a stop there.

"Y'all 'spectin' to drive in the race?"

"Yessir," they all three confirmed, in perfect unison.

The guard spat a wad of tobacco into the dust, eyed them for a moment, and then directed them over to the small stand that served as the track's registration office. Soon as they had pulled to a halt there, one of the young men, the one driving, climbed from the Ford, stretched his tallness out full-length, and ran a hand through a mane of dark hair. He looked to be in his early twenties, handsome, athletic, maybe a bit cocksure. Someone passed by and handed him a registration form. He studied it for a bit and then placed it on the hood of the Ford, bent over it, and began filling it out with a stub of a pencil he had pulled from his jeans pocket.

Another tall young man, almost a twin of the first one, climbed out of the back from the passenger side of the car. He, too, stretched and yawned and squinted at all the folks milling about, then idly scratched his belly through his T-shirt. Someone else handed him a slip of paper, telling him it was a waiver form, to read it and sign it. He didn't actually take the time to read all the words on the page, but instead, snatched the pencil from the first man's hand while he was studiously contemplating one of the blanks on the registration form. The second man signed his waiver, handed the form back to whoever had given it to him, and stuck the pencil back between the other man's fingers.

A third man rolled out of the Ford's passenger seat and then had to do his best to maintain his balance. He appeared to be drunk but he wasn't. As soon as he got his wobbly legs beneath his huge body, he was steady, stretching the kinks out of his muscles from the long ride. He was much bigger than the other two, a mountain of a man, with a crew cut, red face, and arms the size of truck axles. He, too, signed a waiver without reading it, also borrowing the first man's pencil as he studied yet another one of his form's questions.

"Jodell, what's a waiver?" the big man asked as soon as he had handed his slip of paper back to the official who had given it to him.

"I don't know, Bubba," the second one, the one named Jodell, answered, surveying some of the other race cars that had already pulled in beside their own. "Joe, what's a waiver?"

The young man bent over the hood of the car was just then signing his name on his own piece of paper.

"Heck if I know. But you gotta sign it to get a pass to the motor pits, so that's it."

"My grandma uses vanilla 'waivers' in her 'nanner puddin'," the big one was saying. "I'd sure like to have me a slug of some of that right about now."

Both look-alikes good-naturedly shoved the big man into the driver's side of the Ford. Joe slid into the front next to Bubba while Jodell stretched out across the back seat. Their paperwork now dutifully completed, they were issued their passes and directed to follow the dirt road around behind the track to the third-turn tunnel. The big man, Bubba Baxter, drove, guiding the old Ford sedan through the tunnel, beneath the race track and toward the infield.

In the backseat, Jodell Bob Lee already had his eyes closed. He was still half-asleep from the all-night drive they had just made over the mountains, through tobacco country, and then on across the breast of the Carolinas.

Jodell's first cousin, Joe Banker, fought sleep too, but there was too much to see, too much activity going on all around them for him to doze now. Besides, he had to try to make some sense from the printed set of rules the registration folks had given him while guiding Bubba in the right direction through the maze of folks and cars. The big man was prone to distractions. As he drove, he kept raising his nose in the air, sniffing like a coon dog, catching the scent of grilling food drifting on the breeze, looking about wildly for the source of such delicious aromas.

Behind them, hooked up with a logging chain and a tow bar, following along obediently, was a still-gleaming-new 1958 Ford automobile.

A guard was waiting for them when they emerged into the brilliant sunlight on the other side of the tunnel. He checked their passes then waved for them to stay to the right and told them to follow the hand-lettered signs. Neither of them was ready for the sight that presented itself to them when their eyes finally grew accustomed once again to the bright sunlight.

The place was massive and it seemed to surround, to engulf them. The gleaming belt of deep black asphalt circled all the way around where they had parked. A narrow metal guardrail framed the pavement. Down the front straightaway, the towering grandstands stretched all along the highway side of the track, its inhabitants protected from the sun by the corrugated roof they had seen from the highway. The large infield was already filling with race cars, a fine dust from their tow cars' tires hanging in the still morning air like a fog that could be tasted, its grit felt between their teeth. The spacious pit area was fenced off from the rest of the infield.

For country boys from way up the other side of the Smoky Mountains, the sight was more than they could have ever imagined, its sheer size hard to take in with a quick gaze out a bug-specked windshield. They had never even seen a race track bigger than a half-mile circle of loose dirt, or grandstands that held more than a few hundred people at a time. They were more accustomed to rough tracks scraped out of cornfields, with maybe a few rickety bleachers, or with most of the spectators scattered among the cow pies and anthills, watching from their seats on the ground amid the Johnson grass and bitter weed on some pasture hillside.

Joe Banker reached over the back of the seat to shake Jodell, to make sure he was awake. He was certainly not going to let him sleep through all this.

"Jodell Bob!" he shouted. "You got to see this place, cuz! The newspaper pictures and newsreel film in the movie theater don't do it no justice a'tall!"

"Ungh," Jodell groaned. "I reckon I'm awake if you'd quit pokin' me in the ribs." The bright sunlight stabbed him in the eyes when he opened them. He moaned again as he shaded his face with his hand, pulled himself upright to a sitting position, and looked around. His cousin was right. The sight of this place was nothing short of dazzling. "Man! I believe I have done died and gone to heaven!"

"Get a load of that grandstand over there. It looks like it could be a mile or more long. It's gotta hold a million folks!" Joe shouted. He had lost all concept of distance and space in his awe of the racetrack. "Where in the world could they ever hope to find enough people to fill all those seats?"

"It'll be full directly and then some," Jodell offered.

Jodell Lee had heard races from Darlington many times before as they were being broadcast on the radio. He would usually take his favorite place there on the floor of his grandmother's parlor back home in Chandler Cove, Tennessee. The signal came in clearly from the station in Kingsport, twenty miles up the road. Jodell preferred resting with his back against her big upright Zenith, the volume cranked up so he could actually feel the roar of the cars' engines through the radio's big speakers as they dropped the green flag to begin the race. He'd close his eyes and imagine that the announcer would be saying his name when he ran down the list of starting drivers, as he described the action out there on the track, as he declared the winner of that day's wild and woolly race. Now, here he was, actually inside that mystical place, about to drive a race car out onto its storied track as if he actually belonged there.

"Look at them banks in the turns, Jodell," Joe exclaimed, still wide-eyed. "Man, them things sure are steep. I don't see how a car could stay up there without just rolling right on over, bottom over top."

Jodell had seen banking on some of the dirt tracks they had raced, but not inclines that were almost three stories high. Hell, he had hardly ever seen any buildings that tall, much less a racetrack!

Bubba Baxter, still steering along following the slow line of traffic, was speechless himself. He had even quit sniffing the air for hints of cooking food and forgotten how badly he needed to go to the bathroom. This was all far more than he could absorb for the moment.

Joe Banker squirmed in the front seat like an eager kid trying to spot Santa Claus. There were people everywhere and he had already picked out several women he might have to double back for and give the opportunity to meet him.

Jodell Lee's head was on a swivel, staring out one window then another, from rear window to windshield, trying to take it all in before it came to an end as the races he had heard on the radio always seemed to do. He had forgotten how much his head hurt and how bone-weary tired he had been.

They were there! They had been delivered into the promised land.

Twisting Mountain Road

It had, indeed, been a twisting mountain road that had brought Jodell, Joe, and Bubba to this place in the heart of the Pee Dee. And it had been a curving, bucking byway, literally as well as figuratively.

Only six months had raced by since Jodell Lee had driven in his first real competition. Joe and Bubba had worked nights and weekends, stealing time from Joe's own farm chores and Bubba's day job to help Jodell get his late grandfather's whiskey-running car ready for that race. The race had been run on a cornfield track at the Meyer farm not far from Chandler Cove. Never mind that they had avoided telling Grandpa Lee what they planned to do with his car before that race.

Plenty had happened to them since the race bug had bitten so hard. The three of them had run competitions everywhere they could find a place and someone to duel until, a couple of months back, they had completely destroyed a car while winning a sportsman race at Hickory, North Carolina. But the important things were that Jodell had not been hurt in the process and, amazingly, they had won the race. And, in so doing, they had beaten some of the best North Carolina drivers, men who were already making names for themselves for something besides delivering moonshine whiskey, scatting past lurking revenue agents on dark, foggy mountain roads.

But the harsh reality was that the finish-line calamity had destroyed the only real race car they had to drive and promptly put them out of competition. And to make it worse, the car they had demolished had once belonged to Jodell's father before he had died in the Second World War. It was one of the few things he had left behind for his son, and now it was no more than a scorched pile of bent and twisted metal, reverently laid to rest in a back corner of his grandmother's barn.

Jodell had been able to pick up a few rides here and there as he continued to hone his skills on the racetrack. His driving abilities had caught the eyes of several car owners who wanted to put their vehicles out front. But they paid little money, even when Jodell finished near the front of the pack. And the cars that were put under him were more often than not junkers, not fit to be on the track in the first place and long shots at best. Jodell had overachieved to simply finish in the money in some of those mutt cars, but it ate at him to not be first every time he went out there, to not be the leader when the checkered flag fell.

The three of them knew that they had to own a car to race if they intended to make a serious go of it. That was the only way to have control over how it was put together, how well prepared it was for earnest competition. They finally used the money they had won in the high-water mark of their racing careers so far, the Hickory race, then tossed in the payoff for one last whiskey run, and were able to sweeten the pot with a loan from a most unusual source in order to be able to buy the gleaming new race car they had towed all the way from upper east Tennessee to Darlington, South Carolina.

The three of them had spent every spare moment of the last week on their backs beneath the car or up to their waists under the hood, trying to get it into shape for this initial run at the big time. There was no way yet to actually know if the car would be competitive, if it could hold its own with the other cars that would be running there. No way to tell but to put it out there and see how it matched up, head to head, hubcap to hubcap.

Jodell Lee's own driving abilities had been honed the same way as had many of the others he would face at Darlington: running moonshine whiskey from corn-liquor stills scattered through the backwoods and hollows of Tennessee, Georgia, and the Carolinas, delivering the clear brew to bootleggers and their perpetually thirsty customers. For Lee, it had certainly been a family tradition. Jodell's father had hauled whiskey for his own daddy, Jodell's grandfather, in the very car that had been so seriously maimed at Hickory. Then, when his father had been lost in a submarine somewhere in the Pacific, and as soon as he was old enough to see over the steering wheel, never mind get a license, Jodell had climbed into the driver's-side seats of his grandfather's old Fords.

And he had learned to handle an automobile so well it might as well have been an extension of his own body. He had no choice if he wanted to stay ahead of federal revenue agents, the dogged men who were usually better equipped and would always have him outnumbered. But they were no match for Jodell Lee's deftness behind the wheel of a car on a familiar, moonlit road. When he had finally given up 'shine running, he was undefeated, uncaught.

Now he was more confident than ever that he could run with the best of them in legitimate stock car racing. He had proved it on mountain cutbacks as well as dusty dirt racetracks. And now, finally, he was eager to try his hand at racing against the best there was, on the best track there was.

They couldn't get the car parked in the pits fast enough for Jodell Bob Lee. His gas foot was already itching.

Joe Banker, his cousin, brought the mechanical aptitude it took to make the car go fast while still sticking to the track. He had learned his skills working on farm equipment for his father and grandfather, keeping their machinery wired together enough of the time so that they could eke out a living on the rocky hillsides of upper east Tennessee. And keeping the fleet of old cars and trucks running well enough so Jodell could deliver their Grandpa Lee's famous recipe. He was a self-taught technician who could sense a slightly sour engine by sound and instinct and who could coax more RPMs from a reluctant motor with a caress or a wink.

Bubba Baxter was the muscle in the trio, though he, too, knew his way around an internal combustion engine. Bubba also seemed to have a sixth sense for the intricate spring and front-end setup it took to make a car grip the track as if it was a roller coaster on rails. He had opened holes in the offensive line for Jodell and Joe when they had been quarterback and halfback, respectively, for the Chandler County Consolidated High football team. He still took great pride in playing whatever role it took to help them win the tough ones.

The three of them had made a good team so far. The true test was just ahead of them, though.

The scene in the Darlington pits was unlike anything else they had encountered so far in their brief racing careers. There were people and cars everywhere. Certainly, they had never seen so many race cars in one place anywhere, and amazingly, there were more coming through the tunnel all the time. Even the spacious pit area seemed to be filling up already and the sun was hardly knee-high yet. They hurried to mark off their territory with the toolboxes while there was still a stretch of dusty grass available and set to work to get the car unhooked and ready for the track.

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Excerpted from Rolling Thunder Stock Car Racing: Road to Daytona by Kent Wright, Don Keith. Copyright © 1999 Kent Wright & Don Keith. Excerpted by permission of Tom Doherty Associates.
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