NASCAR Off The Record

Like any giant enterprise, the NASCAR we see today is very different from the regional race series launched by a visionary Bill France in the late 1940s. Few writers are as intimately aware of that history as Car and Driver's Brock Yates. In the 1950s he recalls the intimate nature of the sport's early years, when he would see the entire Petty family working together, Richard wrenching on the car while his father cooked for the family on a bar-b-que grill. In 1979, Yates was reporting from ...