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NASCAR Collectibles, NASCAR links, NASCAR Info, NASCAR Items
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Founded more than 50 years ago, NASCAR has become one of the hottest spectator sports in the world. In the years following World War II, stock car racing began to grow. Stock car racing was experiencing the greatest popularity it had ever seen. Tracks all over the country were drawing more drivers to race in front of bigger crowds. But there was very little organization and no consistency in the rules between tracks. From track to track, rules were different. Some tracks were just makeshift facilities, built to produce one big show at a county fair or something similar to capitalize on the crowds flocking to the events. Other tracks were more suited to handle the cars, but not the crowds. Some could manage both, but did little to adhere to rules set by neighboring tracks.
In December of 1947, Bill France Sr., of Daytona Beach, Fla., organized a meeting at the Streamline Hotel in town to discuss the matters facing stock car racing. France had come to Florida from Washington, D.C., years earlier and operated a local service station as well as promote events on the city's famed beach course that he often raced in himself. From that simple meeting, the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing was born. Few knew when the meeting adjourned if the organization would be successful. In fact there were skeptics who believed it never would work. Not even France, who believed a sanctioning body was exactly what the sport of stock car racing needed, could have envisioned what NASCAR has become today.
Things came together quickly. The first NASCAR-sanctioned race was held on Daytona's beach course Feb. 15, 1948, just two months after the organizational meeting. Red Byron, a stock car legend from Atlanta, won the event in his Ford Modified. Six days later on Feb. 21, 1948, the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing was incorporated. It was 1949, however, when what is now the NASCAR Winston Cup Series, the premier racing division in America, was born. The first event featured a $5,000 purse and was held on a two-mile circular course in southern Florida followed by a 150 mile race at the three-quarter-mile Charlotte Speedway in which Jim Roper of Great Bend, Kan., was the winner. A tremendous crowd attended the event to see automobiles with the appearance of a street car race door-to-door. The new racing series was off and running. And it was an immediate success. Eight events in all were held in 1949.
Plans immediately were underway bring bigger, faster races to bigger, hungrier crowds and less than a year later (1950), the country's first asphalt superspeedway, Darlington Raceway in South Carolina, opened its doors for the new division. The first decade for the NASCAR Winston Cup Series was one of tremendous growth. Characters became heroes and fans hung on every turn of the wheel, watching drivers manhandle cars at speeds fans wished they legally could run themselves. Names like Lee Petty, Fireball Roberts, Buck Baker, Herb Thomas, the Flock brothers, Bill Rexford, Paul Goldsmith and others became as well-known to race fans as Willie, Mickey and the Duke were to baseball fans.
 
Then in 1954, France announced plans to construct a 2.5 mile high-banked speedway in Daytona Beach, four miles off the beach in Daytona, headquarters of NASCAR. Construction started November 1957, and the track was completed in 1959. France had helped lead the fight to keep racing affiliated with the city. When those looking to set land speed records began opting for the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah so the incoming and outgoing tides at Daytona Beach would not be a factor, the city wanted to maintain one of its main attractions -- fast cars and the beach. By the end of NASCAR's first decade, the city not only had held on to its racing roots, but had outgrown the beach and, in 1959, moved events to Daytona International Speedway. With its long back straightaway and sweeping high-banked turns of more than 30 degrees, the 2.5-mile tri-oval was one of the largest speedways in the world.
The first race at the new speedway was a 100-mile NASCAR Convertible Division race on February 20, 1959. In this race, fans were treated to something that each year still brings millions of fans to NASCAR races --close competition. The finish of the inaugural Daytona 500 was very, very close between Lee Petty and Johnny Beauchamp – it took officials three days to study a photograph of the finish. Petty, driving a 1959 Oldsmobile, was declared the winner.
The following year (1960), superspeedways were opened just outside Atlanta and Charlotte, N.C. ABC televised the 1961 Firecracker 250 from Daytona Beach as part of its "Wide World of Sports." New heroes were born and Lee Petty's son Richard, who soon would be referred to as "The King" of stock car racing, Buddy Baker, Cale Yarborough, Ned Jarrett, David Pearson and Bobby Allison led NASCAR racing through an era that featured a schedule of more than 60 races a year on tracks from Florida to California to Maine. Richard Petty, son of the first Daytona 500 winner, won the first of his seven Winston Cup championships in 1964.
Today, Petty "The King" is a Winston Cup team owner and his son, Kyle, is a Winston Cup driver who has started 550 races spanning a 20-year career. Fan interest grew and the demand for bigger, faster tracks was heard. In 1969, France opened the 2.66-mile Alabama International Motor Speedway (now known as Talladega Superspeedway), the largest and fastest motorsports oval in the world. New tracks sprang up in Brooklyn, Mich., (70 miles southwest of Detroit), Dover, Del., (between Philadelphia and Baltimore) and Pocono, Pa., two hours from Manhattan.
The decade of the '70s brought further change, including one at the top when Bill France Sr., passed the torch of leadership of NASCAR to his son Bill Jr. on Jan. 10, 1972. By this time, corporate sponsorship emerged and the series had backing by the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company through its Winston brand began in 1971. NASCAR's premier division was now known as the NASCAR Winston Cup Series. Reynolds' involvement later led to the NASCAR Winston West Series and the NASCAR Winston Racing Series -- weekly events held at approximately 100 tracks nationwide with drivers vying for ten regional titles, a national championship, and a $1.3 million point fund.
In 1976, NASCAR's Winston Cup Series took the lead in worldwide motorsports attendance for the first time with more than 1.4 million spectators making their way to events, according to figures from the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company. That lead never has been relinquished. A television milestone occurred in 1979 when the entire Daytona 500 was broadcasted live, the first time for a 500-mile race. By the mid 1980s, Fortune 500 companies not only were involved in sponsoring NASCAR Series, but individual races and teams as well.
Television coverage continued to increase, with every NASCAR Winston Cup race televised in 1989. Drivers such as Darrell Waltrip, Dale Earnhardt, and perennial fan favorite, Bill Elliott and others were rising to challenge Petty and Allison and Yarborough and displaying the colors of detergents and coffees and cereals on the hoods of their cars while doing it. Major consumer packaging companies like Kellogg's, General Foods, and Procter & Gamble were realizing what Bill France knew in the late 1940s -- stock car racing was big.
In 1982, NASCAR consolidated the Late Model Sportsman Division into a new series. Since rising costs had made weekly racing for the LMS cars difficult, the idea behind the creation of the series was to build big races, and to bring all of the regional-stars of the series together for all of the races. Anheuser-Busch, Inc. of St. Louis, Mo., became the sponsor of the new NASCAR Budweiser Late Model Sportsman Series. In 1984, the Busch brand took over the sponsorship in what would become today's NASCAR Busch Series, Grand National Division. By 1989, just 10 years after the first 500-mile race to be broadcast live flag-to-flag, every race on the NASCAR Winston Cup schedule was televised, nearly all of them live. Close competition and high speeds in cars that have a "stock" appearance have been the hallmark of the NASCAR Winston Cup Series through the years.
With the decade of the 1990s more than half over and NASCAR's 50th anniversary gone by, there were still more names. Waltrip, Elliott and Earnhardt, who has won the NASCAR Winston Cup title seven times, matching a record set by Richard Petty, are now the veterans, along with Rusty Wallace, Mark Martin, Terry LaBonte, Ken Schrader and others. And young stars like Jeff Gordon, Bobby LaBonte and Ricky Craven, like in every new decade, were emerging.
In 1993, after three years of hosting a NASCAR Busch Series event, New Hampshire International Speedway, 70 miles north of Boston, was granted its first NASCAR Winston Cup Series event. Nearly 70,000 tickets were sold in an hour. In 1994, the NASCAR Winston Cup Series drew 4,896,000 fans for 31 events, up nearly one million from the year before and an average of 157,936 per event. The NASCAR Busch Series, Grand National Division drew 1,302,400 for an average of 46,514 for 28 events. The two series had the two largest increases in 10 different forms of motorsports according to Goodyear figures. The 1994 Brickyard 400, the first stock car race in the famed history of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, drew an estimated 315,000 fans for a race in which there were nearly one million ticket requests. The 1995 and 1996 events sold out in less than a week.
In May of 1994, NASCAR introduced a new series, the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series, involving full-sized, full-bodied American-made pickup trucks on NASCAR Winston Cup frames. After several exhibition events, the first point event in the new series was held a little less than nine months after the new series was announced.
The next year, 1995, marked the year the NASCAR Lifestyle became a national phenomenon. With cover stories in Forbes and Sports Illustrated and NASCAR Winston Cup attendance breaking the five million mark for the first time, NASCAR found new ways into people's homes. TV ratings broke all-time records with the entire NASCAR Winston Cup, NASCAR Busch Series and the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series schedules aired on television with more than 120 million viewers tuning in. NASCAR also started the successful NASCAR Online, NASCAR's own site on the World Wide Web (www.nascar.com).
In 1996 NASCAR expanded to New York City, establishing an office devoted to further develop and service corporate marketing and sponsorship relationships.
The year 1997 continued the efforts to grow the sport, the NASCAR Winston Cup Series expanded to the California Speedway, outside Los Angeles, and Texas Motor Speedway, in the Fort Worth/Dallas market as well as a second date at New Hampshire International Speedway. The NASCAR Busch Series moved west of the Mississippi River for the first time with new events in St. Louis, Los Angeles, Ft. Worth/Dallas and Las Vegas. The NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series schedule also expanded to events in Orlando, Los Angeles, and Ft. Worth/Dallas.
The 1998 season marked the celebration of NASCAR's 50th Anniversary with an unprecedented integrated marketing campaign to celebrate NASCAR's past, present and future. New races included the NASCAR Winston Cup Series' expansion to Las Vegas while the NASCAR Busch Series expanded to Pikes Peak International Raceway in Colorado, and the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series included new races at St. Louis, Memphis, and Pikes Peak. Approximately 6,273,027 fans attended the 33 NASCAR Winston Cup Series events in 1998. The NASCAR Busch Series, Grand National Division attendance grew 8.2 percent over 1997 with 2,102,000 fans attending the 31 events in 1998.It marked the first time the series topped the two million mark since its inclusion in the report in 1984.
The NASCAR Touring series also grew by one to 13 in 1998 to include the new RE/MAX Challenge Series, developed from the Midwest's former ARTGO Challenge Series. The weekly NASCAR Winston Racing Series continues to provide fans and competitors with weekly racing with regional and national recognition at nearly 100 of the country's leading short tracks around the country. In all, NASCAR reaches and services more than 55,000 competitors throughout the country.
The NASCAR Winston Cup Series headed further south in 1999 for its first event at the Miami-Dade Homestead Motorsports Complex. Incorporating the integrated marketing techniques perfected during the 50th Anniversary Campaign, NASCAR focused its efforts on the NASCAR Busch Series and NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series. With support from every department in the sanctioning body, NASCAR took both series to the next level. Late in the 1999 calendar year two significant announcements were made.
In February, 1999, NASCAR was handed off for only the second time in the company’s 51-year history. Mike Helton, director of competition of NASCAR since 1994 and a former official at the Daytona and Talladega tracks, took over day-to-day operations of NASCAR as Senior Vice President and Chief Operating Officer. France continues as President of NASCAR, while France’s son, Brian, is Senior Vice President of Marketing and Communications.
To continue this story, and for more info on the history of NASCAR, click here.
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