The Last American Hero is Junior Johnson. Yes! - Read it online free

For some reason I was thinking of gumball tires today and trying to remember when NASCAR instituted the rule of starting the race on the same set of tires you qualified on, which for all practical purposes outlawed the supersoft "gumball" qualifying tires. When I googled the term "gumball tires", I was taken to the line in the famed Tom Wolfe article about Junior Johnson... the line that reads:
"when somebody like Junior Johnson really pushes it on a qualifying run, there will be a ring of blue smoke up over the whole goddamned track, a ring like an oval halo over the whole thing from the gumballs burning, and some good old boy will say, "Great smokin' blue gumballs god almighty dog! There goes Junior Johnson!"

That quote is from the March 1965 Esquire Magazine article by Wolfe titled Junior Johnson is the Last American Hero. Yes! that made Junior a national folk hero and was the basis for the Jeff Bridges Twentieth Century Fox movie, loosely based on Junior's life.

Somewhere in my archives I have the Wolfe book of anthologies titled Kandy Kolored Tangerine Flake Streamline Baby that includes the Junior story and others about car fabricator George Barris, etc.

But until I stumbled on it today, I did not realize that Esquire Magazine had republished the entire March 1965 article online, free to read, as part of what the magazine has picked as The Seven Greatest Articles in its history.

If you have never read it, you are in for a treat.Doesn't matter if you're a Junior fan or not or a northerner or southerner or whatever. The article gives a vivid description of 1964 stock car racing. It is set at North Wilkesboro, Junior's last race in a Dodge before switching to Ford. Not to be missed is the description of Linda Vaughn astride the Pure Firebird, the image of all the drivers landing their planes at the Wilkes airport, and the general description of the rural south and what constituted a "good ole boy."

I have read this story a gazillion times in my life and never tire of it. Here's the link:

http://www.esquire.com/features/life-of-junior-johnson-tom-wolfe-0365

--
"Any Day is Good for Stock Car Racing"
updated by @dave-fulton: 04/08/17 02:27:35AM

Jim, I, too loved Wolfe's 1979 "The Right Stuff" which I read in 1981 after having been put onto it by David Little, a former Air Force pilot and Director of Wrangler Special Events at the time. I was familiar with Chuck Yeager from the 1961 movie "X-15", whose timing was about as bad as the X-15 itself, what with the Mercury 7 stuff happening. By the time Yeager came around NASCAR as spokesman for Goodwrench, he seemed an old friend. Interestingly enough, Wolfe was born and raised in Richmond, but I'm not aware of him ever coming around the Richmond track. He was writing in NY when he did the Esquire Junior stuff. No doubt as to Wolfe's liberal leaning. Another of his early books I read was The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test which chronicled the antics of pre-hippie Ken Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters around Northern California while tripping on LSD.


--
"Any Day is Good for Stock Car Racing"