Racing History Minute - September 30, 1955
Stock Car Racing History
The now retired Caulton Tudor wrote the column below for the Raleigh News & Observer in 2010. It was picked up and carried nationally in the That's Racin' feature.
Raleigh could have been a NASCAR contender
By Caulton Tudor - News & Observer (Raleigh)
Saturday, May. 08, 2010
There was a time when Raleigh was in position to be to stock car racing what Charlotte has become.
It was decades ago so many miles back that NASCAR was on training wheels and the fastest car around was a black Hudson Hornet with hand-painted numbers in white liquid shoe polish on at least one door and sometimes two.
The year was 1952, and there were only two modern paved race tracks in the South.
One was in Darlington, S.C. The other was located just inside what was then Raleighs northern-most city limits.
The Raleigh track technically named the Raleigh Southland Speedway but almost instantly nicknamed Dixie Speedway by fans was exactly a mile long, with matching 1,850-foot front and back straightaways and 16-degree banked turns. There also was a quarter-mile track on the infield that became a popular test for local sportsman events.
Unlike the similar oval in Darlington, the Raleigh track was completely lighted and the first long track sanctioned by NASCAR to hold night races.
When Fonty Flock drove a Hudson to a win in the Memorial Day 300 in 1953 at an average of almost 71 mph, the average winning speed on most stock car tracks was in the 60-mph range.
By 1955, Raleigh was hosting three of 45 races on the NASCAR Grand National (now Sprint Cup) circuit two at the one-mile track and a third at the half-mile dirt track located across town at the State Fairgrounds.
Junior Johnson drove an Oldsmobile to a win on the short track and Herb Thomas in a Buick and Flock in a Chrysler won on the mile oval. Flocks triumph was one of four straight for the legendary Flock brothers and came near the end of a season during which Tim Flock won 18 times.
Tim regularly raced with his pet monkey, Jocko Flocko, inside the car and even went to the trouble of having a seat harness and small helmet fitted for the animal.
But during Fontys win in 53, Jocko somehow got free and more or less went wild. Tim, who was leading at the time, was forced to stop and have Jocko removed a highly unscheduled pit call that eventually left Tim to finish in third place.
Its hard to drive a race car as it is, Tim Flock said. But when you have a wild monkey in the car with you, its just about impossible.
In the mid-1950s, the mile races at Raleigh were the most popular in the state. The track hosted three straight July4 events.
But the engines died suddenly when a politically charged debate over a little-known noise ordinance was enforced.
Although it was a roundly unpopular decision, the courts eventually ruled the track noise was in such violation of the noise law that all racing had to cease. Had the track been built just a mile or 2 farther north, the city would not have had jurisdiction over Wake County, and the races almost certainly would have continued long into the future.
Although attempts at compromise continued for months, the court ruling was not reversed. By 1967, most of the track had been destroyed and soon overtaken by residential and commercial development.
Even so, Raleighs impact on NASCAR history was not over.
Since the state-owned, half-mile fairgrounds dirt track didnt fall under city jurisdiction, NASCAR continued to make stops in Raleigh.
The last event the Home State 200 on Sept. 30, 1970 was a landmark event. It was the final dirt track race for the Grand National division, which later was renamed Winston Cup.
Richard Petty won the race and stated without hesitation that it was a bittersweet victory.
I hope we dont forget what dirt track racing has meant to our sport, Petty said. I hope we come back to it once in a while, too. Just so we dont forget, too.
That didnt happen, of course. Dirt track races, like the tracks in Raleigh, became memories of a long-gone era.
Read more here: http://www.thatsracin.com/2010/05/08/34534/raleigh-could-have-been-a-nascar.html#storylink=cpy
