We Could Use a Man Like NASCAR's Dick Beaty Again
Stock Car Racing History
Responding to Johnny Mallonee's recent post about cars and parts "passing" inspection in the "old" days, but being told not to come back to the track again with that setup, I cited the late Winston Cup Director, Dick Beaty letting our 7-Eleven Winston West car owned by George Jefferson and driven by Derrike Cope race in a 1984 Richmond Cup race. That car, which had originated with Elmo Langley, had a very beaten and bruised chassis which had undergone extensive modifications.
Dick allowed the car to race at Richmond after it had made the cross country trip from Washington state, but the team was told to never bring it to another Cup race.
That's the kind of fellow Dick Beaty was. He used common sense and compassion when ruling the NASCAR garage. He'd been a motorcycle racer and tried his hand driving a stock car. He'd retired from a job managing day to day activities at the Charlotte airport.
I found a short excerpt from a decade old story on-line that perfectly illustrates the common sense approach of Dick Beaty:
Driver dust-ups good box office
March 30, 2002
BY ED HINTON.
The late Dick Beaty, NASCAR's Winston Cup director in the 1980s and early '90s, once happened upon Ricky Rudd and Derrike Cope in a garage-area scuffle after a race.
They had wrestled each other to the ground and they were rolling around between two transporters, Beaty reported.
"What did you do?" Beaty was asked.
"Nothing," he said.
"Are you going to fine them?"
"Nope," he said. "They weren't hurting anybody. And they sure weren't hurting each other."
The car owners trusted Dick Beaty. My dear friend, Bud Moore would go in the NASCAR truck and argue with Dick. He'd be followed by Junior Johnson. Never once did Dick reveal one car owner's secret to another.
From Applachian State University's Belk Library collection on Dick Beaty:
As the organization's "top cop," he was seen by drivers and crew chiefs as fair and knowedgable. Said legendary crew chief Harry Hyde, "he knows how to give a warning. He knows how to talk to you....And he's down the line. He treats everybody alike." Beaty said that for him a successful race was to have no problems during inspection or the race and to have a safe race.
And in light of the recent Penske racing rear end controversy, check this note from the Belk collection at ASU:
Beaty's reputation for fairness led to his being asked to serve on a Championship Auto Racing Teams (CART) appeals board that heard an appeal by Penske Racing over the denial of its protest of the disqualification of its car #1 in the June 25, 1995 Budweiser/G . I. Joe's Portland 200.
When my mother-in-law opened a new pet store in Wilson, NC, I staged a NASCAR day on an off Winston Cup weekend. Along with the Wood Brothers and RCR big rigs, Dick Beaty sent the NASCAR transporter and NASCAR flagman Harold Kinder to entertain our guests, at no cost to me. It was Dick's way of letting me know he appreciated the way I had run my NASCAR programs.
To paraphrase a lyric in the song that was used in the opening of the television show All in the Family ,.... "We could use a man like Dick Beaty again."
updated by @dave-fulton: 12/05/16 04:00:58PM
