Just stumbled across this 5 year old article today:
The day NASCAR came to Orange County
48 years since running of Empire State 200
In 1960, Jim Reed rode the No. 7 Chevy at Montgomery Air Base, now known as Orange County Airport, where he now stores his 1947 Navion. For the Times Herald-Record/MIKE
By Tim Michaels
Times Herald-Record
07/13/08
These days, Jim Reed races a turbocharged airplane he keeps at Orange County Airport.
But on July 17, 1960, the day Thunder Road ran right through Montgomery, he was tearing around the runways at the wheel of No. 7, a Chevy.
He broke a valve spring just 14 laps from the finish of the Empire State 200, the only NASCAR Grand National race ever run in this part of New York.
"Driver error," Reed said, still miffed at himself almost 50 years after making a mistake.
It cost him a chance at victory, and Jim Reed was used to victory.
The same guys who ran on the first superspeedways of the South competing for what in today's world would be the Sprint Cup championship were at the airport that day.
Unlikely as it now seems, Montgomery was on NASCAR's calendar with Daytona, Darlington and Atlanta.
Hall-of-Famer Rex White finished first in No. 4, another Chevy, ahead of Richard Petty. Richard's dad, Lee, finished third.
Nineteen cars lined up for the start of a 100-lap race in 80 degree weather on the thick concrete runways of what was then the Montgomery Air Base, an auxillary field for Stewart Air Force Base.
The legendary voice of motorsports, Chris Economaki, was on hand to announce the action .
Local newspaper accounts of the time put the crowd at 5,000, and said the sentimental favorite was Peekskill's Reed. He spent much of his career running on the short tracks of the North, and early in his career raced modifieds, even turning up at the Orange County Fair Speedway once or twice.
On a recent hot Saturday afternoon, Reed drove up to hangar 805 at the airport.
It's not such a different place than it was in 1960. More hangars squat along the north side of the field and a modern cafe sits parallel to taxiway Charlie that on race day was one of the three runways improvised for the track.
From the cafe's back door, a visitor can gaze west across the same flat terrain the drivers saw that day, and beyond to where the land rises and the white barns and silos of a working farm poke out of lush green trees. Look south, and almost a mile away runway 3-21 blends into a field where bales of the season's first-cut hay shimmer in the sultry sunshine.
If the airport is easy to imagine as it was in 1960, NASCAR isn't.
It was just two years removed from running races on the beach in Daytona. Events were held just about anywhere the Polo Grounds hosted a couple and airport tracks weren't that unusual.
Drivers were different, too. Fans didn't hear the whining by the high-priced Sprint Cup stars that in June finally forced NASCAR's president, Mike Helton, to suggest they get over themselves and drive.
Good at it
The wide doors of hangar 805 folded up to reveal Reed's current passion, a 1947 single-prop Navion; a turbocharged six-cylinder Lycoming stuffed behind the cowling because the original engine didn't go fast enough for him.
He set a thick leather carrying bag on a wing, pulled out some scrapbooks and carefully offered a shot of a '56 Chevy. In the early days, he said, he'd race, pack up and drive the same car to the next town. A change of tires, a number taped to the door and more tape over the headlights pretty much got the car ready for the next race. One or two men made up his crew; sometimes just his wife, Karen, whom he recently lost, helped him out.
Reed was the Yankees of NASCAR's short-track circuit. On tracks of less than one-half mile, he won the championship every year from 1953 to 1957. A winning streak never duplicated. In 1960, he arrived at the airport having won three short-track races in less than a week, the last in Old Bridge, N.J., where he beat Lee Petty.
But Montgomery was a Grand National race, and at 2 miles, the airport track was one of the longer ones on the schedule.
For Reed, it was also a chance to race closer to his home than he ever had.
Not that he was out of place on long tracks. In 1959, he'd kissed the walls at Darlington on the way to winning the Southern 500. He'd raced at Daytona International and on road courses such as Watkins Glen and Road America in Wisconsin.
In keeping with its improbable status, Montgomery was without the twists and turns of a road race or the high banks and walls of a closed oval. It was flat and a triangle, to boot, laid out to meet military regulations.
Neither White nor Reed remember racing anyplace else on such a triangle.
"It was a unique race, three runways," White said by telephone from his home in Fayetteville, Ga.
"Just about near stop in the corners."
The drivers would top 140 mph on the broad straightaways, going wide approaching the corners and, braking, head single file into the sharp turns. Economaki, writing in the National Speed Sport News, told fans that "dust clouds billowed over the turns" as most drivers ran on "the dirt outside the runways" to better attack the acute angles.
It was easy, according to White, because there were no guardrails.
"I was good at it," White modestly acknowledged on the phone, not having to point out that from 1959 to 1963 he won more Grand National races (28) than any other driver.
In the hangar, Reed put two powerful-looking hands side-by-side and demonstrated what being "good at it" meant that July day. Coming out of the flat turns, the cars were forced onto their outside wheels, Reed said, pitching his hands toward the outside of the track. Getting the cars rebalanced quickly was critical so as not leave a left rear wheel in the air when hitting the gas to accelerate down the next runway.
Montgomery, Reed agreed, was like a endless series of drag races for 200 miles.
White remembered that he kept changing gear ratios in practice until he got one that shot him back to top speed as fast as possible. He said he ended up with an ultra-low final drive ratio of 5.57:1.
"Jim Reed asked me what I was running. I told him the truth, and he didn't believe me," White said with a chuckle.
"I still don't," said Reed, dismissing the story. To his recollection, nobody made those gears.
If low gears can get you up to speed in a hurry, they also mean it's a must to keep an eye on the engine as it revs rapidly toward redline.
Reed couldn't recall what final drive ratio he set up that day. He did know that he "lost concentration for a second."
In that second, near the end of a straight, his engine wound past its 6,300 RPM redline and broke the valve spring.
Reed was gaining on White when it blew, according to Economaki's account.
"Maybe a little too fast," Reed joked. He'd been camped in first for 28 laps when he made a pit stop on Lap 76. The concrete runways had been brutal on tires all day. White shot past, and when Reed got back on the track he was running out of time to catch the leader. Over the next 10 laps he'd made up all but 12 seconds on White when he looked down at his tach and knew it was over.
The field was a little short that day, only 19 drivers lined up for the race instead of the 25-30 or more that were normal for a race down South. Still, some of NASCAR's heavy hitters were in the pack at Montgomery.
With Reed out of the way, White, the eventual 1960 champion, was left to hold off the Pettys, two-time Grand National champion Ned Jarrett, another two-time champ, Buck Baker, and his son Buddy, the first driver to top 200 mph on a closed course.
The lead changed hands five times that day; pole-sitter John Rostek, Buck Baker and Reed were the only ones to get by White to lead for a lap or more. But nobody touched him after Lap 77. White won with an average speed of 88.6 mph and picked up $2,900 plus lap money. He finished with worn out brakes and bald tires. Richard Petty was a lap behind.
The crazy triangle wasn't so bad to White.
"I always liked where I won," he said.
He even saved a relic from his day in Montgomery. A trophy.
"It was a little special," he said, in an era when many wins didn't come with a trophy.
"They gave me a marble trophy about 30 inches tall. I still have it," at the family homestead in Taylorsville, N.C.
A racing hotbed
The airport hosted a lot of racing in those days, and judging from newspaper clips, drew lots of complaints from townsfolk, who petitioned to stop it. Drag racing was a regular feature, and sports car races drew big crowds. In August 1958, two days of racing for national sports car championships attracted 20,000 spectators.
NASCAR was still something of an acquired taste in the North. Although promoters expected similar crowds to come see the Pettys and maybe turn the Empire State 200 into an annual event not nearly enough people did.
Skip Chambers was 27 and at the track that day with the Montgomery Fire Department. The department sent a truck and the crew stood by as a crash crew. No wrecks interrupted the action, the caution flag only came out once and the firefighters mostly watched the race.
"Everybody thought it was a big deal," Chambers said recently from his farm equipment dealership in the village. He remembered a lot of traffic in a town that in 1960 probably had more cows than people. He got to shake hands with Richard Petty and thought people had a good time.
Economaki, who is 83 this year, drove up from his home in New Jersey to call the race. "It was a welcome event" for race fans, he said, but experience told him not enough of them came to pay the bills.
Promoters had to cover the $13,000 in prize money, a lot in 1960, and all the other expenses.
When the smell of exhaust and burning rubber cleared out, so did NASCAR.
"I was sorry to see it go," Economaki said.
These days you wouldn't know a NASCAR race was held there. Nothing commemorates the spot, no plaque, no sign. Only memories, and those who have them are aging.
White, 78, is retired now.
Richard Petty, 71, "The King," is chairman emeritus of Petty Enterprises, the most successful racing team in NASCAR history.
Reed, who'd rather you didn't know his age, goes to work each morning at Jim Reed Truck Sales Inc. in Cortland Manor. He just got back from Ohio where he raced his airplane. He won, of course.
Orange County Airport is a fixture in civil aviation, not quite as Reed said "in the middle of nowhere" as it was in 1960.
And Gary Quade, who runs a flight school at the airport, can recall seeing the remnants of Rex White's championship season as they faded away in the 1970s faint traces of the lines painted on the runways to mark the lanes the day Thunder Road went right through Montgomery.
tmichaels@th-record.com
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"Any Day is Good for Stock Car Racing"
