As the motorsports community celebrates the 75th anniversary of NASCAR, let’s look back at 10 milestone events that shaped the sanctioning body and its popular NASCAR Cup Series.
THE BEGINNING
A new division of auto racing that would eventually alter the motorsports landscape had a rousing debut on June 19, 1949, when NASCAR’s Strictly Stock Series took the green flag in front a turn-away crowd at Charlotte (N.C.) Speedway.
From the June 29, 1949, issue of National Speed Sport News: “The 150-mile Stock Car Race at the beautiful three-quarter-mile banked speedway in Charlotte, N.C., proved to be another feather in the cap of Bill France, who has a habit of coming up with the best.
“With a publicity campaign second to none in the South, Bill had the satisfaction of drawing the largest crowd of any 1949 race with the exception of Indianapolis. Close to five-thousand fans were turned away and several cars entered in the event were unable to get in due to the highways being jammed.”
Jim Roper, driving a 1949 Lincoln, inherited the $2,000 victory after apparent winner Glenn Dunaway was disqualified when “altered rear springs” were found on his 1947 Ford coupe.
Building on the success of the Charlotte race, France organized seven additional Strictly Stock Series events in 1949. Within eight months, the new series became NASCAR’s headline division.
PRESIDENTIAL VISIT
President Ronald Reagan was among the estimated 80,000 race fans at Florida’s Daytona Int’l Speedway on July 4, 1984, when Richard Petty scored his 200th NASCAR victory.
The event is widely recognized as the most significant in American auto-racing history as Reagan became the first sitting U.S. president to attend a major motorsports event and Petty achieved what turned out to be the final victory of his storied career.
President Reagan gave the command to start the engines via phone from Air Force One while en route to the speedway.
As the laps wound down, Petty set the pace in the STP Pontiac with Yarborough’s Hardee’s Chevrolet riding his rear bumper. Then, on lap 158 of the 160-lap race, Doug Heveron spun and flipped. Petty and Yarbrough had just passed the start/finish line, resulting in a nearly 2.5-mile battle back to the caution flag.
In one of the sport’s most dramatic finishes, Petty held off Yarborough by inches in a paint-trading slugfest to claim the victory.
“From what the president said, I think it blew his mind that we were running at 200 mph and beating on each other like that,” Petty noted.
MILLION DOLLAR BILL
NASCAR racing took a giant step toward becoming a mainstream American sport on Sept. 1, 1985, when Bill Elliott banked a $1 million bonus for winning the Southern 500 at Darlington (S.C.) Raceway.
Elliott’s unprecedented accomplishment garnered headlines in major cities across the nation and landed the racer from the hills of north Georgia on the cover of Sports Illustrated.
The bonus, known as the Winston Million, was the end result of a campaign by series sponsor R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. to draw attention to the sport’s crown jewel races. Late in 1984, officials outlined a program in which any driver who could win three of the sport’s four major events would receive a $1 million bonus.
Elliott won the Daytona 500 at Daytona Int’l Speedway and the Winston 500 at the track now known as Talladega Superspeedway. He came up short in the Coca-Cola 600 at Charlotte Motor Speedway but forever become known as “Million Dollar Bill” by winning the Southern 500.
Elliott ended up leading 100 of the 367 laps. Cale Yarborough finished second, .6 seconds behind at the checkered flag, with Geoff Bodine rounding out the top three.