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NASCAR Has a Little Moonshine in its Past. By Michael Smith
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NASCAR Has a Little Moonshine in its Past.
By Michael Smith
Let's face it; NASCAR racing is not like football, basketball or other so-called stick and ball sports. Historically, football is considered to be an offshoot of soccer and rugby, and basketball was invented to give bored college students something to do during the winter. Stock car racing, on the other hand, is the only sport that arguably grew out of a criminal pursuit. Young hot rodders hauling moonshine through the dry counties of the South needed fast cars to evade local and federal law enforcement officers.
Naturally, any time two youngsters with fast cars get together, the time will come when they need to see whose car is fastest. From humble one-on-one matches, the contests evolved into multi-car affairs run on makeshift tracks. Locals, attracted to the excitement of the contests gathered and it didn't take long for others to see the money making potential in charging admission to watch the contests. Thus, the sport of stock car racing was born, and shortly thereafter, the race promoter.
No doubt the greatest example of a moonshine runner turned race car driver is Junior Johnson, who at the age of 14 was racing cars full of white lightening whiskey through the hills of North Carolina. Johnson's obvious skill as a driver offered him entry into the arena of stock car racing, but the money from making and hauling moonshine was better than the potential winnings from stock car racing, and Johnson continued to ply his illicit trade until 1960 when mounting pressure from the authorities, including more than one arrest and bounties of $5000 to $10,000, caused him to switch to stock car racing full time. Looking back on those early years, when he burned the candle at both ends, working within and outside the law, Johnson recalls that many people probably thought of him as lazy, seeing him fast asleep on the hood of his race car at a local track. The truth is, Johnson admits, he was probably dead tired from running moonshine late into the previous night.
Junior Johnson would go on to be a successful Daytona 500 winning driver and team owner, responsible for grooming the early careers of young drivers like LeeRoy Yarbrough, Charlie Glotzbach, Bobby Allison, Cale Yarborough, Darrell Waltrip and Terry Labonte, to name just a few. In 1998, Johnson was named the greatest NASCAR driver of all time by Sports Illustrated magazine. Furthermore, Johnson is responsible for bringing the Winston name to NASCAR's premier racing series.
Without a sponsor heading into the early 1970s, Johnson contacted R.J.Reynolds tobacco. The government had recently banned tobacco companies from advertising on television and Johnson saw an opportunity to creat name recognition for the tobacco giant while getting some sponsorship for his race team. R.J. Reynolds had other plans, however. When told how much sponsorship money Johnson required to run his team, the tobacco company representatives reportedly claimed to have much more money than that to spend. So, instead of landing himself a tobacco sponsorship, Johnson served as matchmaker to bring Winston in as the main sponsor of NASCAR's elite racing series.
So, today when you think of your sport of stock car racing, spare a thought for one of its early pioneers, a man who may have started out flirting with the wrong side of the law, but who eventually rose to occupy the ranks of NASCAR's greatest drivers.
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