Nascar Betting History
History - Betting Tips - Winners - Glossary
The winner of that race was Glenn Dunnaway in a '47 Ford. After the race, however, inspectors found an illegal part in the shocks of his car. The car had been used for bootlegging earlier that week, and the illegal shock wedge was used often to increase speed of bootlegging cars. Dunnaway's car owner sued, but the NASCAR lawyer kept repeating the word "bootlegger" over and over in court, and NASCAR won the case. Jim Roper, driving a '49 Lincoln, went down as the winner of the first ever NASCAR race. At the end of the season Red Byron became NASCAR's first ever national champion. [Jim Roper recently waved the green flag at the Texas 500 in April 1998.]
On September 4, 1950, the concept of the NASCAR "superspeedway" became a reality at Darlington, South Carolina. The first Southern 500 was held that day, on a track larger, wider, and faster than any stock car driver had ever seen before. Johnny Mantz won in a 1950 Plymouth. This event is now a Labor Day tradition.
Through the 1950's NASCAR began to flourish. Corporate sponsors, such as Pure Oil and Champion Sparkplugs took an active role in the sport. Even the major automobile manufacturers, such as Ford, Chevrolet, and Chrysler gave "factory backing" to individual drivers-- the NASCAR drivers would recieve money from a manufacturer to drive its product. A common motto for these automobile manufacturers was "Win on Sunday, sell on Monday". The car companies realized the potential of NASCAR racing to sell cars. In the 1950's, NASCAR held races in such places as Municipal Stadium [later JFK Stadium] in Philadelphia and Soldier Field in Chicago. [Richard Petty's first race that counts in his 1,185 starts was held clear out of the U.S.- in Toronto, Canada.]
NASCAR faced its first major crisis when all of the automobile manufacturers pulled out of NASCAR racing in May 1957 following an incident at the Martinsville ( Va.) Speedway where five people-including an 8 year old boy- were hurt from flying debris from a crash. Bill France, however, managed to keep the organization functioning by convincing promoters to increase prize monies. Two other factors, perhaps coincidental, served to keep NASCAR alive.
The first was the appearance of NASCAR's first superstar, Glenn "Fireball" Roberts in 1958. Roberts got his nickname from the fierce fastball he threw while playing baseball at Florida State. He won 32 races in his career.
Ironically, what eventually caused Roberts' death was a different type of fireball. During the 1964 NASCAR World 600 at Charlotte (N.C.) Motor Speedway, Junior Johnson and Ned Jarrett crashed on the back straightaway. Roberts swerved to avoid the cars, flipped, and broke the car's fuel tank open. The car burst into flames, and Jarrett ran to pull him out of the fire.He was burned over 80% of his body."
The second factor that helped bring NASCAR through its first lean years was the opening of the Daytona International Speedway in 1959. The track had been a dream of Bill France for many years. France risked almost everything he had on building the track over a plot of swampland four miles away from the ocean. Many people thought France was going to lose it all and thought the track was going to be a failure.
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