Word: nascar
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...sixties he raced in the SCCA's fall pro series on the West Coast. In those days, Indy drivers drove at Indianapolis and the fairground ovals that made up the USAC circuit. SCCA, the sanctioning body that was road-racing oriented, had a circuit composed mostly of amateur races. NASCAR, the Southern stock car group, had nothing to do with either of them. Today, half of the USAC races are on road tracks rather than ovals. NASCAR runs some road races, and SCCA runs three different pro series, including the Can-Am challenge for large engine sports cars, which...
...recognized by France, whose early operations were so successful that he was soon branching out, staging races in Georgia and the Carolinas. In 1947, he and some friends formed the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing; France was elected president, and there he has remained. The first thing NASCAR did was decree that tracks were to have well-maintained roadways and fire-fighting equipment always on hand. Cars had to be equipped with rollbars; drivers had to wear shoulder harnesses. And stock cars had to be just that...
Hardly. In 1949, NASCAR sanctioned 87 races on 25 tracks around the U.S.; last year it sanctioned 1,027 races on 85 tracks around the world. Attendance has grown from a few hundred thousand fans to an estimated 12 million, and instead of gasoline money, drivers now compete for $3,500,000 in prizes. New tracks have sprung up all over the country-Charlotte, N.C., Atlanta, Riverside, Calif. But the showplace is still Bill France's own Daytona International Speedway...
...souping up its racing engines, only to lose the "stock car" championship to Chrysler, which installed custom-built, $12,000 "hemispherical-head" engines in its Plymouths. That was too heady for Bill France, owner of Florida's Daytona International Speedway and president of NASCAR, who has the funny idea that somebody besides a factory ought to be able to compete in the contest. He banned the "hemi-head"-which put Chrysler in such a huff that it refused to race at all at this year's Daytona Speed Weeks. "France made stock-car racing," groused a Chrysler mechanic...
...last. But last week the dodgers and weavers got a break. At Florida's abandoned Flagler Beach Airport, even the local cops turned out to cheer as amateurs and pros whipped through brand-new driving tests devised by the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing. Instead of NASCAR's usual straight dashes down the tide-smoothed sands of Daytona Beach, the association concocted its 1958 stock-model performance tests as a yardstick of automobile safety, based them on qualities that the average driver needs in the average car during an average turn at the wheel: maneuverability...