![]() ![]() In 2017, Parks was inducted into the NASCAR Hall of Fame, which features a bootlegging exhibit and an authentic moonshine still built by Junior Johnson himself. The closest NASCAR comes to grain alcohol these days is in the ethanol filling up gas tanks, but the sport’s moonshine history is beginning to be recognized. “He worked very quickly in the 1950s to whitewash the connection between the sport and moonshiners.” “France saw an opportunity to develop NASCAR into more of a family-friendly sport that could make more money over time, and to do that he needed to downplay the connection between that sport and its illegal roots,” says Thompson. Under France’s leadership, NASCAR embraced corporate sponsorship and downplayed its bootlegging past, becoming more associated with Mountain Dew than mountain dew. In December 1947 France assembled the leading stock car drivers, mechanics and owners in Daytona Beach, Florida, to standardize rules, a meeting that ended with the formation of the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing (NASCAR).īill France, however, sought to distance NASCAR from its bootlegging origins as he took control of the organization, and that tension contributed to the decision by Parks to leave NASCAR and sell his race cars in 1951. Hall took the checkered flag.Ītlanta, however, did not welcome the moonshiners back, and another top stock car driver named Bill France began to recruit the bootleggers to race in Virginia and the Carolinas. With 30,000 fans chanting for Hall, who had his driver’s license revoked after being arrested no less than 16 times, the authorities relented and let the bootleggers race. When stock car racing resumed after World War II in September 1945, a riot nearly ensued at Lakewood Speedway after police banned five racers, including Hall, who had been convicted of liquor-hauling violations. Seay won the first big stock car race in 1938 at Atlanta’s Lakewood Speedway in front of 20,000 fans, and Hall would eventually win the national stock car championship in 1941. To further elude revenue agents and the police, bootleggers tricked out their cars with features that seem to be straight out of a spy movie or a Looney Tunes cartoon-devices that with a press of the button could release smoke screens, oil slicks and even bucket loads of tacks to puncture the tires of their pursuers. With relative ease, mechanics could also soup up the Ford V-8 to gain a few extra miles per hour of speed, which could make all the difference in car chases. “It was fast enough to stay one step ahead of the law, rugged enough for the mountain roads and had a big enough trunk and back seat to squeeze in moonshine.” “With the Ford V-8, suddenly there was an engine that was a match for their profession,” Thompson explains. “It turns out Ford accidentally created the perfect moonshine delivery vehicle.” “Bootleggers had experimented with different cars over time, but they were never quite fast enough for their tastes,” says Thompson. While automaker Henry Ford banned drinking by his workers, his Ford V-8 was literally the engine that drove moonshining after its 1932 debut. ![]() ![]() Ironically it was a devout teetotaler who did more for the bootlegging business in the years following Prohibition than anyone else. ![]() “Moonshiners didn’t want to share the tax revenue or any of this enterprise they had built from scratch with the federal government,” says Neal Thompson, author of Driving with the Devil: Southern Moonshine, Detroit Wheels, and the Birth of NASCAR. “Those were hard times back in the hills and you did things you shouldn’t to get by,” said NASCAR Hall of Famer Curtis Turner, who began bootlegging at age nine, according to .Īppalachian moonshining continued to thrive even after Prohibition’s repeal thanks to the persistence of dry counties and a desire to evade hefty federal alcohol taxes. Stock car racing had its roots in Appalachia where producing and selling homemade whiskey offered liquid salvation for family farms seeking to escape crippling poverty-especially during the Great Depression, which hit the region particularly hard. “If it hadn’t been for whiskey, NASCAR wouldn’t have been formed. Indeed, beginning in the Prohibition era, the drivers transporting moonshine from rural areas or illegally importing booze from Canada had to make resourceful changes to their vehicles to elude the authorities on winding backroads with hairpin turns. ![]()
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