The Daytona 500

(Page 1: The Damnedest Week)

A. J. Foyt was ready to whip somebody's ass—I mean, even more ready than usual—and the leading candidate appeared to me to be Bill France Jr., the president of NASCAR. This was Foyt in his prime, when he was mean as a rodeo bull and lumbering through life about one tick away from throwing the kind of first punch that was also the last. At this particular moment Foyt was being thrown off the Daytona 500 pole for cheating. So you talk about pissed...

I was standing eight or ten feet away, just out of range of that bridge piling of a right arm of Foyt's (this was before a lot of the muscle in his right forearm was left hanging on a guardrail in Michigan in an Indy car crash). Foyt's left arm was around France's shoulders so that the crook of the elbow was like a vise that hadn't tightened on France's neck— yet. Foyt was pointing his right forefinger in France's face, jabbing, jabbing, so close that I figured one of two things was going to happen any second: Either Foyt was going to poke France right between the eyes with his finger, or he was going to close his fingers into that picnic ham of a fist and nail him between, above, below, and all around the eyes with one pop.

But you know what? Billy France never blinked. Never even gave Foyt what I have come to call, after all these years, the owl-eyed look. When France would get rattled or irate in conversation, he would go wide-eyed. But he wasn't even giving Foyt that little satisfaction.

Anyway, this was just out front of the NASCAR inspection station in the garage area of Daytona International Speedway. Foyt was pulling France slowly along by the shoulders, pointing, talking right in his face, and here they came toward me and then Foyt spotted me and walked France off to my left (his right) and took him around the corner of the inspection station.

I followed.

Foyt turned around and looked at me again, a look that said, You pissant, and he pulled France around yet another corner.

I followed.

Foyt had barely opened his mouth to resume raising hell in France's face when he looked around again and I was there again—You pissant. He let France go and those massive arms flopped down by his sides in exasperation, a gesture that said this goddamn media situation was getting out of hand and racing was going straight to hell if pissant reporters could watch your every move. Stomping back into the inspection station, where media people were not allowed, he pulled down the sliding steel door.

I decided to stick around. I mean, I didn't have any quotes from Foyt for my newspaper story yet, unless you count "F--k 'em."

Then a passenger car, a big Pontiac Bonneville, came whooshing through the pit gate, through the alleys between the garages, and screeched to a stop with its nose not four feet from the steel door of the inspection station.

Out stepped Billy France's father, Big Bill, who was the founder and still the czar of NASCAR. At age sixty-six, he remained a genuine, certified, tough old sonofabitch.

He wore a referee's whistle around his neck. He left the car door open and the engine running, as if this wouldn't take long.

As he raised the sliding steel door, somebody in the rapidly gathering gaggle shouted, "Where you going, Bill?"

The old man turned his head slightly and bellowed back, "Wallace told me to make sure these sonsabitches were legal by the time he got here, and I'm gonna do it." George Wallace, the Alabama governor and persistent presidential candidate, was to be the grand marshal of the Daytona 500 that year.

Big Bill went inside and pulled the steel door down behind him.

So began, late in the afternoon of February 8, 1976, the damnedest Daytona 500 week there ever has been.

Copyright © 2001 by Ed Hinton. All rights reserved. Posted with permission of http://www.twbookmark.com. Click here for ordering information for "Daytona" at Amazon.com.