#60 - Kid Lightning
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06/14/2017 Matt McLaughlin |
(Editor’s Note) In 1997
- 1998, Matt McLaughlin penned a special Anthology of historical pieces in
honor of the 50th Anniversary of NASCAR entitled "50 Years of NASCAR
Racing." Matt has entrusted the entire collection, minus one or two that
were misfiled back then and cannot be salvaged, to my tender, loving care.
As NASCAR turns 70, the
Anthology itself will celebrate a 20th anniversary through 2018, and will run
again here on Race Fans Forever. As before, there is no record of which pieces
came first, so it will appear in the sequence presented earlier. Please, sit
back and enjoy as you take a journey back through the pages of history and
perhaps relive a memory or two.
As always, many thanks
to Matt, and God bless you my friend. ~PattyKay
When old time fans gather together to discuss the
heroes of yesteryear, names like Richard Petty, Bobby Allison, Cale Yarborough,
and David Pearson are always mentioned with near reverence. But in his time,
there was one driver, who despite limited factory support and a special
challenge in the common sense department, beat them all like a drum when things
went his way. That driver is of course, Kid Lightning, if not the
greatest racer ever to turn a wheel on the track, certainly one of the most
persistent.
Born Matthew Leichtzinger on April 1st 1950, the Kid
was the 8th of 10 brothers born to the clan. The son of a prosperous automobile
agency owner, and grandson of one of the South's most notorious moonshiners (Whitey
Leichtzinger, AKA White Lightning, perhaps the originator of the term White
Lightning for corn liquor) the Kid was born into one of the most prosperous
families in Houston Hollow, North Carolina. (No great shakes considering the
poverty of the town in those days, which those from Charlotte invariably
referred to as "Hoot and Holler".) While prosperous, the Leichtzinger
family was not well regarded by the town's gentry, including the Minister who
regularly preached each of the vile Leichtzinger Boys was twice as fit for hell
as the one before him. The Minister had a point. The Leichtzinger boys were
well noted for breaking jaws and traffic laws, not to mention breaking up an
occasional marriage with their incessant tomcatting around. Matthew may have
been the best behaved of the lot, but that's like trying to decide which is the
most pleasant form of flu.
Having ridden go carts and motorcycles from an early
age, the Kid's first car was a '39 Ford purchased from his grandfather's
wrecking yard, while he was still the tender age of 11. The car was outfitted
with a hopped up Chevy 327 thundering through worn out glass-packs, and painted
"Carolina Gray" (as in gray primer.) The car was soon the scourge of
the community, as the Kid seemed to confuse local roadways with race tracks. He
attributes his survival to "a guardian angel Richard Petty taught to
drive." At 12, two years before he was of age, the Kid built his first
race car, a '39 Chevy painted in the family's trademark silver, and running
number "00b" in honor of his daddy, who was seven time track champion
at the Houston Hollow Speedrome in the infamous
"00" Fords. To help distinguish his car from his dad's (who was still
racing at that time) and because he ran out of silver paint, the roof of the
"00b" was painted a shade of blue the Kid recalls as "a shade
deeper then Petty blue and a hell of a lot prettier." The silver and blue
00 cars would remain the Kid's trademark throughout his career.
Matthew entered the car under the name of his older
brother Henry, who had retired from racing to pursue a full time career in
drinking heavily. The ruse proved to be a fine one for Matthew, who got to go
out there and race, then make a hasty exit while all the racers he wrecked
stood in line to beat the snot out of Henry. The Kid's driving style was
compared to "a blind drunken man who confused an oval track race with a
demolition derby." Still, while a bit wild, Matthew was fast and he won
his third race out at the track, actually winning on his roof after getting
into another car while racing to the line. Once his treachery was discovered,
Matthew was allowed to keep racing, because the locals drove from miles around
to see his antics. It was his tender age that earned him the nickname
"Kid" which was to stick with him all his life. While he won his fair
share of championships and races, the Kid's style was such that he either went
home with a trophy, or with what was left of his car shoveled into paper sacks.
To finance his career, the Kid started "Thunder Road Brewery" selling
beer to other underage kids, to keep his tiny dirt floor race shop open. That
same Thunder Road Beer is still produced under contract with a local brewery
and currently sells for 10 dollars a bottle in the tony clubs of Los Angeles.
The Kid made his first Grand National (now Winston
Cup) start during the tragedy-marred World 600 of 1964, while still only 14.
His older brother Paul saw the wreck that killed Fireball Roberts and
immediately pulled into the pits and retired from racing. The Kid could not see
the wreck from the pit, but was so furious that a perfectly good race car was
just sitting there ready to go, he hopped on in, and took to the track in it.
As he recalls it, the sight of that fiery wreckage did give him pause, but once
the green flag dropped he put the thought aside and started passing cars right
and left. As a longtime friend, Junior Johnson, once commented, "I don't
know if the Kid was just the bravest SOB I ever met, or if he was just too
damned stupid to be afraid. I'm guessing the latter." Once Bill France
figured out who was at the wheel of that car, he threatened to suspend the Kid
for life if he didn't pit and get out of the car immediately. Threats of
lifetime suspension were as common during the Kid's career as boneheaded
wrecks.
At 16, the Kid began running the Cup circuit full
time. His crew consisted of a good friend, Catfish John, several of his
brothers, his dimwitted best friend Virgil Kane, and the Kid's long suffering
girlfriend, Carolina Charlotte North, better known as Carrie. He recalls those
days fondly in his autobiography, labeling the rag tag group, " a bunch of
long-haired country boys without a teaspoon of sense between us, kept out of
trouble by Carrie, and living on hot dogs boiled on the manifold of a beat up
old Ford truck we used to haul the car, washed down with copious amounts of
beer." While he usually ran better than his equipment allowed, the Kid
turned some heads, by being able to battle occasionally with the legends of the
sport, though more often he inadvertently wrecked them. His first of 37
eventual wins in NASCAR's top division came at the infamous Black Rock Speedway
in West Virginia. (Now the site of a nuclear waste dump.) A night race run on
Halloween, it featured 500 laps on the grueling high banked dirt half mile
oval. That night's race was made that much tougher by the fact the last 10 laps
were run in a violent thunderstorm, which knocked out the lights on the last
lap, and turned the track into a swamp. The Kid's heartfelt celebration in the
track's muddy victory lane, is forever etched in the memories of those few fans
who didn't have the sense to run for cover by that point. In an ironic twist,
as Kid Lightning celebrated his first win, a bolt of lightning came down and
split the tree directly behind him. In a panic to get down off the car before
he ended up fried as well, the Kid slipped on the wet roof and broke a
collarbone. Perhaps Richard Petty summed it up best by saying “A driver had to
be a damn fool to want to race at Black Rock. That night the Kid was the
biggest damn fool out there."
While he won no other races that season, the Kid did
come close to taking the honors at the inaugural race at Talladega. He was one
of the few Grand National regulars to compete at that boycotted event, against
the strong wishes of Carrie, who feared for his life. The Kid was leading on
the last lap when his worn out tires finally let loose, and he went high out of
the final corner giving the race to Richard Brickhouse. Still, Talladega would
become his favorite track, and the Kid won 7 races there. In a sad irony, that
same track almost took his life in 1987, when a bad wreck sent him rolling end
over end 13 times, and left him badly injured. That wreck was the worst of the
Kid's career, and as he recalls, "during the long recuperation I found
both God and the bottle. I just wish I had paid more attention to the former
and less to the latter." It was a problem with alcohol and pain pills that
started during that recuperation that would one day end the Kid's career.
Still, he seemed to be doing well. The Kid married
Carrie in Las Vegas during the ride home from Riverside, then remarried her in
the infield at the Daytona 500, with Richard Petty and Bobby Allison as
groomsmen, because the racing community was miffed they hadn't been invited to
the original service. While he won occasionally, the Kid will perhaps best be
remembered as the Forest Gump of NASCAR. In 1967 when the King won 27 races and
the championship, the Kid finished second in points. (Which, as he puts it,
"Is sort of like saying the English came in second in the Revolutionary
War.") In 1973, he helped Benny Parsons win the championship by subbing
for Benny at Bristol and driving the car to the victory. During the same
season, at the finale at Rockingham, the Kid and his crew helped piece back
together Benny's Chevy to allow him to go out for a few more laps and win the
title. The Kid was the first driver ever to be wrecked by Dale Earnhardt,
during Dale's very first Cup start. One drunken evening, the Kid's tongue got a
little loose, and he accidentally explained how to pull a slide job to Dale. At
the 1984 Firecracker 400 the Kid was instrumental in helping Richard Petty win
his 200th victory. With two laps to go, the Kid accidentally got his radio wire
caught up in the steering wheel, wrecked and flipped his car. While he was able
to drive away, the wreck bought out a caution that allowed the King to take the
win. After the race, then President Reagan asked Petty, "What sort of fool
flips his car over at 190 MPH and then keeps on driving?" The King
replied, "That would be Kid Lightning, sir. He's our kind of fool."
Leichtzinger relief drove for Petty at his final Pepsi 400, after the King
succumbed to exhaustion. He bought the car home 11th, the best finish for the
43 car that season. The Kid also gave Jeff Gordon his first Busch series start,
driving for a team he co-owned with Carrie.
While past his prime, the Kid still managed to win a
second World 600, though some still say because his sponsor was so chummy with
Charlotte's owner, the car was allowed to run underweight. To this day
Leichtzinger still claims if the car was illegal he didn't know anything about
it. His biggest victory was certainly the 1995 Daytona 500, a race he was
awarded after the driver flagged the winner was disqualified for a minor rules
infraction. A series of personal tragedies within his family, disastrous
experiences with sponsors who were crooks, and his increasing drinking
eventually wound up costing the Kid his career and marriage in 1996.
NASCAR's record books have been expunged of any
mention of the Kid, due to an incident that occurred that off season. The Kid
had once again fallen off the wagon (something he did so regularly that winter,
he winces recalling it and jokes that perhaps that wagon ought to drag a
mattress behind it to keep him from getting so busted up) during the Big Red
boat cruise. Denied a chance to pilot the boat, the Kid mooned Bill and Betty
Jane France, earning himself a third lifetime suspension, and NASCAR's
corporate wrath.
Once again sober, and reunited with Carrie, Kid
Leichtzinger keeps talking about a comeback. He has in fact made several Busch
and Truck series starts over the past couple years, under assumed names to get
around that suspension of his. There were even rumors flying around at Bristol
it was Kid Lightning, not Buckshot Jones, in that 00 car in the Busch race that
caused the big wreck. Certainly, the driver showed the old Kid Lightning style.
Considering the possibility of a Kid Lightning comeback in Winston Cup, The
Kid's old friend, Dale Earnhardt, can only smile and shake his head. " If
the Kid ever gets to race in this series again, NASCAR better tear out the
front 20 rows of seats, cause as hard and dumb as he drives, that's most likely
where Matt will wind up… on the parade lap."
*Matt can no longer
field comments or email at Race Fans Forever. If you have comments or
questions, please leave them below and I’ll do my best to supply answers.
~PattyKay Lilley, Senior Editor.