A Little Vegas History and Long Trips to Races
There’s
not much to say about NASCAR’s premier series’ history in Nevada, beyond this
weekend’s destination of Las Vegas Motor Speedway. Only one other
GN/Cup/Monster race has been run in the state - but there’s a story to that
event.
Las
Vegas Park Speedway, which held its only Grand National event in 1955, was
built as a horseracing track by a guy named Joseph M. Smoot, who later was
indicted for embezzling a significant portion of the $2 million he raised for
the project. He eventually turned up dead in his hotel room.
Norm
Nelson, later champion of USAC’s old stock car division, won the NASCAR race,
but this was one of times - as happened in the early days - when two Grand
National races were hold on the same day in different parts of the country, and
most of the familiar names like Petty, Flock, Weatherly and Herb Thomas were
racing at Martinsville, Va., not Las Vegas.
Indy
Cars also ran once at Las Vegas Park, as this 1954 race program shows
Although
NASCAR never raced there again, the track survived a few more years, and USAC’s
stockers raced at Vegas in 1959, with Fred Lorenzen
taking the win. Johnny Mantz of Southern 500 fame
finished 7th in both the 1955 NASCAR race and the 1959 USAC event.
No
doubt it takes a lot of planning to get a race team from the East Coast to the
Far West in just a few days, but at least today’s teams have pretty good
resources to organize and execute that travel. Think about how much harder it
would have been in the open trailer days, before Interstate highways… like in
1951, the first year NASCAR’s Grand National Series ventured west of the
Mississippi.
On
Sunday, April 15, 1951, 33 cars and drivers raced at Hillsboro, N.C. (The town
changed the spelling to Hillsborough some years later.) On Sunday, April 22,
they raced in Phoenix, Ariz., not at the current Phoenix International
Speedway, but rather at the 1-mile dirt Arizona State Fairgrounds oval. That
race also had 33 starters, and seven of them had been in the field at Hillsboro
a week earlier.
The
road warriors and their finishes were:
Fonty
Flock (1st & 4th)
Tim Flock (4th & 3rd)
Bill Blair (3rd & 23rd)
Herb Thomas (7th & 22nd)
Bill Holland (31st & 8th)
Lee Petty (9th & 26th)
Walt Sprague (25th & 32nd)
Holland
drove the two races for different car owners, but the others almost certainly
hauled the Hillsboro car across the country and ran at Phoenix a week later.
In
fact, the week after that, the series returned East for a race on Sunday, April
29, at North Wilkesboro, and six of the seven (all but Sprague) were there as
well, with Fonty Flock winning over Tim Flock, Petty
and Holland.
That
round trip today - Hillsborough to Phoenix to North Wilkesboro - is more than
4,200 miles by the quickest (mostly interstate) route. Think what it would have
been like mostly on two-lane roads in 1951.
Near
the end of the 1951 season, there would be another coast-to-coast “triple,”
this time from North Wilkesboro on October 21 to Marchbanks
Speedway in Hanford, Calif. (then a half-mile dirt track; later, it became a
superspeedway, one of NASCAR’s most forgotten tracks) on October 28 to
Jacksonville, Fla., on November 4. That time only two racers ran in all three
events, Fonty Flock and Herb Thomas. That road trip
would have been well over 5,000 miles.
Herb
Thomas
I
think you’d be hard pressed to find members of today’s Monster Energy NASCAR
Cup Series community who would stay in the game if conditions were what Flock
and Thomas endured in 1951.
But
here’s one that’s even more bizarre. On Saturday, June 30, 1951, NASCAR’s
finest raced at Carrell Speedway in Gardenia, Calif., and West Coast racer Lou
Figaro took the win. (Don’t confuse Figaro with Lou Figari,
the promoter who, with Larry Mendelsohn, ran the All-Star Racing League for
northeastern modifieds in the 1960a and ‘70s.)
The
next day, Sunday, July 1, the Grand Nationals ran at the Grand Rapids Speedrome in Michigan, and starting on the outside pole was
none other than Lou Figaro. I haven’t researched this, but I have to think he
had a second car ready in Michigan and flew in from the West Coast Saturday
night. (The trip would have been well over 2,000 miles.)
Unfortunately,
Figaro’s luck didn’t hold out, and he finished last in his effort to win a
weekend double. Even more unfortunately, Figaro lost his life three years later
in a wreck at North Wilkesboro.
Racing
in NASCAR’s top circuits remains demanding, more so than most of us can
imagine, but if the ghost of Fonty Flock or Herb
Thomas could join a team heading out to Vegas next week, I have a feeling
today’s crews would get tired of a certain phrase being repeated:
“You
think THIS is bad!”
POSTSCRIPT
Most
of the names from 1951 were at least vaguely familiar to me (a long-time NASCAR
fan and admitted “old guy”), but Walt Sprague wasn’t, so I did a little
checking, with the usual help of Racing-Reference.info and other sources.
Sprague
was a New Yorker, 25 years old, who had raced locally at Wellsville Raceway and
was making only his second Grand National Start at Hillsboro. Two weeks after
Phoenix, he came home 7th in a race at Martinsville.
His
last GN start was in Toledo, Ohio, on August 19. Five days later he died in a
non-NASCAR race at the Monroe County Fairgrounds, not far from Rochester, N.Y.
A lumberman by trade, he left a wife and two young children.