Junior – The Best of What Was
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When
I walked through the gate into the Atlantic Rural Exposition Fairgrounds race
track that Sunday afternoon in April of 1963, I knew from reading the Richmond
newspapers’ advance stories that a guy named Junior Johnson would be in one of
the cars to watch during the Richmond 250 NASCAR Grand National stock car race.
Junior Johnson, his Ray
Fox/Holly Farms #3, and a team car
What
I didn’t know was that Junior and Joe Weatherly would put on a spirited,
race-long battle that afternoon, and it would end only in the closing laps when
engine in the Ray Fox-owned Holly Farms-sponsored #3 Chevy would explode, and
the car would end up backed halfway through promoter Paul Sawyer’s white board
fence around the track.
That
Johnson-Weatherly duel in my first-ever race would make me a lifelong fan.
I
had come to the race prepared to cheer Weatherly, because he was a Virginian
like me, and because he’d brought the previous year’s championship trophy home
to the Old Dominion. Sadly, less than a year later, “Little Joe” was dead.
Johnson,
thought, made the bigger impression that spring afternoon almost 57 years ago,
leading the most laps and driving with an abandon that you couldn’t help but
admire. Junior quickly became the other guy earning my cheers, and it stayed
that way for the rest of his driving career (even when he switched to Fords)
and when he became car owner.
When
he walked away from active involvement in 1995, racing ceased to be as much
fun.
The legend behind the wheel
Junior
Johnson deserved to be in the first class of NASCAR’s Hall of Fame. Nobody else
is ranked as high both as a driver (50 wins) and a car owner (132 wins,
including 13 of his own). He was a Grand National “regular” for only nine
years, and he won at least one race every one of those. (I put “regular” in
quotation marks because Junior never tried to run every race – his best points
finish was sixth.) As a car owner, he helped Cale Yarborough and Darrell
Waltrip to their greatest years, and he had only two seasons – both at the end
of his career – when his team failed to win a race.
Still,
that wasn’t the whole story. What made him Tom Wolfe’s “Last American Hero” was
Junior the moonshiner, Junior the good ol’ boy, Junior the mechanical genius
(and regular cheater), Junior the sharp businessman, Junior the all-around nice
guy.
When Junior raced the
famously rule-stretching “Yellow Banana” Ford in 1965, templates (much less
lasers) weren’t part of the NASCAR inspection process.
Junior
Johnson had a personality that you – as a fan – could put up on your wall and
revere. He was one of US . . . with all our best traits.
He
walked away from the sport before he turned 65, and I think that a good part of
the “why” he left is that he saw more clearly than the rest of us where things
were headed, and he wanted no part of it.
That
in turn ties into the real downer of this article: the sad reality that Junior
Johnson would stand NO CHANCE of making it in NASCAR today:
- Convicted criminal.
- No money.
- Less than matinee idol
looks.
- Less than English
teacher grammar.
- Rule-breaker/cheater.
For
that matter, neither would Weatherly, Fireball Roberts, Herb Thomas, Rex White or many others. All they could do was drive the crap
out of a race car at the local level and have somebody recognize that talent
and give them a shot at the next level. Ask Bubba Pollard how well that works
today.
Maybe
that plays an even bigger role than the charter system, the driver development
programs, the insane rules and the point system nobody understands in why it’s
gotten so much harder for this fan to feel connected to the sport today.
Junior
Johnson, I will miss you for the driver you were, the owner you were, the
decent human being you were, and all you stood for in racing the way it was.
Frank’s
Loose Lug Nuts
Here’s
a really obscure history lesson that came to mind when I was remembering that
first race I attended. What we know today as Richmond Raceway (formerly
Richmond International Raceway) has had perhaps more names
than any track on the NASCAR Cup circuit, and the one from the 1940s, ‘50s and
‘60s that includes “Atlantic Rural Exposition” is the most complicated.
Where
in the world did that goofy name come from?
Well,
it was like this. During World War II, several things happened to the Virginia
State Fair, which up until the way had been held on land just off a main
Richmond thoroughfare called “The Boulevard” (and as of earlier this year,
Arthur Ashe Boulevard). The Diamond, Richmond’s minor league baseball part,
sits on the property today, along with a couple of other athletic facilities.
During
the war, fairs were suspended, but preparing for their eventual resumption, the
fair corporation purchased land outside of the city for a new fairgrounds. This
was the Strawberry Hill Farm. Then, still during the war, the majority owner of
the fair corporation died.
At
this point, a group of Virginia livestock businessmen decided to purchase the
fair corporation and the new property, but their plan was not to continue the
fair. Rather, they subscribed to an idea championed by a Virginia Tech
professor to make Richmond the Chicago or Kansas City of the East with a major
livestock market. They planned to hold a major cattle and other livestock
market on the Strawberry Hill property and call the enterprise the Atlantic
Rural Exposition.
Initially,
a one-mile racetrack was to be built as part of the enterprise, but the
speedway turned out to be a half-mile, where Indy-style “big cars” ran he first
race in 1946.
This is said to be a
photo from one of the first Richmond races. Check out that guard rail!
After
a couple of years of financial underperformance, the exposition backers
realized they needed the revenue from a fair, and the Virginia State Fair was
re-born, albeit still with the clunky Atlantic Rural Exposition name. The track
was stuck with that name, too, until Paul Sawyer succeeded in giving a more
race-track-like name 20 years later.
