The Real Dirt on Atlanta’s Racing Past
Hint: It’s under the tires
(By now everyone’s sufficiently
befuddled by NASCAR’s new points system that proposing other changes might
cause your heads to explode, so I’ll take a week off from my series on possible
fixes for NASCAR’s ills and instead look deep into the past of racing in this
week’s Monster/Xfinity/Camping World destination, Atlanta.)
Sunday’s
“Folds of Honor Quik Trip 500” will be the 110th
Grand National/Cup (Winston/Nextel/Sprint)/Monster race at Atlanta Motor
Speedway. The first race was in 1960, which is before an awful lot of today’s
fans were born, or at least old enough to remember. Nevertheless, AMS is hardly
the beginning of racing in what was for years the population hub of the South.
(A couple of notes about the current
track: First, it originally was Atlanta International Raceway, only acquiring
its current name when it became part of the Speedway Motorsports’ empire.
Second, the race was just called the Atlanta 500 once upon a time, but that was
back when we had newspapers, and they wouldn’t allow race titles that ate too
much space on the page.)
Back
before World War I, Atlanta briefly had a 2-mile dirt track, built by the
inventor of Coca-Cola, but it wound up as the site of Hartsfield-Jackson
Atlanta Int’l Airport.
Lots
of short tracks also have come and gone – the Peach Bowl was perhaps the most
famous and successful – but for big-time NASCAR (and other) racing, the base of
Atlanta’s history was Lakewood Speedway.
Lakewood from the air.
A
one-mile fairgrounds dirt track originally built in 1917 for horses, Lakewood
quickly became a destination for motorsports of all kinds, even boats racing on
the lake. Pre-World War II statistics are difficult to find, but we know that
Indy-type cars were an attraction from the beginning (the track was sometimes
called “the Indianapolis of the South”), and that the first stock car race took
place in 1938.
After
WWII, we know that NASCAR ran a modified race at Lakewood in 1948 and began
running Grand Nationals in 1951, but this track also remained AAA/USAC
territory, with a lot of ARCA stock car races as well. ARCA and USAC continued
to run at Lakewood after NASCAR abandoned it for shiny new AIR/AMS, save for
two Grand Touring/Grand American events in 1969 and ’70.
Indy
Cars continued to visit Lakewood into the 1950s; there were six post-WWII
AAA/USAC Indy Car races, including the tragic 1946 event when drivers George
Robson (winner of that year’s Indy 500) and George Barringer
were killed at the end of the race.
Additionally,
Lakewood hosted one race for NASCAR’s ill-fated Speedway Division, which
featured Indy-type cars with stock car engines.
This is said to be from the 1952 NASCAR
Speedway Division race.
Eleven
GN races took place at Lakewood between 1951 and 1959, and the winners list
covers most of the sport’s greatest names:
Tim Flock, Herb Thomas, Buck Baker, Curtis Turner, Junior Johnson, Lee
Petty.
Lee
Petty’s name almost didn’t get there. He won the track’s final GN race, when
son Richard was flagged the winner, only to have Dad file a protest, correctly
complaining that a scoring error had robbed him of the win.
(Thanks to TMC Chase for the clip
below.)
Rounding out the memorable names list, Joe Weatherly
and Fireball Roberts won the two Convertible Division races at Lakewood.
Lakewood
continued to stumble along for nearly two decades after Grand Nationals and
Indy Cars departed, but the happenings were less memorable, unless you include
the scenes from “Smokey and the Bandit” that were filmed there. But even though
the place closed in 1979, pieces of it remain, although it would be hard to
rebuild.
While you’re watching or listening to the Atlanta race
this weekend, allow yourself a little time for fantasy and think about tearing
up Bruton’s asphalt, shrinking the track a little,
and bringing back Lakewood (with or without the lake) at AMS. More than one
person has commented on the possibility of adding dirt tracks back into the
Monster/NASCAR series mix, and maybe this would be the place to do just that.
Just put this sign out…
… and you might
get this again.
One
final note: Those NASCAR GT/GA races in
’69 & ’70 – which you might call Lakewood’s “last hurrah,” were won by
Atlanta’s own T.C. Hunt and the great Tiny Lund. Siler City, N.C., racer Wayne
Andrews, whose son Dennis is a great contributor to several racing websites,
finished third in both Lakewood events, six and nine positions ahead of a guy
who’ll be more in the spotlight this weekend…
Richard Childress.