King of the Road: Bill France Jr. (1933-2007)

I called a friend of mine, who’s a mad NASCAR fan, to mull the passing of Bill France Jr. Just what was the man’s contribution to the national fabric? My friend responded, “Vroooom!”

You must use the Jr. when discussing the 31-year chairman of NASCAR, who died June 4 at 74; it’s necessary in a way that it isn’t with, say, Martin Luther King, Sammy Davis or Dinosaur. This is because there was a Bill France Sr.–was there ever. Big Bill grew up poor in Washington and had less than $100 to his name when he moved his family south during the Depression, seeking work. He found it in a gas station in Daytona, Fla., a town that loved gas. Soon France was helping organize stock-car races on the beach. After the war, France, 6 ft. 5 in. and with a booming voice, decided to bring order to a ragtag racing scene that sometimes saw promoters skip town without paying the drivers. He founded NASCAR in 1948, built the Daytona superspeedway in the 1950s, banished all dirt tracks from the circuit in 1970 (thus assuring more vroooom) and then handed the operation to his son.

Bill France Jr. was smaller and quieter but no less visionary or hardworking than his dad. During the construction of Daytona International, he would be on site dawn to dusk, driving a bulldozer, wielding a shovel, whatever had to be done. Later he would work at the family racetracks as a flagman or scorer. He was ready for the reins when they were given to him in 1972.

NASCAR’s reputation then was as a Southern pastime whose early stars had learned speed during midnight bootlegging runs. France didn’t care about any of that. His crucial insight was that vroooom is inherently thrilling and there’s no reason that it should be exclusive to one region.

To reach a wider audience, he needed television, and he went a-courtin’. CBS bit, big time, in 1979 when it agreed to televise the Daytona 500 flag to flag. That race couldn’t have gone better for NASCAR: the superstar Richard Petty won when leaders Donnie Allison and Cale Yarborough crashed into each other in the final lap, then leapt from their cars and got into a fistfight. It was marvelous theater, and ratings were high, which they’ve remained since. The last TV deal France signed before bequeathing NASCAR to his son in 2003 was for six years and $2.4 billion.

In the 1980s and ’90s, as NASCAR marched through the North like Sherman through Georgia, France slowly altered NASCAR’s image to make it more mainstream. He asked his drivers to sign more autographs and forced them to behave on the track as well. When two of his stars, Dale Earnhardt and Geoff Bodine, were engaging in weekly sparring matches, France told them to cut it out or find another line of work. NASCAR, whose rank and file once included criminals, was coming to stand for integrity.

The faces of NASCAR began to change. Even if some of the sport’s beer-bellied fans didn’t take to pretty boy Jeff Gordon, France thought Jeff was fine, as did lots of moms, daughters and little kids with poster-bedecked bedrooms. More interesting than Gordon’s looks was his heritage. Born in California, he was a teen in Indiana. In an earlier time, such a kid would have dreamed of racing in the Indianapolis 500, maybe, but wouldn’t have given NASCAR a thought. Now NASCAR was the big leagues, recruiting coast to coast, and everyone wanted to be part of it.

But while France built NASCAR into a huge business and the country’s biggest spectator sport, he built it into something else too. Something perhaps even more important.

The critic Jacques Barzun once famously (well, famously among sports fans) observed, “Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better know baseball.” The citizens of NASCAR Nation would, today, reasonably argue with that. Please quote me no Yankee Stadium attendance figures; baseball at present is a disgrace–the subject of government inquiries, an industry as rife with known and suspected cheaters as Wall Street circa 2000. Is this the heart and mind of America? Maybe it is, but not as we’d like to see it.

NASCAR, by contrast, seems, despite all the grease, clean. Wholesome. As it roars round the track, it climbs ever higher in the public’s affection and esteem. It celebrates things about the American character–power, speed, courage, risk taking, fun–that we are reluctant to surrender, at least psychically. And thanks to Bill France Jr., it celebrates national inclusiveness.

Many of us didn’t know what we were missing–until he showed it to us.

Robert Sullivan’s latest book, a collection of his golf writings, is You’re Still Away.