Bill France Sr. and his willing partners — some more willing than others — created NASCAR in an art deco inn right across the highway from Daytona Beach’s surf.
When they left the Streamline Hotel that December day in 1947, the makeshift masters of stock-car racing didn’t own a map nor possess certainty that the unpaved road would lead to anywhere special.
The loosely arranged sport needed rules. The ambitious France concluded that racing needed a ruler to impose a tire-iron grip on maverick promoters and the rowdy cowboys slinging their souped-up street cars around the South’s dirty curves.
The France gang started NASCAR history. Some 62 years later, as NASCAR prepares to capture the echoes and trinkets of that history in a $195 million Charlotte museum financed by hotel taxes…Â Details