Inaugural '81 banquet was France's first leap forward

NEW YORK -- It started with a simple coat-and-tie dinner at Tavern on the Green restaurant, and a few racecars parked outside the Plaza Hotel. NASCAR's first postseason celebration in New York 26 years ago was a simple, almost unnoticed affair. Local media ignored it. Competitors questioned the reasoning behind it. But it was all part of the big-picture vision held by a chairman who saw that inaugural banquet as the biggest, boldest step toward taking the sport nationwide.

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Champions Week festivities revved into high gear Thursday, when NASCAR sponsors and executives presented an array of awards honoring everyone from pit crews to regional tour winners to Nextel Cup champion crew chief Chad Knaus. The luncheon at a posh Midtown restaurant was only the prelude to Friday night's main event, a postseason banquet at the Waldorf-Astoria attended by 1,100 people in evening gowns and black ties. So it seemed fitting that the final honoree at Thursday's Myers Brothers media luncheon was Bill France Jr., the late NASCAR chairman who expanded the sport beyond its natural boundaries, and saw New York as the natural jumping-off point.

Not everyone else did. This was long before NASCAR races in metro Chicago, Miami, Kansas City and Phoenix, back when the sport was seen as a regional phenomenon and was only beginning to receive attention from TV. NASCAR's awards banquet had historically been held at a hotel in Daytona Beach, Fla., where the champion received a check for a few thousand dollars and a leather jacket. France wanted to change that. So he took his banquet north, toward the lights of the nation's biggest and brightest city, even as those in his own sport wondered why.

"I remember the first year, everybody saying, 'What in the world are we going up there for?'" said NASCAR vice president Jim Hunter. "Bill Jr.'s vision and foresight was that we needed to be here, because every major company in the United States either had an office or an ad agency in New York, and we needed to expose the sport here in New York."

From the very beginning, NASCAR's postseason forays to New York have been about sponsorship. In 1981, France -- who made regular trips to the city to shake hands and meet television and advertising executives -- saw it as a way to expose the sport to corporations that might otherwise never notice it. Now, with a Big Apple track still in the dream stages, the banquet is essentially NASCAR's New York race weekend, the biggest opportunity for series sponsors to push their motorsports programs before the largest audience the country has to offer.

But the beginnings were humble. Car owner Richard Childress, recently retired from driving in 1981, remembers driving to that first banquet from North Carolina, and getting a speeding ticket along the way. NASCAR would load all the trophies into a van in Daytona Beach, and truck them up to Manhattan. One man, NASCAR executive Bob Smith, handled all the logistics, a job that requires 30 to 40 people today. Hunter oversaw the seating arrangements, at the time for only about 100 people.

And people wondered: Why is NASCAR, which at the time contested only eight of its 31 races outside of the South, doing this?

"At first I thought it was crazy," said Childress, a six-time champion as a car owner. "But Bill France Jr., as usual, always made the right decision. I think he knew that we needed to get out and get to other places, and I think this was one of his first steps in making that happen." (Continued)