Daytona legends recall good ol' days on beach (cont'd)

"You would get sand-blasted, and you couldn't see," Panch said. "We had tear-offs you could pull off, but that only lasted a short while. So some of us cut little round holes in the windshield, so we could reach over and kind of peek out. Either that or use a marker out of your driver's window."

That didn't always work, however, as Panch readily admitted.

Marvin Panch Credit: Rusty Jarrett/Getty Images

Beach course
fading into sunset

A trip to the beach where racecars once ran now finds a restaurant and lingering ghosts of NASCAR's colorful past, writes Mark Aumann.

• Complete story click here

"Johnny Beauchamp had a couple with some children sitting on a dune going into the North Turn, and he was using that for his shutoff point," Panch said. "Well, evidently they needed a Coke or something and they moved down the beach a little bit. Next time by, he missed the turn and almost went into downtown Daytona [because he drove deeper into the turn before braking]."

Downtown Daytona, for the record, was about 10 miles away. Panch laughed heartily as he told the story, and these guys who built racing have thousands more.

Fleck is full of them. He said racing on the beach is a part of NASCAR lore that never should be dismissed or forgotten.

"All I can say, really, is that it was a lot of fun. It was great fun. It was different," Fleck said.

"When I came down for the '56 race, I came down with my '35 Plymouth with a Hemi engine. I flat-towed it with a tow bar. It was quite an experience. We had to schedule our races, of course, according to the tide -- so we had a little bit of something to race on. We would let it drift out a little bit to run in the ocean a little to cool our tires off, so we could finish the races. Tires weren't engineered like they are today. Very skinny.

"And what I'm wearing now is what I raced in then. A short-sleeved shirt, white [thin] pants with a red stripe. Nothing was fireproofed. Our fireproof was the fire extinguisher we had in our car. Our ambulance was a hearse from the local funeral director -- and they only had one. So when someone got hurt, they tried to take care of him right there so they didn't have to take it to the hospital. If they took someone to the hospital, we had to stop the race until they got back.

"They had a first-aid kit with peroxide and Band-Aids. And eye wash, they had a lot of eye wash -- because you would get sand in your eyes. It was very tough to see. And once in a while you would pop off a seagull, too. It was a bloody mess when it hit your windshield. There was feathers and blood floating 'round."

Panch said that he and the other drivers memorized every inch of the old Daytona beach course, even though they oftentimes struggled with realizing exactly where they were.

"The biggest problem was not being able to see," he said. "And when you ran the beach, you always tried to run where it was kind of wet -- because it was hard. But the corners, there was no handling. It was like driving through a plowed field. And then coming down the pavement to get into the South Turn, there was a hump in the road. We'd bounce over that hump, and when it landed, we started putting the brake on. That was our shutoff point. You had to really concentrate on where you were."

The common denominator of all the story-tellers was that old-school racing on the beach was fun -- pure fun.

Think Michael Waltrip had much fun earlier this week when he was assessed a $100,000 fine and all sorts of other penalties by NASCAR after a fuel additive was discovered in the engine manifold of his car? And how much fun did Jeff Gordon have after discovering that Waltrip, despite someone on Waltrip's team intentionally bending the rules, would start in 15th place for this Sunday's 500 -- while Gordon, who won one of Thursday's two qualifying races, will start 42nd because one of his mechanics "inadvertently broke the rules," according to NASCAR?

"We're very proud of the progress the sport is making," Fleck said. "Of course it's more big business than it is sport today. It's almost like any sport. Any sport today is big business. And of course with it being more about business, it's not as much fun as it used to be."

He said it with a touch of sadness in his eyes. Or maybe it was sand.

The opinions expressed are solely of the writer.