In creating the modern era, France saw beyond himself (cont'd)

The amazing thing isn't that NASCAR went national, that it cut the umbilical cord to its rural upbringings and moved from cotton country to Las Vegas, from the Carolina sand hills to South Florida. The amazing thing is that France was the man to take it there. Billy, as many called him, was as gritty and as plainspoken a man as so many of the drivers he presided over, a sort of Cale Yarborough in a coat and tie. And yet he set in motion events that created people like Kasey Kahne and Jimmie Johnson, easily digestible drivers with model good looks and as much marketability as talent.

"The series evolved into almost this sophistication that was just anathema to what the origins of what stock-car racing were," said Max Muhleman, a pioneer in motorsports marketing. "And yet he presided over it and saw that was the way it had to go. Whether it was to his style or not, he was smart enough to see that was the horse to ride."

He was only fulfilling the vision laid out by his father, Bill France, who tried to centralize stock-car racing at a time when it was "neck-and-neck with old-time wrestling at the armory," Muhleman said. Billy watched as Big Bill used his political connections, building relationships with senators and governors that would later pay off. He watched as his father broke into the business of building racetracks. He watched as his father focused not on what the sport was, but what it could become.

"A lot of people were amazed when he called Daytona speedway Daytona International Speedway. It seemed kind of overreaching, like he was going to vault us into the ranks of Monte Carlo and LeMans with one name," Muhleman remembered. "He may have named it first and built it into that later. He must have had many talks with Billy about how far he thought the sport could go."

The younger France took command in 1972. He could be equal parts charming and intimidating, was at the same time beloved as well as feared. He held the power to end careers. Even in his final years, when his health was failing and he would occasionally roll into a racetrack on his scooter, you could still sense the presence and hear the voice that made men quake. He could have very easily grown comfortable with all that power. Many men would have. He could have easily sat back, counted his money, and presided over a nice little racing series that lived below the national radar.

Instead he risked everything, pulling NASCAR out of the shadows and creating something that became as much a cultural phenomenon as it was a sport. The transition wasn't always seamless -- safety efforts sometimes lagged as the quality of "the show" took precedence over driver well-being -- but it was successful beyond anyone's imagination. By the time France was finished, the sport he had fashioned looked like the sport he had inherited only in the fact that men raced cars. Virtually everything else had changed, from the venues to the cities to the sponsors to the ages and faces of the drivers themselves.

And it all bore very little resemblance to the man who created it. Bill France Jr. had the selflessness and the vision to build modern NASCAR not in his own image, but in the image he knew he needed to be.

"There is a lot of irony," Muhleman said. "Here was a guy who was smart enough to do it the way it needed to be done, even if that wasn't the way he grew up with."

The opinions expressed are solely of the writer.