In creating the modern era, France saw beyond himself

He had relinquished his role as president, forged on as cancer invaded his body, and was eight months away from bequeathing ultimate power in NASCAR to his son. But the influence Bill France Jr. wielded in the sport his father founded became plainly evident on one winter day in 2003. He asked for a microphone, and a very politically correct announcement on schedule realignment suddenly veered off the script.

He sat not on stage with the rest of the circuit's brass, but in the first row of spectator seats. He watched as his son, Brian, who soon would take the mantle as the sport's chief executive, awkwardly attempted to explain NASCAR's plans for expansion into larger markets. By then the cancer and the treatment for it had taken its toll on Bill Jr., who stood slightly hunched, with only wisps of hair on his head. But his voice, and the opinions it carried, were loud and strong. And when he spoke, everyone listened.

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These were not times to be vague. Bill Jr. did what his son wouldn't, naming names -- Darlington, Rockingham, Atlanta, even Charlotte. They were all, in parlance that would soon become common in the sport, "on notice." They had to start selling more tickets or worry about losing their races. Using the sometimes startling frankness that helped define him, he needed only a few minutes and a few words to convey what so many slide shows and video presentations could not.

Bill France Jr., who died Monday at age 74, was never one for ambiguity. The man who will be remembered Thursday at Bethune-Cookman College in Daytona Beach, Fla., brought NASCAR into the modern era by grabbing it by the collar and forcibly dragging it out of a past defined by dirt tracks and small towns. Every driver who sleeps each weekend night in a Prevost motor coach and flies home in a Learjet owes France a debt of gratitude. More than driving skill, more than trips to Victory Lane, it was the former series chairman who made them rich.

And he did it by somehow reconciling his blunt, often uncompromising personal nature with his vision for the sport. France was a tough man born of a tough father, chairman at a time when the sport was populated by burly, grease-stained competitors who still settled scores with their fists. He could be jarringly candid, as he was in one of his final public appearances, when he told reporters inquiring about his health that he was still "sucking air." This was his world. He ruled over it with unquestioned authority. And he changed it.

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.