Legend has it that one morning, Bill France sketched out his ideas for a racetrack that would be the marvel of its day, allowing for speeds up to 200 mph, an unheard of velocity at that time. And on Feb. 17, 2008, hundreds of thousands of race fans will gather in Daytona Beach to enjoy the results of France's foresight.

But there were other people behind the scenes who played major roles in the construction of Daytona International Speedway, people like Charles Moneypenny, Thomas Cobb and Clint Murchison.

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By the mid '50s, France knew the beach and road course was facing extinction. Developers were eyeing the property near Ponce Inlet lighthouse, and subdivisions were already in the planning stages.

Dan Warren is a Daytona Beach attorney and former city councilman who claims to have been there in 1952 when France announced his intentions to build a superspeedway.

"We were having breakfast and Bill grabbed a doily, pulled out his pen and said, 'I want to show you what I'm proposing to build in Daytona Beach.' And he drew what became the famous tri-oval," Warren said in a 2005 interview.

But France needed help. He needed an engineer who could bring his dreams to life. He needed the support of the local government. And he needed cash to fund the project, which he estimated would cost nearly $3 million -- a hefty sum in those days.

Enter Daytona Beach city engineer Charles Moneypenny.

"I know of no textbook on the subject of how to build a racetrack," Moneypenny was quoted in a Daytona Beach News Journal article. "When I began research on this track back in 1953, the first thing I learned was that most tracks are laid out strictly by guesswork."

Moneypenny knew that Florida's sandy soil couldn't support the weight of a high-banked superspeedway and grandstands, but he knew of a location west of town, out by the airport, that might work, according to Warren.

"There was a high grade of marl gravel underneath the subsoil there. Most of the soil here is sand and you can't build on it," Warren said.

In addition, no one had attempted to build a track with the banking required to meet France's speed specifications, particularly the transitions required to connect the turns to the straightaways. So Moneypenny went to Detroit to meet with engineers who built the Ford proving ground track, which had banked corners.

"The banking at Ford wasn't as high, but they had the transition from the flat parts onto the banking," Warren said. "They shared their engineering reports so we could do it, too."

France went to the Daytona Beach city commission with his idea, where he found support from city attorney Thomas Cobb. It was Cobb who drafted the legislation in 1953 to create the Daytona Beach Racing and Recreation Facilities District.

Originally, the plan was to sell $3 million in bonds to finance the project, but an economic downturn shelved that idea. By 1957, the commission agreed to lease the 447-acre parcel to France's corporation for $10,000 a year over a 50-year period.

Armed with blueprints and land, France needed working capital to begin the project, which was rapidly becoming known as "France's Folly." However, a Texas oil millionaire stepped in.

Clint Murchison inherited his father's sizeable investment portfolio, which included real estate, railroads and oil. When France called, Murchison was willing to loan him $600,000 and provide the construction equipment necessary to build the track.

That, coupled with additional funding from Pepsi-Cola president Donald Kendall and General Motors auto designer Harley Earl, a second mortgage on his home and the selling of 300,000 shares of stock to local residents, France was able to begin clearing the land in late 1957.

Construction on the speedway began in April of 1958 and Moneypenny began to run into challenges.

The plan was to build the track with 50-foot wide straightaways and a 20-foot apron, with a 3,000-foot long concrete safety wall on the backstretch and 2,700-foot long walls in the turns.

In order to create the footings for the banking, Moneypenny had construction crews excavate millions of tons of soil from the track's infield, creating a 44-acre lake that was named Lake Lloyd. In addition, Moneypenny had 22 tons of lime rock trucked in from Ocala to use as the track's binding base.

No one had tried to pave at that degree of incline, so Moneypenny came up with an ingenious solution. He connected the paving equipment to bulldozers anchored to the top of the banking. In addition, very fine iron fillings were mixed with the asphalt to help with the track's adhesion.

By December, all of the stock shares had been sold and France was using money from ticket purchases to complete the final construction phase.

Practice runs began on Feb. 6, 1959, and on Feb. 22, nearly 42,000 fans were in attendance as 59 cars took the green flag in the inaugural Daytona 500.

Moneypenny would patent his construction plans for bank, radius and transition for superspeedways, then go on to design Talladega and Michigan, and at age 90, supervise the renovation of Richmond from a half-mile oval to a .75-mile tri-oval.

In case you're wondering, Lake Lloyd was named after Sax Lloyd, one of the original six members of the speedway authority. According to NASCAR historian Buz McKim, when the France family relocated to Daytona Beach, France found work as a brake specialist in Lloyd's General Motors dealership.