In 1959, first Daytona 500 changed city, sport forever

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. -- The road running out of town was called Volusia Avenue, and it passed miles of stark emptiness on its crawl west from Daytona Beach. There was little development beyond a motel and a bar called Club 92. Engineers from General Electric would soon arrive to design parts for rockets being launched from Cape Canaveral, setting up shop near where NASCAR's offices are today. But as the 1950s drew to a close, these outskirts were the sleepiest side of a sleepy beachfront town. That is, until they set the bulldozers to work on the scrub and cypress swamp, and construction began on an edifice that would alter a city and a sport forever.

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They called it the Big D, and no one had ever seen anything like it. Two and a half miles around, with sweeping, high-banked turns, Daytona International Speedway created an instant sensation among both the townsfolk and the people who would eventually compete on it. NASCAR founder Bill France Sr. moved Daytona's annual big race from the oceanfront to his mammoth new facility in 1959, and even tough, grizzled racecar drivers were left gawking.

"It was out of this world," said former driver and car owner Cotton Owens. "To go down there and look at this big circle, none of us knew about that type of racing. Those high banks were something else."

They called it the 500 Mile NASCAR International Sweepstakes, and it went green at noon on Feb. 22, 1959. An old ticket stub shows an admission fee of $8. The starting field of 59 cars featured an abundance of stock-car racing legends -- Richard Petty, Junior Johnson, Joe Weatherly and Fireball Roberts among them -- as well as a Canadian and a pair of drivers from Peru. A crowd of 41,921 watched as Johnny Beauchamp appeared to edge Lee Petty in a photo finish, capping a 3 hour, 41 minute, caution-free event. Officials reviewed still photos and newsreel footage, and declared Lee Petty the official winner more than two days later.

Even the drivers recognized that they were taking part in something historic, that their sport was entering a new era. As the 50th edition of the Daytona 500 prepares to go green on Sunday, that inaugural event 49 years ago seems archaic by comparison -- the cars were so slow (the pole speed was 140 mph), the crowd was so relatively small, the facilities were almost nonexistent, spectator parking was a jumbled mess. But it also nurtured the craze for racing that had gripped Daytona Beach since the old speed trials on Ormond Beach. It gave its host city a national identity. And it provided a fledgling racing series with a grand stage and a marquee event.

"It made Daytona Beach," said Harold Cardwell, a historian and author who served as a medic during the hugely popular races on Daytona's beach-road course. People loved those events, run half on asphalt and half on sand, full of cars skidding around the wide turns, their windshields dappled by sea spray. But the romance belied a more primitive reality, one nearly bereft of facilities or crowd control, where women in skirts could get their legs cut up by the sharp edges of palmetto fronds. Traffic and parking were a nightmare. Among race organizers, there was a real concern of the palmettos and sea oats catching on fire, and spectators being unable to escape the blaze. And then there was the overarching specter of beachfront development, and the racecourse being swallowed up by progress.

France, who had founded NASCAR at Daytona's Streamline Hotel a decade earlier, knew something had to be done. So he commissioned an aging civil engineer named Charles Moneypenney to build a modern racetrack, and the architect traveled to England and France seeking inspiration. France and Daytona Beach city commissioner Dan Warren flew to Boston, Detroit and Chicago to try and raise money for the project. They met owners of professional stick-and-ball teams, consulted with Ford engineers at the manufacturer's proving grounds, tried to wrangle every idea and every dollar they could.

Daytona International Speedway

Workers construct the wall along the high banks.

They built it west of town, on a tract of scrub ringing a cypress swamp. Moneypenney had the swamp dug up to provide dirt for the 31-degree corner banking, and the resulting hole filled with water and later became Lake Lloyd. The orientation of an adjacent airport runway precluded construction of a true oval, so a tri-oval configuration was used. A Daytona racer and future 500 winner named Marvin Panch remembers watching the track being paved, and the paving machines tethered by cables to bulldozers, to prevent them from sliding down the banking.

"It was absolutely just awesome," said Johnson, who would go on to win the second Daytona 500 in 1960. "You couldn't imagine what it felt like going around that racetrack at the speeds we were running and the capabilities of what the cars could do. The racetrack was a big advancement for anybody that had ever raced prior to that, because there was nothing even comparable to it."

A few drivers living in the Daytona Beach area, men like Roberts, Marshall Teague and Smokey Yunick, took some laps around the new track after it was completed in an attempt to generate publicity for the inaugural event. But there was no organized test session, and most of the drivers in that first Daytona 500 never saw the track until they showed up to race.

"We come through the tunnel, and there was nothing in the infield. I think there might have been one little inspection building, and that was it," said Richard Petty, who has won the 500 a record seven times. "We inspected the cars and stuff out on the grass. And then it rained a couple of days, and we had to wade in. The cars were actually sitting in water, because that was a swamp to begin with. But for a 21-year-old kid, it wasn't nothing new. The whole world was new to me, so it wasn't any different than anything else."

Daytona International Speedway

Installation of the Turn 4 tunnel.

The drivers in that inaugural starting field were an eclectic mix. Two-time Olympic bobsledder Bob Said, father of current racer Boris, was there to make what would become his only NASCAR start. Dick Foley was a Canadian who made all seven of his career NASCAR starts on either the beach-road course or the Big D. Then there were the Peruvians, Raul Cilloniz and Eduardo Dibos "Chachi" Chappuis, the latter of whom went on to become the mayor of Lima. The reason for the foreign drivers? France splurged on sanctioning from the FIA -- the governing body of Formula One -- which has been in effect ever since.

For the drivers, the track was a great unknown. Of the 44 events on the 1959 NASCAR schedule, only eight took place on facilities a mile or longer -- two at Atlanta, one at Trenton, one at Sacramento, one at Darlington and three (including a qualifying event) at Daytona. Prior to that, the biggest track on the circuit had been Darlington, at 1.375 miles around. The top speed there was about 110 mph, about 30 slower than those generated at Daytona. Drivers were so accustomed to racing on shorter tracks, Petty remembered, that they almost had to re-learn everything to compete at Daytona. "This is one big quarter-mile," Panch remembers drivers quipping to one another.

"You watch the first race, daddy and Beauchamp are passing each other every other lap instead of one of them sitting down and figuring out what was going on," Petty said, "because that was the way they'd always run."

Lee Petty, 1959 Daytona 500 winner

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Lee Petty perhaps put it best: "We were all rookies," he said after that inaugural event. Then there were the mysterious movements of the air. Drafting, such an essential practice in NASCAR today, was an unknown until those racers took to the high banks for the first time. Even then, they didn't completely understand why their cars were behaving like they were. Over time, they figured it out. Almost every one of those early Daytona 500 participants has a story as to how.

• Petty: "I learned in the first race that I could get back and get a running start and pass somebody. I had no idea whether I had more horsepower than they had, I didn't even think about the wind part, as far as the aero deal. That came a little at a time. I learned a little something, somebody else learned a little something, he learned something, and then we all got to talking about it. I think when we first started, they called it sucking up. They thought, this don't sound good, we need to get another word for it. So they came up with drafting."

• Johnson: "I was on the racetrack running wide open and Cotton Owens came by in a Pontiac. He was fast enough to just go right on by me. When he went by, I ducked in behind him. About a half a mile from there, I was running all over him and I wasn't even half throttle. I said, hey, I don't understand this. My car can't keep up with him, but I can run all over him when I'm behind him. I kept thinking about it and trying to figure out what was going on. I finally figured out that I was running in his dead air space, so it didn't take as much for me to run as fast as he did."

• Panch: "You just had to get used to the wind going down the backstretch. The wind would move you over a lane. You learned in a hurry not to correct it, just to guide it back. It was more like flying an airplane than it was like driving a racecar, I do remember that much about it. The main thing was, we had to keep it straight. Remember, we didn't have spoilers, so we had to keep them straight to get through the air. We figured if we had the front ends low and the back ends up in the air, we'd go through the air better. Evidently we did, but it made the cars, awful, awful loose."

If anyone was frightened or intimidated, they didn't let on. Talk to the old racers today, and you get an overwhelming sense of how excited they were to be tackling new territory, how amazed they were that they could race on those high banks and not fall off. Men now in their 70s and 80s talk with downright giddiness about the sheer pleasure of going so much faster than they ever thought they could. As the years went on, the cars got better, the drivers got smarter, and the speeds got quicker. But it all started out there a half-century ago on the sparse west side of town just off Volusia Avenue, a street known as International Speedway Boulevard today.