Shuman, Myers brothers legends in their own right

Since 1957, NASCAR has presented a deserving candidate with the Buddy Shuman Award each fall, most recently at the Myers Brothers luncheon in New York. But not many racing fans know the story behind Buddy Shuman or the Myers brothers.

Louis Greer "Buddy" Shuman was born in Charlotte, N.C., on Sept. 8, 1915. He showed an early aptitude for mechanical things, and reportedly won more than 100 races in the modified division before making his Cup debut at Greenville, S.C., in 1951, finishing 10th. He never ran more than a partial schedule -- and rarely ventured outside of the Southeast.

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One exception came in the summer of 1952, when B.A. Pless hired Shuman to drive his No. 89 Hornet, starting at the dirt mile in Hillsborough, N.C. He finished 17th with an axle failure, but scored an eighth at Charlotte Speedway one week later, which gave the team enough money to take the car north for races at the Michigan State Fairgrounds, followed by a race in Canada three days later.

Starting 34th in a field of 47 cars in NASCAR's second and last trip to the Motor City, Shuman steadily worked his way through traffic and stayed on the lead lap, trailing only Tim Flock when the checkered flag fell. So momentum was on his side when the circuit visited the half-mile Stamford Park dirt oval in Niagara Falls, just across the Canadian border.

Shuman started sixth out of 17 cars, and when Flock crashed and Dick Rathman suffered an engine failure, Shuman assumed the lead and never looked back. He beat Herb Thomas by two laps, as only three cars were running at the end of the race.

But Shuman's major contribution to the sport came as NASCAR's chief technical inspector. It was his job to police the garage area in a time when stock cars were expected to use stock parts. That wasn't always the case, according to Smokey Yunick, who wrote more than two decades ago that he had his share of run-ins with Shuman, who more than once declared Yunick's cars to be "outside the spirit of the rules."

At the time, NASCAR inspectors had parts catalog books for each of the major manufacturers, and their main task was to match part numbers with the ones in the catalog. It didn't take long for Shuman to realize that mechanics were modifying parts and then stamping or engraving the correct part number on the illegal ones.

"Staying on top of all that must have been a terrible, impossible job," Yunick wrote. "Buddy was far from dumb, and sometimes, after he belatedly found out somebody had slipped something past him, he'd get mad and decided to crack down."

One of those times came in the 1954 Southern 500, when Shuman hired a camshaft expert to inspect Yunick's work. The camshaft somehow passed inspection -- which surprised Yunick, who had hand-ground it -- but Shuman declared that the engine block had been modified and wouldn't let Yunick's car compete.

Former track owner Bob Bahre won the 2008 Buddy Shuman Award.

Bob Bahre, long a champion promoter and supporter of stock-car racing in the New England region, collected the Buddy Shuman Award this year.

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By the summer of 1955, Shuman would be hired by Ford's Pete DePaolo to start up their factory-backed team, with Joe Weatherly and Curtis Turner as drivers. The team would make its debut at Darlington -- and win twice that year. But Shuman's life would be cut short on Nov. 13, 1955, when he succumbed to smoke inhalation from a hotel fire in Hickory, N.C.

Billy and Bobby Myers were racing brothers from the Winston-Salem area. Each made their Cup debut at Weaverville, N.C., in 1951. Billy wound up eighth and Bobby 16th. Billy, older by three years, was the 1955 NASCAR Sportsman Division National Champion and scored two victories in 1956, driving for Bill Stoppe's Mercury team. Bobby would only make 15 career starts, but four of those were in the Southern 500.

Bobby Myers had scored a pair of top-10 finishes in 1956, and had landed one of Lee Petty's Oldsmobiles for the 1957 Labor Day race. He qualified well, earning a spot on the front row alongside Cotton Owens -- and grabbed the lead on Lap 14, only to be passed by Turner on the next circuit.

But on Lap 27, Fonty Flock spun on the backstretch and wound up sideways on the track, blocking the entrance to Turn 3. Immediately following Flock and with no chance to take evasive action, the cars of Myers and Paul Goldsmith piled into Flock's machine at full speed. Myers was killed instantly, while Flock and Goldsmith were seriously injured. From his hospital bed, Flock announced his retirement from driving.

Tragedy would strike the Myers family again in April of the next year when Billy suffered a heart attack while behind the wheel of his modified at Bowman-Gray Stadium in Winston-Salem and died before he could be rushed to the hospital.

Bobby's eldest son, Danny "Chocolate" Myers, kept the family tradition alive as Dale Earnhardt's longtime gas man.