Financial gamble pays off for 'greatest driver alive' (cont'd)

Trying to keep NASCAR officials -- and creditors -- from panicking, Turner and Smith asked for permission to move their race date to June 19. In the meantime, one of the grading contractors, W. Owen Flowe, claimed Turner owed him an additional $74,000 and parked his equipment blocking the unpaved backstretch, telling several of his employees to stand guard overnight.

That didn't sit well with Turner. According to a report in the Charlotte Observer, the track president took matters into his own hands. He and another track employee, armed with a shotgun and a revolver, held the grading employees at gunpoint while the equipment was pushed out of the way.

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"Mr. Flowe threatened to cut a hole in the track if he didn't get money," Turner said. "After all the labor we've put into this thing, we weren't going to watch somebody tear it up."

When Cabarrus County deputies were called in, they politely replied that the dispute was on private property, and as owner, Turner had the right to do as he pleased. And the final paving work was completed without further incident.

However, because the job was so rushed, the asphalt didn't have time to cure properly. "I ran trucks over it six hours to pack it," Turner admitted. "What I should have done was cool it with water."

And as soon as cars got up to speed, with Fireball Roberts turning a lap at over 134 mph, the track began to come apart, all the way down to the gravel foundation. There were four foxhole-sized craters in the middle of the second turn, and at least eight gaps in the pavement in Turns 3 and 4, resulting in multiple cars suffering major windshield damage from flying rocks and debris.

One driver was quoted as saying "it's like riding over a plowed field with a little topsoil sprinkled on top of the furrows."

There were real concerns in the garage area that the race wouldn't go 600 miles with 60 cars on the track. Mechanics started devising unique solutions, including covering the windshields and grill with heavy wire mesh screens and putting mudflaps on the rear tires in an effort to keep the debris at a minimum.

"Each car looked like a chicken coop was in front of it," said Concord Tribute sportswriter Bill Kiser.

Turner had crews hastily repair the potholes, NASCAR officials gave the go-ahead, and a field of 60 cars in three-wide rows, led by pole-sitter Fireball Roberts, took the green flag in front of a crowd announced at 78,000 -- later revised to a paid attendance of 35,462, showing that promoters have been "sweetening the deal" for years.

SI cover: Feb. 26, 1968

“

One day I was driving down the road and just decided to build a race track. I hadn't planned it or anything. I had the piece of ground where the track is today, so I built it.

”

CURTIS TURNER

Not surprisingly, the race itself was a test of endurance and tenacity. Roberts led the first 65 laps but his Pontiac threw a wheel after running over debris, causing him to crash on Lap 191. Turner, who qualified third on his own track, was in the lead when his Ford suffered catastrophic engine issues. Tom Pistone then took over, but suffered a broken axle from the continuous pounding.

"I'm not blaming Curtis Turner," Pistone said. "He tried to get it ready. I don't like to run [down] the track but they should stop it. The things that are happening today -- ball-joint suspensions giving way, front and rear wheel bearing collapsing, differentials and axles breaking -- those things are caused by track conditions."

But the biggest heartbreak of the day went to Jack Smith, who led nearly half of the race. He held a five-lap lead over the field with 47 laps remaining when a piece of debris bounced up and punctured his gas tank. "The hole was this big," Smith said, pointing to his fist.

Chattanooga native Joe Lee Johnson, who started 20th and ran a conservative pace all day in an effort to make it to the finish line, suddenly found himself in the lead with a four-lap cushion over Johnny Beauchamp. He cruised, literally, to the win from that point as only 24 cars were still on the track at the checkered.

"I just raced my car and the track," Johnson said. "I always take one pace and stay with it. I stay in the groove and never change my pattern."

When did he think he had a chance to win.

"When I first saw my name go up on the scoreboard," he said. "Until I saw Jack Smith so out, I'd just been running smoothly and was hoping for a break. That was it."

In a post-race interview, owner Paul McDuffie said the car was set up for distance, not speed.

"It couldn't have [run a lap] over 124 miles per hour, for that's what we had the car geared for," McDuffie said. "It was geared to run at its best when the track got bad late in the race, and that's what it did."

The rest of the top five included Bobby Johns, and the father-son duo of Richard and Lee Petty. However, the Pettys, along with four other drivers, were disqualified several days later for cutting across the dirt infield -- Turner hadn't had time to do any landscaping -- after originally missing the pit entrance. Lee Petty said he did it after spinning to miss Junior Johnson's crash that took out a section of the frontstretch guardrail.

"With all the dust swirling around, I couldn't see," Petty said. "When I finally opened my eyes, I had stopped right in my pit area. That was a stroke of luck, or so I thought. ...

"It was three, four, maybe five days later when NASCAR told me I had been disqualified. Really, what was I supposed to do, having spun out like that? I told NASCAR that if they were going to take my points and my money away, I might as well go back to chopping wood for a living."

The race was a success, but the speedway went into receivership in 1960. In an effort to repay shareholders, Turner approached the Teamsters Union for a loan in exchange for the opportunity to organize a driver's union. Bill France caught wind of the idea and banned Turner for life in 1961. Shortly thereafter, speedway directors then ousted him as president and took over control of the track.

Turner was reinstated by France in 1965, but the magic was gone. He won just once more: for the Wood Brothers at Rockingham at the end of the 1965 season. In 1968, Charlotte Motor Speedway officials paid off the mortgage in full, just a few months before Turner finished ninth in the 1968 World 600 on the track he created.

Two years later, on Oct. 4, 1970, Turner was killed in the crash of his private plane near Punxsutawney, Pa.