Heartbreak, triumph vivid for HOF nominee Moore

Only a handful of men currently alive can say with certainly that they were there at NASCAR's birth. One of those was Spartanburg, S.C., native Bud Moore. As one of the top mechanics in the sport, he won championships with Buck Baker. As a full-time car owner, he won championships with Joe Weatherly. He was a guiding force in the early careers of Darrell Waltrip and Dale Earnhardt. After tragedy struck his team twice within a 12-month period, Moore assisted NASCAR with several key safety initiatives that remain in place today. Over a 37-year span as car owner, Moore won 63 races and his cars finished in the top 10 nearly half of the time.

Hall of Fame bio

A decorated World War II infantryman, Bud Moore became a successful Cup Series car owner almost immediately upon fielding a team in 1961.

• Complete story

Q: How did you get started in racing?

Moore: Well, that's a pretty long story. I really got started in late 1946, early 1947. Myself and Cotton Owens were in Spartanburg. Cotton built him a modified car to start with and started running it, and me and Joe Eubanks got together and we built one. So we started running the modifieds, the flat-head Fords.

I was doing more of the mechanicing, Joe Eubanks was doing more of the driving. I tried to drive but I knocked too many fences down. Anyway, that's how we got started. We won quite a few races and Cotton Owens won quite a few. All the modifieds run together: the Flock brothers and Jack Smith, you name them, all of them were running back then. We'd run a race in Columbia, S.C. on Thursday night, run Charlotte Fairgrounds on Friday night and we'd run Lakewood in Atlanta or we'd run Asheville- Weaverville or Augusta on Sunday. So we'd run three races a week.

I do remember the latter part of '47, or early part of '48, we won 13 Thursday nights in a row in Columbia. During the time, we won something like 20 of 22 races at Columbia.

Q: At what point did you decide to move up into Grand National?

Moore: We sort of got the idea after Bill France formed NASCAR. We helped get the thing rolling. Also, when they ran the first Grand National race in 1949, we started looking into it. We started running some in a '49 Ford. Then we started running a 1950 Oldsmobile when they came out, the Oldsmobile 88. We ran the first race they ran in Darlington in 1950. I think we finished 14th.

I was part-owner and chief mechanic. I was better at being a mechanic than being a driver, I'll put it that way.

Q: Some of your greatest success as a chief mechanic came in the latter part of that decade, didn't it?

Moore: Me and Joe Eubanks, we ran Fords together. I was a chief mechanic on Buck Baker's car in 1957 and also Speedy Thompson's car. Baker won the championship in '57 and Thompson won Darlington in '57. We had a lot of success that year and I was voted mechanic of the year in 1958.

Back in '56, we were running the '55 Ford and we were out in Chattanooga, Tenn. -- a mile dirt track. Pete DePaolo had four '56 Fords out there and he had all these drivers driving them. But they didn't have the right kind of screens on them to keep the dirt out of the radiator. And almost any of them didn't finish. We ran second or third in that race, and DePaolo knew we were racers so he gave us two of those '56 Fords they had out there. We brought them back and started running them.

In '58, we ran the Chevrolet. That's when the 348 engine came out and we had quite a bit of trouble with it at first, but we got it figured out. Me and Jack Smith teamed up in 1959 and we ran a '59 Chevrolet. Also, we left Chevrolet in 1959 and got a 1960 model Pontiac. We won quite a few races and set a world record on July 4 at Daytona when we won the 250-mile race and averaged 146 mph.

That's how it all got started.

Q: What was your relationship with Joe Weatherly like?

Moore: We had a good relationship. We won two championships with him and don't remember how many races, but there were quite a few. We lost him in Riverside, Calif., because of a brake problem. He was always called the clown prince of racing. He was always pulling some sort of stunt on somebody and carrying on a lot of foolishness. But he was a heck of a race driver.

Q: How difficult was it to lose Joe Weatherly and Billy Wade in accidents so close together?

Moore: We lost Joe Weatherly at Riverside because Ford had come out with some new brakes and we sent the car out to Bill Stroppe and the Mercury people. I sent the car out there and they put the new brake system. At Riverside, we'd have to stop and adjust the brakes on it because it would wear them down and they wouldn't have any brakes. So we'd come into the pits and adjust them. Anyway, Ford came out with a deal where they had automatic adjusters on them. As they wore, they'd adjust the brake.

Vote now!

Fans are invited to participate in voting for up to five nominees to be inducted into the NASCAR Hall of Fame as the 2010 inaugural class.

• Hall of Fame voting

About the Hall

The Hall of Fame will bring NASCAR's history to life and preserves that history in the appropriate environments. The facility will allow fans to have the opportunity to relive the sport's greatest moments.

• More on the Hall of Fame

We started the race and ran three, four, five laps and they had a big wreck in the first turn, about 15-20 cars piled up. We had lost second gear in the transmission and the Ford engineer said, "Let's change the transmission." I said there was no need, we'd get too far down. So they had the red flag out, cleaning up the track. We ended up putting in a new transmission and was only two laps down when the race restarted.

Weatherly was running the daylights out of it and he wore the brakes out finally. It didn't have the safely lock on the wheel so it blew the right front going into Turn 5, a 60 mph corner, a hard right and his car went into the wall. He never wore a shoulder harness. I don't know, he just wouldn't wear them. I don't know if that would have helped or not but we lost him out there.

Billy Wade, we were running tire tests for Goodyear at Daytona and we'd run four sets of tires, five laps each. We were running construction tests. We were going to send him back out to run 10 laps on each one of them after we had lunch. He went out and came around on the tenth lap, we gave him the one lap to go, he went down into Turn 1 and hit that bump going in there, blew the right front and hit the wall head-on.

Q: What are your thoughts about how safety has evolved in NASCAR since then?

Moore: As you know, we made a lot of changes in the cars and helped NASCAR with the changes. When we lost Billy Wade at Daytona, we found out the shoulder harness jerked the seat belt up on him. So we were the ones to come up with the jockey strap (five-point harness). That's the one underneath the seat that comes up between the driver's legs and attaches to the seat belt to keep the shoulder harness from jerking the seat belt.

We came up with the window net because of Weatherly at Riverside. There were a lot of safety features we helped NASCAR come up with. Right now, I've looked at the cars and everything they've got now. And that Car of Tomorrow, with the seat and the way everything is and all the safety features they have in it, if they hadn't had some of the safety features they've got right now, I think there'd have been a lot more drivers hurt.

Q: You always seemed to be such a good judge of driver talent, especially young drivers. You ended up with Darrell Waltrip and Dale Earnhardt early in their careers?

Moore: Back then, you had to run whatever you could and get sponsorship whenever you could. I had Melling Tools with Benny Parsons in 1980, and Wrangler came to me and wanted me to take over Earnhardt. We ran Wrangler Jeans. It's just the situation where the sponsorship came around so you could go racing.

Back in the '60s, Ford helped us out when we were running the Mercurys. It wasn't that much, but it was enough to go racing. Anyway, in 1970, the car companies pulled out of racing and that left us sort of holding the bag. Back then, when all the sportswriters were writing about it and talking on the radio, they didn't talk too much about the driver. They talked about the model of car; Chevrolet, Ford, Plymouth or Dodge. The manufacturers got a lot of advertisement that way.

When they pulled out, France sort of changed things around. Instead of advertising the cars, he started talking about the drivers. That's when they started doing all the promotion with the drivers. Anyway, Bill France was a heck of a promoter. He knew how to do things and get people going and all this, getting people coming to the racetrack. He done a heck of a good job. Bill Jr. done a heck of a good job, too.

Q: If you could select the first five members of the NASCAR Hall of Fame, who would they be?

Moore: Well, you've got to go back to the ones who helped start NASCAR. I know one that's not in the top 25 and I don't know why, and that's Cotton Owens. He should have been in the top 25 to be voted on. I think there's only three of us still living who were there at the start in 1947. That's me, Cotton Owens and Raymond Parks, out of Atlanta.

I think Raymond Parks should be one of them that goes in. I think the Frances should go in, both of them. I think the Frances should be automatically in and they should vote for five others. That's the way I look at it.

Q: What was your greatest thrill in racing?

Moore: Being put in the Hall of Fame at Talladega this past April was one of biggest deals that's come along. That was a real big deal for me. I'm looking forward if I get voted into the NASCAR Hall of Fame in Charlotte. That's going to be another big, big deal for me. I think that'll put me in all of them then. It's a great honor to know everybody is pulling for you, over the 50 years, all the races we won and the championships. I think it's a great deal, as far as I'm concerned.

Also
• Glen Wood looks back on legendary career