Trailblazer becomes first African-American inducted into NASCAR Hall
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CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Wendell Scott often broadcast his do-it-yourself work ethic on his cars, which frequently sported hand-painted letters to read: “Mechanic: Me!” Though Scott’s automotive know-how was largely self-made, he usually had an audience of his seven children watching, begging to help the family cause within their Danville, Virginia shop.
Scott would often shoo his kids out, telling them to go play elsewhere. But for young Deborah Scott, she yearned to be in her father’s racing shop just a little while longer.
“I loved it when he would be on the creeper under the car working and he needed a tool,” she recalled. “… It grew on me. I started liking to get dirty.”
Now married as Deborah Scott Davis, 64, she was part of a vocal contingent of friends and family with Danville ties witnessing her father’s induction Friday evening as part of the 2015 class of the NASCAR Hall of Fame. On a night filled with stories pulled from NASCAR lore, Davis’ remembrances from her youth stood out.
As she joined her siblings to receive a proclamation from the town’s mayor late Friday night, her brother Frank remarked that Davis deserved credit as likely the best mechanic of the bunch. His comment came without exaggeration — Davis transferred a lifetime of automotive knowledge handed down from her father into a long career building cars for Ford Motor Company, first at an assembly plant in the Atlanta area and now near her Louisville, Kentucky home.
Davis still has fond memories of those days growing up, watching her father do more with less. And like her father, who died in 1990, she shouldered many responsibilities for the family-run race team, helping as a mechanic’s assistant, the team’s scorekeeper and — when she was old enough to get her driver’s license — a parts runner.
Davis said some of the most gratifying help she offered the family racing effort was as the official scorekeeper, back in the old-school days before electronic timing and scoring was even a dream. Back then, one person with a score sheet was assigned to each car. Each score sheet had a number of small boxes for each lap, and the scorekeeper dutifully marked the time from the scorer’s clock in each numbered box whenever their car came past.
By Davis’ estimation, she only missed one lap in her time as scorekeeper, which ended only when she left for college. That lap was early in the 1964 World 600 at Charlotte Motor Speedway, when a multi-car crash triggered a massive fire that eventually claimed the life of Fireball Roberts, a fellow member of the NASCAR Hall of Fame.
Scoring Roberts’ car that day was his daughter, Pamela, who Davis — also a teenager at the time — counted among her best friends.
“We sat there and were watching our fathers, and her dad didn’t come around,” Davis recalled, “and we saw this black, rolling smoke behind us and when we turned back to look on the backstretch, I missed my dad going by. Her dad couldn’t come by.”
Because events on the larger speedways of the era used backup scorers, Scott’s missed lap was restored and he remained credited with a ninth-place finish.
“I didn’t cost him any positions or any money,” Davis said, “but that was one of the incidents where I promised never, no matter what happened, I would keep my attention.”
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Davis said the children wouldn’t travel to every race, mostly to those close enough to the family’s home and on dates that wouldn’t interfere with their school work. That’s why, she said, none of them were present when Scott posted his only victory in NASCAR’s top division on a school night — Sunday, Dec. 1, 1963 at Speedway Park in Jacksonville, Florida.
“Of course, we all wish we had been,” Davis said. “Of all the races, we weren’t there.”
When Scott came home as a winner, he received a warm welcome. But the politics of the time wouldn’t allow an African-American driver a celebration with the checkered flag or the trophy queen, tempering the family’s excitement. Scott was eventually credited with completing 202 laps in the scheduled 200-lap race, but that achievement wasn’t recognized on that Sunday night in Jacksonville.
“Mixed emotions because here it was, he had won, but not in the right honorable way that he should’ve been able to celebrate because as you know, he knew he was winning the race,” Davis said. “He knew when he took the lead and how many more laps there were to go and as history tells it now, correctly, yes, he did go two laps extra to win the race and still not receive the honor at that time.”
Race officials initially credited runner-up Buck Baker with the victory, claiming that a scoring error had taken place. If Davis had been there, she said, there would have been no dispute.
“They couldn’t have gotten around me,” she said. “I really don’t believe they could have gotten around me.”
Davis’ expertise with a wrench extended beyond helping on the race car. Frank Scott recalled a trip to Michigan International Speedway in the 1960s, traveling with his father, his sister and brother Wendell Jr. — four of them on the single bench seat — when the truck hauling the race car broke down.
Wendell Sr. and Jr. hitchhiked to the nearest township to get parts, leaving Frank and his sister to prepare the engine for the repairs.
“Daddy said to have the motor torn down by the time he got back,” Frank Scott said. “Deborah got up under the hood, and I was breaking the bolts to loosen them and she would take them out. She was like a little grease monkey, and that kind of led her into her adult life when she joined the automotive division working for Ford in Atlanta. Even right then, she started cutting her teeth. She had a mechanical instinct and didn’t mind getting grease up under her nails.”
Friday night in Charlotte, the Scott family had the largest delegation of supporters of any of the five inductees, with Frank Scott estimating the number to be “in excess of 100” and from all over the country. For Deborah Scott Davis, the wait to hear her father’s name called was a long time coming, but one made all the more satisfying because her mother, Mary, who could not attend the induction because of her health, was able to hear it as well.
“Deservingly so,” Davis said. “I think the time aspect, I think our friends and some of the fans didn’t understand why he wouldn’t be in the first class, the second class — I’m OK with the timing of it. Just in the nick of time, I feel like, while our mom is still here. Couldn’t have happened in a better year.
“When the announcement was made, it just automatically lifted me out of the chair. Yes, finally — whew! Years before, you can’t be but so sad. At least he’s nominated, at least he’s getting closer and closer, and then it happened. It means so, so much.”