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A landmark meeting that set the foundation for major-league stock car racing is getting a well-deserved toast on the occasion of its 70th anniversary.
The sport’s officials and dignitaries will meet again Thursday in Daytona Beach to celebrate the Dec. 14, 1947 gathering, the first in a series of meetings that formed the National Association of Stock Car Auto Racing.
The festivities will take place at the Streamline Hotel, site of those initial meetings 70 years ago. The art-deco building, which opened just steps from Daytona’s shores in 1940, has been newly renovated with a focus on maintaining its historic importance as NASCAR’s birthplace.
The northern Florida beachfront had long been a site for automotive derring-do and land-speed records before stock car racing’s early growth. Sensing a need to organize and develop a rules structure and standards for promotion, Bill France Sr. and other prominent figures in the sport kicked off a three-day meeting with the intent of creating a sanctioning body.
Those talks ended Feb. 21, 1948 with the founding of NASCAR.
