With Darlington Raceway ready to toast seven decades of NASCAR racing in this weekend’s throwback festivities, the current exhibit on display at the NASCAR Hall of Fame is especially timely.
The NASCAR Hall’s “1948: Proving Grounds” exhibit shines a deserving spotlight on the first season for the fledgling sanctioning body, a 52-race grind for the Modified Division. The season set the foundation for the Daytona Beach organization and the establishment of the Strictly Stock Division (now the Monster Energy Series) the following year.
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“It’s almost seen as a prelude season or a preamble rather than the first season,” says Kevin Schlesier, the Hall’s exhibits manager. “So we really wanted to plant the flag in the ground historically and academically and say that it is the first NASCAR season and everything that (founder) Bill France and his cohorts were doing sets the tone. …
“The ’48 season was an interesting hodgepodge of them figuring it out, but them also setting the formula for still what works today.”
Flashing back 70 years to those formative years wasn’t an easy task for Schlesier and his team. Cars and other artifacts from the time period are scarce, and record-keeping was unreliable back in stock-car racing’s infancy. “You really have to dig deep into the archives,” Schlesier says, noting how his team mined old newspapers and International Speedway Corporation’s reserves to tell the story of NASCAR’s post-war burst onto a motorsports scene dominated by sprint cars and Indianapolis-style racers.
“It started out as sort of a celebration of the great sport that NASCAR becomes, but then you realize that in the first year, it’s anything but a done deal,” Schlesier says, noting that the racing periodicals of the day often mocked stock-car racing as a regional upstart. “We thought, let’s zero in on that and really do good history, which is 1948 isn’t the first year of a great sport, 1948 is the year where the sport could’ve been great or died instantly, and then what are the different, cross-cutting factors that looked at that.”
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For history buffs, “Proving Grounds” brings that rough-and-tumble period to life, showing NASCAR’s goal of becoming an organizing source of stability in an era of fly-by-night promoters. It also shows the growth of primitive technology with the dominant car of the day — the 1939 Ford — and the hardscrabble tracks that formed the schedule that Bill France Sr. assembled as the series went.
But the newspaper articles — supported by race reports, canceled purse checks and other well-preserved documents — also tell the story of a dynamic, back-and-forth championship battle. Red Byron and Fonty Flock traded the standings lead several times with Byron eventually securing the title. Both became early stars in Strictly Stock competition, with Hall of Famer Byron becoming the premier series’ first champion.
Though relics from 1948 were not easy to come by, several pieces of automotive history help to anchor the exhibit. The Indianapolis Motor Speedway Museum and Hall of Famer Ray Evernham were among the contributors, providing vehicles on loan from their impressive collections.
The exhibit runs through January 2019.
