Posted on by Nate Ryan

Shortly after waving the green flag on the April 4, 1971 Cup Series race at Atlanta International Raceway, Jimmy Carter made his passion for NASCAR abundantly clear.

This was no transactional photo op for a U.S. presidential candidate visiting a race track.

“I’m really proud to be back here; it’s been one of the favorite sports of my life,” Carter told the Universal Racing Network during the race broadcast. “My wife and I have been racing fans for more than 25 years and just to see this sport develop into a worldwide effort where the race car drivers are becoming worldwide heroes is really thrilling to me.

“I’m very glad to see the Atlanta Raceway recuperate from those first long numbers of years with too much rain. … This is a kind of race day that’s exciting for fans all over the world.”

President Carter died at 100 on Dec. 29 as the oldest living ex-president in history, sparking a torrent of conversation dissecting whether the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize winner did more after leaving office or during his single term as the leader of the free world in the late 1970s.

But there’s no doubt Carter was the most NASCAR-friendly U.S. president in history — a legacy cemented years before he occupied the White House.

As Georgia governor from 1971-75, he hosted three NASCAR dinners when drivers, team owners, officials and media were in town for Cup races at the speedway south of Atlanta. After attending the driver meeting for the March 29, 1970 race, Carter said he told his wife, Rosalynn, that “if I am elected, I’m going to have those guys out to the mansion the first time I get a chance.”

Just a few months after assuming the Peach State’s highest office, Carter feted a group of 26 drivers at the governor’s mansion in Atlanta and spent time regaling two of the top three qualifiers at the speedway earlier in the day — seven-time Cup champion Richard Petty and four-time Indianapolis 500 winner A.J. Foyt (who won from the pole position three days later for one of his seven Cup victories).

NASCAR car owner Bud Moore chats with Jimmy Carter during one of Carter’s many visits to what is now Atlanta Motor Speedway. (Getty Images)

“You two have been my heroes for more than 10 years,” Carter told Foyt and Petty, according to an April 2, 1971 story in the Atlanta Constitution. “This is the greatest honor I have had since I got into politics.”

Carter traced his love of racing to attending dirt tracks in North Carolina and Virginia. After the 1.54-mile oval in Hampton, Georgia, opened in 1960, he was a track fixture — though a story that he was a ticket vendor seems apocryphal. In an interview with NASCAR Productions for the 2015 documentary “The Perfect Storm” (about the 1979 Daytona 500), Carter didn’t recall working at Atlanta Motor Speedway but had fond memories of several races there — as did the drivers who had met him.

With NASCAR still primarily a regional entity, President Carter’s Southern roots and rural upbringing resonated with a cadre of blue-collar stars who raved about a former peanut farmer born in a home without running water or electricity. Carter’s faith-driven and humble authenticity left a mark with many NASCAR Hall of Famers.

Before the March 21, 1976 race at Atlanta, longtime NASCAR journalist George Cunningham conducted a presidential straw poll of nine stars in the 36-car field. Five said they planned to vote for Carter if he became the Democratic nominee (three split their votes between Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan and George Wallace, and a fourth abstained).

No one stumped harder for Carter than three-time Cup champion Cale Yarborough, who was a part-time politician himself. After becoming the first Republican since Reconstruction elected to the Florence County council, he was re-elected as a Democrat in 1976 — switching parties because of his fervent support for Carter.

“If I’m going to work for him, I should be in the same party,” Yarborough told Cunningham. “Carter is the best man, and I believe he will be elected. He’s turned on 90 percent of the country’s big news media already.”

Buddy Baker also was smitten. “One thing for sure, we don’t need any cowboy actors in the White House,” Baker said in a reference to Reagan (who would beat Carter for the presidency in 1980). “I’m for Carter because he seems conscientious and a good person. That’s about all you can judge by because they all sound alike. Besides, it’s nice to be able to say you had dinner with a president.”

Junior Johnson appreciated Carter as a Washington outsider with practicable sensibility. “Ain’t a lot of people got a hold of that man yet, and I haven’t seen him promising anybody anything,” Johnson told Cunningham before the 1976 race.

But Carter made good on a famous campaign promise he made later that weekend in the drivers meeting — celebrating stock car racing in the nation’s capitol.

NASCAR received a triumphant White House welcome Sept. 13, 1978, with a buffet dinner on the South Lawn. A delegation including Yarborough, David Pearson, Benny Parsons, Bill France Sr. and Bill France Jr. was hosted by the First Lady, who served roast beef, ham and cornbread. Willie Nelson entertained a raucous crowd with a rollicking set of “Whiskey River,” “Crazy,” “Amazing Grace,” “Georgia” and “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain.”

Jimmy Carter missed the gala because he was preoccupied with the biggest accomplishment for world peace during his presidency — brokering the Camp David Accords between Egypt and Israel.

He still delivered a tremendous boost to NASCAR’s profile — just five months before the sport got another jolt of mainstream electricity with the epochal 1979 Daytona 500.

“Jimmy told us if he ever got to be president, we would share in some of the glory,” Pearson told Atlanta columnist Lewis Grizzard at the Washington, D.C., extravaganza. “Here we are.”

Nate Ryan has written about NASCAR since 1996 while working at the San Bernardino Sun, Richmond Times-Dispatch, USA TODAY and for the past 10 years at NBC Sports Digital. He is the host of the NASCAR on NBC Podcast and also has covered various other motorsports, including the IndyCar and IMSA series.

President Jimmy Carter and first lady Rosalyn Carter invited NASCAR stars as guests to the White House in 1978. While Carter was called away on business, pictured are Cale Yarborough, First Lady Rosalyn Carter, David Pearson, Benny Parsons and Bud Moore. (Getty Images)
Posted on by Zack Albert

William Byron headed to the Championship 4 round of the NASCAR Cup Series Playoffs for a second consecutive year in 2024. He made that return trip with Rudy Fugle, a veteran crew chief who’s been a steady companion for some of his most successful stretches — including the last four seasons with Hendrick Motorsports’ No. 24 Chevrolet team.

Byron and Fugle head to Year 5 of their partnership with aspirations of returning to the Cup Series’ title fray at Phoenix Raceway next November, potentially adding more keystone victories along the way. The 27-year-old driver added a big catch in 2024 as the Daytona 500 champion, tacking on two more regular-season wins to clinch safe passage into the playoffs.

RELATED: Season reviews for 2024 | Byron through the years

The bonds between Byron and Fugle were formed in the driver’s breakout 2016 season in the Craftsman Truck Series, where the two guided a Kyle Busch Motorsports entry to seven wins, falling just shy of a Champ 4 spot. The two were reunited at the Cup Series level in 2021, and the No. 24 team has barely slowed since, building on their mutual reliance.

“Just trust, confidence, knowledge, work ethic — there’s a lot of different things that are important, key pillars to a relationship like that. So yeah, I feel like he’s done a great job over the years,” Byron said Nov. 22, noting the span of Fugle’s Cup Series tenure. “I mean, he’s getting a lot of experience at this. So yeah, I’m just thankful to have him as a crew chief. It’s a tremendous commitment, and he does it really well.”

Their momentum was not enough to seal a first Cup Series crown for Byron this season, as eventual champ Joey Logano led a convincing Team Penske 1-2 finish in the finale. A reporter planted the notion at the NASCAR Awards that perhaps Fugle had taken the loss harder than Byron after the team’s third-place result in the final standings, given their post-race demeanors. That suggestion prompted Byron to respond with “maybe.”

“I mean, I think he just puts a lot into it, and our roles are different and he wears his emotions on his sleeve, and I love that about him,” Byron added. “So yeah, we’re in a good place. All of our postseason meetings and talks about Phoenix are in a great spot, and we’re ready to go next year. So we have a lot of goals to achieve next year and I feel like he’s in a good place. But yeah, emotions are raw right after the race and sometimes in the car, it’s a little bit different picture than what they see. So yeah, I think it was just kind of real for him.”

About Phoenix, then. The relatively low-banked 1-mile track that will again host the championship race next year has received offseason notes of emphasis by Byron and his Hendrick Motorsports teammates as an area where the organization could use improvement. Similar-length tracks at New Hampshire and Gateway fall under the same heading.

MORE: Power Rankings: 2025 preview | By the Numbers: Cup Series 2024

Understandably selfishly, Byron says he wants performance enrichment across the board for 2025, weighing both the good with the bad from last season. Despite the three victories, his laps-led total for the season (357) was the lowest of the four-year Byron-Fugle era. In positive contrast, Byron ended the year with seven straight top-six finishes in one of the circuit’s most consistent postseason runs.

“I think it was a good year. I’d like to have more speed next year and just lead more laps,” Byron said. “I think a lot of that’s in my control and our team’s control, and I think we can work on that in the offseason, just kind of getting a little bit better at certain tracks. Definitely Phoenix is high on that list. We’ve got a lot of room to improve there. I thought our potential was a little bit better this year compared to last year, honestly, but yeah, we just need to keep working on those tracks and then just lead more laps, and I think there’s a few different ways you do that. So we were really good down the stretch. I mean, the last seven weeks, all top six. So I think that was really, really strong and hard to do, so just need to work on a couple of little things.”

When Byron kicks off the new campaign, he’ll have a near-omnipresent reminder of last year’s successes, striding back into Daytona International Speedway as the defending Daytona 500 champ. He said that among his goals for 2025 is adding more prestigious wins to his career tally — specifically mentioning the Brickyard 400 at Indianapolis and the Coca-Cola 600 in his hometown of Charlotte.

He’s held a nearly yearlong reign as the winner of the “Great American Race,” but Byron said the magnitude of the achievement is just now beginning to take hold.

“It’s pretty awesome,” said Byron, who will aim to become the 500’s first back-to-back winner since Denny Hamlin (2019-20). “I mean, I think a lot of people asked me that throughout the spring and the summer, and I didn’t really know how to answer, because I was still trying to achieve the championship and everything like that, just week to week. So yeah, I’ve reflected on it a little bit more now, and it’s awesome for our team. It’s a huge accomplishment, and hopefully we can get more of those crown-jewel wins. That would be my goal.”