Daytona legends recall good ol' days on beach
By
Joe Menzer,
NASCAR.COM February 17, 2007
(Edited) . . . . . amid a bunch of
classic old racecars, was a group of guys who used to work
on and drive them. There was the No. 15 machine of "Wild
Bill" Snowden, the "Florida Hurricane" and a couple of
replicas of cars Fireball Roberts used to race. An old No.
42 Plymouth of Lee Petty was there, too, among others.
Having my own wheels meant I could stay as long as I
pleased. So long after the last bus was loaded and gone, I
sat with the likes of Marvin Panch and Raymond
Parks and Ray Fox and
Dick Fleck
and listened to how it used to be.
"It
was fun, a lot of fun," said Fox, who worked on a number of
cars that won races on Daytona's beaches.
Parks, who is hard of hearing and smiles more than he speaks
these days, had friends with him to interpret what he was
feeling.
"He
used to be Mr. Daytona," one of them said of the former car
owner.
Panch, winner of the 1961 Daytona 500 after the race moved
from the beach to the asphalt, fondly recalled running
ocean-side before the current superspeedway opened, as did
Fleck, who competed mostly in the Modified stock-car
division and said he ran in the last three races ever staged
on the sand.
You
would get sand-blasted, and you couldn't see," Panch said.
"We had tear-offs you could pull off, but that only lasted a
short while. So some of us cut little round holes in the
windshield, so we could reach over and kind of peek out.
Either that or use a marker out of your driver's window."
That didn't always work, however, as Panch readily admitted.
"Johnny Beauchamp had a couple with some children
sitting on a dune going into the North Turn, and he was
using that for his shutoff point," Panch said. "Well,
evidently they needed a Coke or something and they moved
down the beach a little bit. Next time by, he missed the
turn and almost went into downtown Daytona [because he drove
deeper into the turn before braking]."
Downtown Daytona, for the record, was about 10 miles away.
Panch laughed heartily as he told the story, and these guys
who built racing have thousands more.
Fleck is full of them. He said racing on the beach is a part
of NASCAR lore that never should be dismissed or forgotten.
"All I can say, really, is that it was a lot of fun. It was
great fun. It was different," Fleck said.
"When
I came down for the '56 race, I came down with my '35
Plymouth with a Hemi engine. I flat-towed it with a tow bar.
It was quite an experience. We had to schedule our races, of
course, according to the tide -- so we had a little bit of
something to race on. We would let it drift out a little bit
to run in the ocean a little to cool our tires off, so we
could finish the races. Tires weren't engineered like they
are today. Very skinny.
"And what I'm wearing now is what I raced in then. A
short-sleeved shirt, white [thin] pants with a red stripe.
Nothing was fireproofed. Our fireproof was the fire
extinguisher we had in our car. Our ambulance was a hearse
from the local funeral director -- and they only had one. So
when someone got hurt, they tried to take care of him right
there so they didn't have to take it to the hospital. If
they took someone to the hospital, we had to stop the race
until they got back.
"They had a first-aid kit with peroxide and Band-Aids. And
eye wash, they had a lot of eye wash -- because you would
get sand in your eyes. It was very tough to see. And once in
a while you would pop off a seagull, too. It was a bloody
mess when it hit your windshield. There was feathers and
blood floating 'round."
Panch said that he and the other drivers memorized every
inch of the old Daytona beach course, even though they
oftentimes struggled with realizing exactly where they were.
"The biggest problem was not being able to see," he said.
"And when you ran the beach, you always tried to run where
it was kind of wet -- because it was hard. But the corners,
there was no handling. It was like driving through a plowed
field. And then coming down the pavement to get into the
South Turn, there was a hump in the road. We'd bounce over
that hump, and when it landed, we started putting the brake
on. That was our shutoff point. You had to really
concentrate on where you were."
The
common denominator of all the story-tellers was that
old-school racing on the beach was fun -- pure fun. . . . .
. . . . . "We're very proud of the progress the sport is
making," Fleck said. "Of course it's more big business than
it is sport today. It's almost like any sport. Any sport
today is big business. And of course with it being more
about business, it's not as much fun as it used to be."
He said it with a touch of sadness in his eyes. Or maybe it
was sand.
The opinions expressed are solely of the writer.
