Lloyd George
"Shorty" Rollins
Born: April 3, 1929 Died:
December 28, 1998
Born: Granbury, Texas
Home: Pensacola, FL
Lloyd
George "Shorty" Rollins nicknamed "Shorty", was the
first official NASCAR Rookie of the Year in 1958. He began stock car
racing in Corpus Christi, Texas. The great success achieved there led
him to Fayetteville, North Carolina and to NASCAR Grand National . His
rookie year 1958, he had 1 win, 12 top five finishes and 22 top ten
finishes in 29 starts with car owner Spook
Crawford. He won the first stock car race at the Daytona
International Speedway, a 100-lap qualifying race in the NASCAR
Convertible Division, which gave him a second place start in the first
Daytona 500 in 1959. He made 43 starts in three professional seasons and
earned $17,018. He left racing in 1960 with just 43 starts and settled
in Pensacola, Florida with his wife Mozelle, where he established
Hurricane Fence Industries. He was a resident of Pensacola until his
death at the age of 69.
Stateline
History
The winner of the Stateline
race, Shorty Rollins, went on the win the 1958 NASCAR Rookie of the Year
title. The following season, Richard Petty earned the outstanding rookie
award. Rollins was from the same hometown, Corpus Christi, TX , as
future NASCAR champions, brothers Terry (1984 and 1996) and Bobby (2000)
Labonte.
The win at Stateline was the
only career Grand National win by Shorty Rollins, but it wasn’t his only
NASCAR win. In 1959, Bill France opened his mammoth, two and a half
mile, high-banked superspeedway at Daytona. The very first competitive
event ever contested at the new facility was a Convertible Division race
on February 20, 1959, two days prior to the inaugural Daytona 500.
Rollins, who had originally registered for the Daytona 500 in the Grand
National Division in his “zipper-top” 1958 Ford, noticed the lack of
cars entered in the Convertible Division race. So he removed the roof
from his Skyliner and reregistered as a Convertible. His decision was a
success as he beat Marvin Panch and Richard Petty to the finish line to
become the answer to one of auto racing’s best trivia questions: “Who
won the first race at the Daytona International Speedway”?
Rollins, Panch, Richard
Petty, and the other Convertibles were also permitted to race in the
inaugural Daytona 500, but the ragtops proved to be uncompetitive
against their hardtop cousins. Lee Petty’s ’59 Oldsmobile won the
Daytona 500 in a photo finish over Johnny Beauchamp’s ‘59 Thunderbird.
Rollins is in the Chautauqua County, New York
Hall of Fame
