How Moonshine Built NASCAR

Here's a piece of American history that most folks have completely backwards, and I take great joy in setting it straight: one of the biggest sports in this country — stock-car racing, NASCAR — was born, direct and undeniable, out of running moonshine on mountain roads exactly like this one.

Think it through. If you're hauling a load of illegal liquor down a twisting mountain road in the dark with the law on your tail, you need two things above all: a car that looks perfectly ordinary, and a car that is anything but. So the moonshine runners became the finest backwoods mechanics in America. They'd take a plain-looking sedan and soup up the engine till it flew, stiffen the springs to carry a thousand pounds of liquor without sagging and giving the game away, and rig up wicked tricks — a switch to kill the taillights and vanish in the dark, lights that blinded the man behind you, tanks to dump oil or tacks on the road. They called them 'trip cars,' and the men who drove them learned to handle a car at the ragged edge, on bad roads, at night, for real stakes.

And then Prohibition ended and the liquor money dried up some — but the cars were still fast and the drivers still wild. So what does a bunch of hot-headed young men with the fastest cars in the county do of a Sunday? They race each other. Cornfield tracks, dirt ovals, bragging rights. It got so popular that in nineteen forty-seven a fellow named Bill France gathered the racers together down in Daytona and organized it into NASCAR. And the first stars of that sport were moonshine runners — the first champion had hauled liquor.

The most famous of them, Junior Johnson, came from the Wilkes County foothills, off east of here — never caught running on the road, only nabbed once at the family still — and he became a NASCAR legend, the 'Last American Hero.' Different corner of the mountains than this one, I'll be honest. But the story is the same story, and this road is the same kind of road: the twisting mountain dark where American racing was really born. Every time forty cars scream around a speedway on a Sunday, they are running a moonshine road. They just don't know it. You do.