Runnin’ Moonshine: How Real Racing Began; The Birth of NASCAR

The Chase
Most moonshiners wanted their runs to be easy and uneventful, which as we know didn’t always happen. They would try to avoid chases as much as they can by driving on the backroads as much as they can, avoiding check points and road blocks.

However if a chase did occur the runners had several advantages over the Revenuers. Their biggest advantage was their cars; the revenuers were issued stock family sedans with little modifications by the government which could not keep up with the cars of the shiners.

The other advantage was the roads themselves, most of the runners drove the same roads daily and new the layouts and all of the turns. They knew how fast they could go around each turn, which way to go to evade the G-Men and which routes to take.
The revenuers new they couldn’t catch the runners in a chase so they soon changed their tactics. They started using radios in the cars to notify other agents to set up road blocks with in a minutes notice. Soon more and more moonshiners got caught, the days of the runners started coming to an end.

The Birth of Stock Car Racing
Hauling illegal liquor eventually lead to the birth of the largest Motorsport in the United States. During the weekends moonshiners would argue about who had the fastest car in the area. The arguments would lead to guys wanting to prove that their car was the fastest so they would then head over to the fairgrounds and start racing each other in circles.

Soon crowds would come and check out the racing thus Stock Car Racing had been born! After church every Sunday in the Southern United States there would be Stock Car races and the races would grow bigger and bigger. NASCAR held its first Strictly Stock race on June 19, 1949, at the Charlotte Speedway in North Carolina. In 1950, the first NASCAR-based track, the Darlington Raceway in South Carolina, opened. Soon permit tracks that could seat 10,000 and had paved asphalt to race on.

By the mid 1960′s NASCAR had grown from a weekend hobby of Moonshiners to an all-out Motorsport attracting new fans and racers from all over the country. Soon large high dollar sponsors from the Big Three in Detroit and other companies sponsored teams and allowed them to race full time. Many of the former moonshiners were now able to make a great living by racing NASCAR.

NASCAR fever had swept the South and has forever become an important part of Southern Culture. However drivers and fans alike will never forget the roots of the sport, because they know somewhere deep in the hills of Tennessee sits a running still, with Manson Jars full of liquor waiting to be loaded into a 1940, to make one last run. Be careful because where there is a Moonshiner hauling his load, there is a Government Agent waiting to catch him!