While Indianapolis-style speedway racing evolved around tailor-made open-wheeled ‘race cars’, down in the south-eastern corner of the nation stock car – ‘stock’ in the sense of everyday production car – racing took root in the 1930s, notably from the era of alcohol prohibition under the Volstead Act. From 1920 to 1933, alcoholic drink production, importation, transportation, and sale was illegal – cue widespread criminal operations to produce, import, transport and sell ‘joy-juice’, and often ‘bath-tub brew’ moonshine. And from transporting such illicit beverage around the southern States grew the earliest glimmerings of what became US-style stock car racing… or at least, that’s what the promoters and image makers have always told us.
When the prohibition laws were repealed in 1933, much of the particularly Appalachian Mountain area moonshine business fell into decline. But the established bootlegger drivers with their hopped-up stock cars tuned to outrun the police – and drivers equally well-tuned to out-driving the police – turned from continuing to avoid booze tax by out-running “the revenue men” into pitting their cars, and their skills, against one another by racing on track for increasingly attractive cash prizes. It was sport, it was fun and – typically American in terms of its enterprising nature – it could be a profitable business.
Now, since the turn of the century automotive speed records had been set, and challenged, and broken, year on year down on the flat, firm, straight-line sands of Daytona Beach in Florida. After 1935, outright Land Speed Record pace had outstripped the beach and Bonneville Salt Flats replaced Daytona in the pure record breakers’ ambitions. The City of Daytona had seen its annual Speed Week flourish as a money-making (there’s that phrase again) attraction, and it began to host stock car racing on a 4.1-mile beach-come-road circuit – a couple of miles on the sand, then a treacherous, slippery, quickly rutted-up turn through the dunes onto a blacktop road, State A1A, then back onto the beach through another defile in the dunes.