CUP: A Rising Tide Of Yesterdays
Don't be surprised if you see an old Mercury driving down A1A in Ponce Inlet...
Truelove worked out a deal with a friend who had repossessed some vehicles in the area and drove one back to Connecticut.
Junior Johnson, Tim Flock, Curtis Turner, Cotton Owens, Lee Petty – many of NASCAR’s pioneer drivers raced on the Daytona sand.
“It was great just being around those guys,” Truelove said. “They were the stars. They knew what they were doing. A lot of the rest of us didn’t care where we finished. We were here to have fun.
“Before my first race, I was talking to driver Al Keller, and he told me that when the race started the sand would fly and that I wouldn’t be able to see. He told me to get a piece of cardboard and hang it over the windshield to block the sand. I said, ‘Al, if I put that there and somebody stops in front of me, I’m going to hit them.’ He said, ‘You’re going to hit them, anyway.’ ”
The sand and salt pockmarked windshields, and the encroaching tide caught more than a few vehicles when drivers wandered too close to the water.
“Coming down the beach heading into the north turn was an art, sort of like gliding an airplane,” said Johnson, who also experienced a major accident on the beach course. “You started a quarter-mile from the turn, and you came in off the water. You turned that thing sideways two-10ths of a mile before you got to the turn.
“You had to have a pretty good knack for what you were doing. Going down the asphalt the other way, it was just the opposite. You go down there, stop, and turn left. At about 30 to 35 miles per hour.”
Since sun, salt and sand made visibility less than ideal, drivers used the Ponce Inlet lighthouse as a visual cue to begin slowing down for the south turn.
The lighthouse is among the survivors.
There were two driver deaths – a ridiculously low number, considering the conditions – during the beach era. Films of the races show spectators standing only a few feet from the highway part of the race course.
Particularly brutal was a crash in a 1955 Modified race. Al Briggs was burned over 90 percent of his body when his Ford coupe slammed into sand dunes flanking the asphalt portion of the course and caught fire. He died that night.
Still, it is the good times that are remembered over a drink or two at the North Turn restaurant, where the back office once served as the payout window for NASCAR officials working the beach races.
Truelove, migrating south each winter despite his wife’s protests (“She says, ‘You going down there again to have those people slap you on the back?’ Yeah! I am! I like it!”), can talk for hours about all of it. And does. He’s a popular target for restaurant visitors drawn in by the area’s motorsports history and the old race cars out front.
“Going down to Daytona then was like saying you were going to Indianapolis,” Truelove said. “It was big time to go down and compete on the sand at Daytona. The NASCAR name was building up, and Bill France was elevating the quality of the racing. Once you came down here, you wanted to come back.”
And he does. Despite spinal problems that limit his range of motion, Truelove still drives a restored Mercury racer from the beach era, much to the delight of passing motorists startled by the sight.
“If I didn’t have this, what would I do?” he asked. “I’m not a young man any more. Yesterday is still important to me.
“I want to relive yesterday.”
Mike Hembree is NASCAR Editor for SPEEDtv.com and has been covering motorsports for 28 years. He has written several books on NASCAR, including "NASCAR: The Definitive History of America's Sport" and "Then Tony Said To Junior: The Best NASCAR Stories Ever Told". He is a six-time winner of the National Motorsports Press Association Writer of the Year Award.
