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Sprint Cup
CUP: Moore’s Long Racing History Predates NASCAR
Bud Moore will join four other legends as the newest inductees into the NASCAR Hall of Fame...
Walter “Bud” Moore is an official hero of the Greatest Generation.
He was a crew chief, a master mechanic and a team owner for much of stock car racing’s history.
His cars won national championships and the sport’s biggest race – the Daytona 500.
He is a man who knows the fastest way around every speedway – and the fastest way out of most of them.
“He was great about getting out of tracks to beat the traffic when the race was over,” remembered Donnie Wingo, a former crew chief for Moore’s Spartanburg, S.C.-based NASCAR operation. “He was famous for it. They got him pretty good one year at Martinsville.
“Henry Benfield (a long-time NASCAR garage resident and prankster) stuck a jack up under his car, his Lincoln. As soon as the gate opened, Bud was going to take off. Then the tires started spinning, and he was sitting there going nowhere. We were all standing there watching and laughing.”
Bud Moore, basically a racing lifer, was a frequent target of such activity in his half-century in NASCAR, but he gave as good as he got over those years. Along the way, he built a solid reputation as a smart racing mechanic and car builder and as one of the pillars of the building years of NASCAR.
On Monday, Moore’s racing exploits – and, not incidentally, his bravery in World War II – will earn him NASCAR’s highest honor, a place in its new Hall of Fame. Moore, David Pearson, Ned Jarrett, Bobby Allison and the late Lee Petty will be inducted in a ceremony at the Charlotte (N.C.) Convention Center.
Moore retired from NASCAR racing in 1999 when he sold his Bud Moore Engineering team after being involved in motorsports since the post-World War II years. He won a Sprint Cup (then Grand National) championship as crew chief for driver Buck Baker in 1957 and followed that with two team-owner titles with driver Joe Weatherly in the 1960s.
Many NASCAR greats drove Moore-owned cars over the years. The list includes two of the drivers going into the hall with Moore – Pearson and Allison – and Dale Earnhardt, Buddy Baker, Darrell Waltrip, Benny Parsons and Ricky Rudd. Allison won the Daytona 500, NASCAR’s biggest race, for Moore in 1978.
In NASCAR’s foundation years, teams operated by Moore, Junior Johnson, the Pettys and the Wood Brothers often were labeled as the four corners of the sport.
“Wayne Robertson (an RJ Reynolds Tobacco Co. official who oversaw the Winston sponsorship in NASCAR) always said there were four pillars holding up NASCAR – the Pettys, the Woods, Junior Johnson and Bud Moore,” Moore said. “I guess we helped get the thing built so that it could grow.”
But Moore did much more than that. He was a constant voice for change in the garage areas, and he was a close friend and advisor to both NASCAR founder Bill France Sr. and his son and successor, Bill France Jr.
Moore’s Cup cars won 63 times. His success declined in the 1990s as racing became much more expensive and sponsors for single-car operations like Moore’s became much more difficult to find. After years of trying to stay competitive with limited sponsorship help, Moore sold his team and the familiar No. 15 Fords that had so long been associated with him.
One of 10 children growing up on a Carolina farm, Moore, who will turn 86 years old two days after the hall ceremony, began tinkering with fast cars as a teen-ager. His farm life was interrupted at the age of 18 when he was drafted into the Army at the peak of World War II.
A year later, in June 1944, he was in one of the first Army units that hit the beaches of Normandy as the United States and its allies began the march that reclaimed Europe from the Nazis. Moore was wounded several times and received numerous medals.
He returned home to Spartanburg and jumped with both feet into the post-war automobile craze that swept the country. He and a Spartanburg friend, Joe Eubanks, quickly became interested in the ragtag sport of stock car racing, which was semi-organized at best in that period. NASCAR was still two years from being formed.
Moore drove a few race cars but slapped the wall a few times and figured he was too big and tall to be a driver, anyway. That eventually led him into a crew chief position in 1950s NASCAR and to the top of the sport, then into team ownership.
There Moore found early success with the talented Weatherly, but he also was hit in the heart by the dangers associated with the business. Weatherly was killed in a brutal accident on the Riverside, Calif. road course in January 1964. A year later, during a tire test at Daytona International Speedway, Billy Wade, also driving for Moore, died when his right front tire blew and sent his car hurtling into the first-turn wall.
Moore drove home and told his wife, Betty, that he didn’t think he could race any more. But he returned and worked on safety advances that addressed the brake problem that apparently led to Weatherly’s crash and the seat harness issue that was a factor in Wade’s sudden death.
Moore built a strong relationship with Ford Motor Co. and raced its cars for most of his career. In the late 1960s, he detoured from NASCAR at the request of the car builder to run its Trans-Am Series road-racing operation.
He found success there, also, winning the series championship in 1970 with driver Parnelli Jones piloting the Moore Mustangs. Dan Gurney and Pearson also drove Moore’s Trans-Am cars. One of those Mustangs, restored to its racing glory, sold a few years ago at a collector-car auction for $343,000.
Moore’s racing career put him in at least one really bad spot.
Before repeated problems on pit road led NASCAR to call for speed limits for pit-road traffic, team members routinely stepped onto the pit surface to hold signs so that their drivers could readily identify their pit location as they roared in at amazingly fast speeds. Now this is done safely with signs that hang onto poles, but then team members did the work “up close and personal.”
Moore assigned that job to himself for many years. During the Coca-Cola 600, his driver, Brett Bodine, slid through his pit when his car hit a wet surface, and it slammed into Moore, tossing him into the pit wall.
“I told him (via the team radio) to take it easy coming in because somebody had spilled something in the pit next to ours,” Moore said. “He was coming in pretty hot. When he got on the brakes real hard, the car got sort of sideways straight into me. I jumped straight up and landed on the hood, and it threw me into the air and onto pit wall.
“They finished the pit stop and got him out of there. It broke my right leg and tore ligaments in my knee.”
Moore’s final words to Bodine (who now drives the pace car on NASCAR weekends) on the radio as they hauled him away on a stretcher: “Boy, you better win this damn race.”
By the way, Bodine did not.
With his induction into the hall next week, Moore will be joining long-time friend and competitor Junior Johnson, whose time in the sport paralleled Moore’s. One of the memories they might share during the festivities is of the night Moore, who had matched wits with Junior over so many years, saw a different side of Johnson.
“We were coming back from a Richmond race one year and ran up on Junior Johnson and his guys,” Moore said. “They saw us coming and kept holding us up. Wouldn’t let us by. Finally, they pulled over to the left side to let us by. We got up beside them, and I was ready to shake my fist at them.
“Then I saw Junior. Stuck his big rump out the window. Mooned us. I couldn’t believe it.”
The hall ceremony will be a bit more formal.
Mike Hembree is NASCAR Editor for SPEED.com and has been covering motorsports for 29 years. He is a six-time winner of the National Motorsports Press Association Writer of the Year Award.
He was a crew chief, a master mechanic and a team owner for much of stock car racing’s history.
His cars won national championships and the sport’s biggest race – the Daytona 500.
He is a man who knows the fastest way around every speedway – and the fastest way out of most of them.
“He was great about getting out of tracks to beat the traffic when the race was over,” remembered Donnie Wingo, a former crew chief for Moore’s Spartanburg, S.C.-based NASCAR operation. “He was famous for it. They got him pretty good one year at Martinsville.
“Henry Benfield (a long-time NASCAR garage resident and prankster) stuck a jack up under his car, his Lincoln. As soon as the gate opened, Bud was going to take off. Then the tires started spinning, and he was sitting there going nowhere. We were all standing there watching and laughing.”
Bud Moore, basically a racing lifer, was a frequent target of such activity in his half-century in NASCAR, but he gave as good as he got over those years. Along the way, he built a solid reputation as a smart racing mechanic and car builder and as one of the pillars of the building years of NASCAR.
On Monday, Moore’s racing exploits – and, not incidentally, his bravery in World War II – will earn him NASCAR’s highest honor, a place in its new Hall of Fame. Moore, David Pearson, Ned Jarrett, Bobby Allison and the late Lee Petty will be inducted in a ceremony at the Charlotte (N.C.) Convention Center.
Moore retired from NASCAR racing in 1999 when he sold his Bud Moore Engineering team after being involved in motorsports since the post-World War II years. He won a Sprint Cup (then Grand National) championship as crew chief for driver Buck Baker in 1957 and followed that with two team-owner titles with driver Joe Weatherly in the 1960s.
Many NASCAR greats drove Moore-owned cars over the years. The list includes two of the drivers going into the hall with Moore – Pearson and Allison – and Dale Earnhardt, Buddy Baker, Darrell Waltrip, Benny Parsons and Ricky Rudd. Allison won the Daytona 500, NASCAR’s biggest race, for Moore in 1978.
In NASCAR’s foundation years, teams operated by Moore, Junior Johnson, the Pettys and the Wood Brothers often were labeled as the four corners of the sport.
“Wayne Robertson (an RJ Reynolds Tobacco Co. official who oversaw the Winston sponsorship in NASCAR) always said there were four pillars holding up NASCAR – the Pettys, the Woods, Junior Johnson and Bud Moore,” Moore said. “I guess we helped get the thing built so that it could grow.”
But Moore did much more than that. He was a constant voice for change in the garage areas, and he was a close friend and advisor to both NASCAR founder Bill France Sr. and his son and successor, Bill France Jr.
Moore’s Cup cars won 63 times. His success declined in the 1990s as racing became much more expensive and sponsors for single-car operations like Moore’s became much more difficult to find. After years of trying to stay competitive with limited sponsorship help, Moore sold his team and the familiar No. 15 Fords that had so long been associated with him.
One of 10 children growing up on a Carolina farm, Moore, who will turn 86 years old two days after the hall ceremony, began tinkering with fast cars as a teen-ager. His farm life was interrupted at the age of 18 when he was drafted into the Army at the peak of World War II.
A year later, in June 1944, he was in one of the first Army units that hit the beaches of Normandy as the United States and its allies began the march that reclaimed Europe from the Nazis. Moore was wounded several times and received numerous medals.
He returned home to Spartanburg and jumped with both feet into the post-war automobile craze that swept the country. He and a Spartanburg friend, Joe Eubanks, quickly became interested in the ragtag sport of stock car racing, which was semi-organized at best in that period. NASCAR was still two years from being formed.
Moore drove a few race cars but slapped the wall a few times and figured he was too big and tall to be a driver, anyway. That eventually led him into a crew chief position in 1950s NASCAR and to the top of the sport, then into team ownership.
There Moore found early success with the talented Weatherly, but he also was hit in the heart by the dangers associated with the business. Weatherly was killed in a brutal accident on the Riverside, Calif. road course in January 1964. A year later, during a tire test at Daytona International Speedway, Billy Wade, also driving for Moore, died when his right front tire blew and sent his car hurtling into the first-turn wall.
Moore drove home and told his wife, Betty, that he didn’t think he could race any more. But he returned and worked on safety advances that addressed the brake problem that apparently led to Weatherly’s crash and the seat harness issue that was a factor in Wade’s sudden death.
Moore built a strong relationship with Ford Motor Co. and raced its cars for most of his career. In the late 1960s, he detoured from NASCAR at the request of the car builder to run its Trans-Am Series road-racing operation.
He found success there, also, winning the series championship in 1970 with driver Parnelli Jones piloting the Moore Mustangs. Dan Gurney and Pearson also drove Moore’s Trans-Am cars. One of those Mustangs, restored to its racing glory, sold a few years ago at a collector-car auction for $343,000.
Moore’s racing career put him in at least one really bad spot.
Before repeated problems on pit road led NASCAR to call for speed limits for pit-road traffic, team members routinely stepped onto the pit surface to hold signs so that their drivers could readily identify their pit location as they roared in at amazingly fast speeds. Now this is done safely with signs that hang onto poles, but then team members did the work “up close and personal.”
Moore assigned that job to himself for many years. During the Coca-Cola 600, his driver, Brett Bodine, slid through his pit when his car hit a wet surface, and it slammed into Moore, tossing him into the pit wall.
“I told him (via the team radio) to take it easy coming in because somebody had spilled something in the pit next to ours,” Moore said. “He was coming in pretty hot. When he got on the brakes real hard, the car got sort of sideways straight into me. I jumped straight up and landed on the hood, and it threw me into the air and onto pit wall.
“They finished the pit stop and got him out of there. It broke my right leg and tore ligaments in my knee.”
Moore’s final words to Bodine (who now drives the pace car on NASCAR weekends) on the radio as they hauled him away on a stretcher: “Boy, you better win this damn race.”
By the way, Bodine did not.
With his induction into the hall next week, Moore will be joining long-time friend and competitor Junior Johnson, whose time in the sport paralleled Moore’s. One of the memories they might share during the festivities is of the night Moore, who had matched wits with Junior over so many years, saw a different side of Johnson.
“We were coming back from a Richmond race one year and ran up on Junior Johnson and his guys,” Moore said. “They saw us coming and kept holding us up. Wouldn’t let us by. Finally, they pulled over to the left side to let us by. We got up beside them, and I was ready to shake my fist at them.
“Then I saw Junior. Stuck his big rump out the window. Mooned us. I couldn’t believe it.”
The hall ceremony will be a bit more formal.
Mike Hembree is NASCAR Editor for SPEED.com and has been covering motorsports for 29 years. He is a six-time winner of the National Motorsports Press Association Writer of the Year Award.
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