WEEK SEVEN – BRUTON SHOOTS OFF HIS MOUTH

There he goes again.

Entering Week Seven, Bruton Smith is
mouthing off as he always does whenever Texas Motor Speedway comes up on the
schedule. He notes how Texas will seat 200,000 people and so forth, and was
rumored to be eyeing the purchase of Darlington Raceway, so he could close it
down and use its dates for other of his tracks; moving the Southern 500 to Texas
was rumored beginning in 1997.

Bruton is also offering his usual
unsolicited advice on Talladega, recommending the track be rebuilt. "I
basically tore Atlanta Motor Speedway down and rebuilt it…..we redesigned
it….There is no problem with redesigning a racetrack….I don’t think there’s
anything you can do (at Talladega) between now and April, but you could sure do
it between now and the next event there."

Since Texas opened Atlanta was redesigned,
Homestead Motorsports Park was rebuilt from a rectangle to an oval, and Smith
redesigned Sears Point by adding in a Chute between Turns Four and Seven. What
no one has bothered to notice, however, is that none of these redesigns was
necessary. Homestead was griped about because its rectangular shape made the
corners double-apex, but the races there turned into highly competitive affairs
far superior to anything the track has run since the turns were converted to
oval shape. Atlanta’s redesign came for no legitimate reason and helped make the
speeds faster than they need to be.

Nor is there any problem with Talladega’s
present layout. Consider that injury and death have occurred everywhere EXCEPT
in pack racing, be it at Talladega or Daytona or the IRL’s Texas shootouts or
CART’s Michigan and California 500s; if anything, there is a safety factor in
being packed together instead of strung out, as the worst hits have always been
with strung out cars.

Even drivers like Terry Labonte and Dale
Jarrett make clear they don’t believe it is unsafe; they just do not like the
edge-of-you-seat nature of the competition there. Competition, though, is
supposed top be at a maximum, not a minimum, level, and with the aero anchors
now in use – which the drivers to a man recommended in the first place – racing
at those two facilities has reached a maximum level that should never been let
go.

And for Bruton to talk as he does is
rather audacious, given his own history of fiasco. His firstborn in big-league
racing was Charlotte Motor Speedway, whose gestation is worth remembering.

The track began in August 1959 with the
start of construction. Smith, a local short track promoter, was partnered with Curtis
Turner, the sport’s most colorful personality. Some 1,400 stockholders helped
pay for the construction of the facility. Right away, though, trouble began.
Smith wanted the track completed for a Memorial Day weekend race in 1960. Work
teams labored 24 hours a day despite several bouts of unusually bad weather;
according to Max Muhlemann, a strike almost occurred but was averted when Turner
confronted the workmen with a shotgun. When the topsoil was removed, they ran
into solid granite, and the resulting blasting efforts took much longer than
expected. It added $500,000 to the costs, and finally the race date had to be
postponed until mid-June of 1960.

Even then construction wasn’t finished –
when NASCAR Grand National stockers showed up for opening practice that month,
track workmen were only then finishing laying down pavement. The area separating
the quad-oval from pit road was supposed to be covered with grass; instead it
was dirt. Drivers took to cutting through the dirt to get to the pits, and the
resulting clouds made visibility difficult. NASCAR told drivers they would be
disqualified if they ran through the dirt to get to the pits.

When the 600 ran, the asphalt was ripped
to shreds. As Richard Petty put it years later, there were potholes big enough
to park cars in. Richard and Lee Petty spun through the dirt at various times.
Junior Johnson spun through the dirt into the pits. Bob Welborn, Lennie Page,
and Paul Lewis all spun through the dirt into the pits. Adding insult to injury,
the Pettys and teammate Bobby Johns finished together in the top five, but
NASCAR DQ’ed the Pettys and the others for "improper pit entry."
Debris punched open Jack Smith’s gas tank in the closing stages and Joe Lee
Johnson took the win, four laps ahead of Johnny Beauchamp, at an average speed
of some 107 MPH.

Though the crowds were coming, the track
was some $500,000 in debt and creditors were demanding to be paid. The track
held two 1961 races; that year’s World 600 proved to be a fateful one as Richard
Petty blew his engine with some 100 laps to go and this left sophomore David
Pearson with a two-lap lead on Fireball Roberts. Pearson’s lead grew to four
laps when Roberts pitted with a deflating tire. But entering Three of Lap 399,
Pearson’s right rear shredded. Roberts made up two laps but Pearson hung on for
the win.

After the 600, Turner was let go and Smith
resigned from the track. Turner, though, met with officials from Jimmy Hoffa’s
Teamsters Union, and a deal was struck – Turner would get a loan of nearly a
million dollars in exchange for forming a drivers’ union, the Federation of
Professional Athletes. Tim Flock became involved and a large number of drivers
signed up. Part of the deal involved getting NASCAR to allow pari-mutuel betting
on its races. Big Bill France, however, called a meeting at Bowman-Gray Stadium
in Winston-Salem, NC, and he had a handgun with him. He vowed never to allow a
drivers’ union – especially one allied with Jimmy Hoffa – and suspended Turner,
Flock, and Fireball Roberts for "conduct detrimental to auto racing"
for their union work. The union promptly disintegrated. Roberts left right away
and was reinstated by NASCAR; a Grand National Advisory Board was formed
involving drivers, team owners, promoters, and NASCAR brass. Flock and Turner
sued to no avail, and Charlotte Motor Speedway was now in the hands of Judge J.
B. Craven of western North Carolina. He put the track under Chapter Ten of the Bankruptcy
Act, keeping it open pending admission of new owners, and its debts exceeded $1
million.

Turner, meanwhile, was bitter about losing
the speedway and also bitter about how Bruton Smith had handled things. Said his
widow Caroline "Bunny" Turner-Hall to author Peter Golenbock,
"Bruton used his vote to get Curtis all the way out of Charlotte Motor
Speedway. I don’t know why Bruton wanted him to resign…..Curtis always felt
that Bruton cost him the track. He felt that Bruton had been his friend, and
then he turned out not to be a friend…..I don’t know what went on between
them, but I do know that you can’t buy class, (and) Bruton Smith doesn’t have
any."

By 1963 the track had passed to local
furniture store magnate Richard Howard, and improvements began to take shape.
The track worked out of debt, and became a racing blockbuster.

Bruton Smith, meanwhile, retreated to
Illinois and made millions of dollars in the car business, in banks, and in
insurance companies. He’d also been buying shares from other holders atop the
40,000 shares he’d kept, and by 1973 had a third of the 1.5 million shares the
speedway had accounted for. By 1975 Richard Howard lamented that the track was
being run from Illinois. "Bruton put his votes on a fourth man to get a 4-3
edge on the board. I try to run the speedway conservatively…..(but) it got to
the point where we were spending three dollars to make one. We made improvements
that were needed, but too quickly…..(in 1974, despite nearly $400,000 in
profits) I ran out of money for the first time in ten years and had to borrow
money to finish paying our taxes. I don’t operate that way."

Though Smith denied when asked that he
wanted to retake the speedway, he blasted Richard Howard and demanded he step
down "and let a younger man with some fresh ideas take over." Smith
and Howard clashed over virtually every issue involving the track, and in
October of 1975 Smith hired former Firestone field director Howard Augustus
"Humpy" Wheeler as a "development director." By the time of
the 1976 World 600 Howard and his fiscal restraint were gone and Smith’s
damn-fiscal-conservatism spendaholism was in complete control.

As racing expanded, so did Bruton’s
dreams. He purchased North Wilkesboro Speedway after the death of Enoch Staley
and after 1996 arbitrarily assigned its spring date to his new Texas Motor
Speedway. Bob Bahre of NHIS had also purchased Wilkesboro for a second date at
Loudon, but wanted to keep Wilkesboro open for Grand National and Craftsman
Truck events; Smith shot this down and the track has remained closed due to his
intransigence.

Texas opened in 1997 and problems
reminiscent of Smith’s botched opening of Charlotte in the first two years
cropped up – an unraceable surface; broken sewer lines; poorly planned parking accommodations.
Ricky Craven was seriously injured during practice and his career was negatively
affected. The race itself was a demolition derby with a ten-car melee on the
opening lap and crash after crash ensuing. It was no better in 1998 when a fiery
ten-car eruption occurred on the second lap and drivers Derrike Cope, Mike
Skinner, and Greg Sacks were seriously injured in pre-race practices. The
Craftsman Trucks have seen some of their worst crashes ever at Texas, such as
Derrike Cope’s flight on his door in 2000 and a savage T-bone crash in 1999; the
nadir for Texas was reached in 2000 with the death of Tony Roper in the track’s
quad-oval area. In all for fendered cars the track has been a fiasco.

When the long-delayed conversion of
Atlanta finally occurred, the result was depressingly similar – a track too fast
to race on, multiple driver injuries and the death of an ARCA driver in 1998,
and no workable outside groove; by 1999, though, a second groove finally came
in, and some exciting races have ensued – in November 1999 the lead changed
hands 38 times, a number not seen since the 1993 Daytona 500; in March 2000 a
photo-finish was the victory for Dale Earnhardt over Bobby Labonte; and in 2001
Kevin Harvick’s photo-finish over Jeff Gordon brought the house down and may
have forever cemented the 2001 Atlanta 500 as NASCAR’s brightest moment.
Overall, though, the track remains far too fast, and this has led to on-and-off
rumors about restrictor plates and the use of aero anchors; Ed Clark of Atlanta
even recommended they be tried on the cars for the track’s November 2000 event.

The last few years have been seasons of
chaos for Charlotte – in 1999 three spectators were killed when a wheel assembly
flew off an IRL car into the stands, and in 2000 race fans were victimized in
the collapse of an overhead walkway.

Certainly Bruton Smith has done a lot for
racing, and excellent events do occur at his tracks, but his relentless whining
for a second date at Texas and his useless advice on Talladega make him a pain.
If told to reconvert Atlanta back to a true oval design, he would object
vehemently, so who is he to call for changes to Talladega or any other track?