![]() In 1961, Roberts took the pole for the Daytona 500 with a speed of 155.7 mph in a Pontiac that he could have driven home that day. The perception of death-defying speed came as much from the booming engines and flying dirt as from actual speed.īut on the superspeedways, the big V-8s pushed cars to heart-stopping velocities. On the short dirt tracks that still dominated the NASCAR schedule in 1960, the winner’s average speed was usually no more than 60 or 70 mph. The second surprise is the astonishing speeds the cars reached on the big, new speedways. But through the early 1960s, aside from steel roll bars, fat tires and loud exhaust, the race cars were almost indistinguishable from street models. Modern Winston Cup cars have almost no factory parts other than the hood and trunk lid. The first is just how “stock” the cars really were. To fans familiar only with NASCAR’s modern era, two elements of the sport’s early superspeedway days stand out. And they would make Fireball Roberts a household name. The tracks would transform stock-car racing. In 1960, superspeedways opened at Charlotte, Atlanta and Hanford, Calif. As more money flowed into stock-car racing, promoters built bigger, faster tracks. Speeds grew throughout the 1950s, and so did the sport’s following. In second place was 21-year-old Fireball Roberts. NASCAR records show the race was won by Californian Johnny Mantz, who cruised around at an average 76 mph for six and a half hours. Through its first decade, NASCAR had a single track with the kind of high-speed banking that came to be described as a superspeedway - the 1.4-mile Darlington Raceway, where NASCAR’s first 500-mile race was run in 1950. Even by the late 1950s, the winner’s purse at most Grand National races was only $700 or $800.īut the money in NASCAR - and the speed - would skyrocket. Stock-car racing then meant dirt tracks and small purses, barely enough for even the top racers to live on. Wherever he got the name, it stuck, and racing fans took notice of it as Roberts traveled the gritty Southern racing circuit. But those who grew up with him in Apopka don’t remember him being much of a baseball player. And it seemed even better when compared with the nicknames of other early racers - Possum Jones, Banjo Matthews, Burr-head Nantz.Īfter he was famous, Roberts told people that his name had nothing to do with racing: As a teenage pitcher, he had earned it for a blistering fastball. It was a wonderful name for a race-car driver: Fireball. “I told him, ‘The hell with this I’m not riding with you anymore.’ “Īfter a year of college, Roberts had had enough. “I figured he was caught, but Fireball just kind of slips off the road and down the shoulder and sort of up on the edge of the ditch and right on around them. McClure was with Roberts one day when police blocked a country road, trying to stop him. If you were a religious man, you’d be praying.” “If you were smart, you’d be hanging on tight the whole ride. ![]() Roberts raced every chance he got, at horse tracks and fairgrounds throughout Central Florida.Īnd on weekends, when Roberts drove from Gainesville to visit his parents in Daytona Beach, he’d try to set a new record with each trip. After high school, he left for engineering school at the University of Florida in Gainesville, hoping it would lead to a career designing auto engines.īut Roberts never got his mind off racing, said George McClure, his college roommate. When the family moved to Daytona Beach before Glenn graduated, he lived with the Haygoods in Apopka until school ended. As a teenager, he had excelled at motorcycles and go-carts, and his father encouraged him to race. ![]() Glenn and his friends tinkered with cars and raced them whenever they could. The Roberts family lived in a distinctive brick house that still stands on the city’s north side. Roberts’ father, Glenn Sr., was a superintendent for the sawmills owned by the prominent family of Apopka Mayor John Land. You could lay down on 441, and you wouldn’t get run over.” “You probably could have heard us coming 10 miles away,” Haygood said. Highway 441 from Apopka to Mount Dora before heading south again, like a summer storm running laps.īut this thunder was man-made: Curt Haygood in his 1949 Ford with a 1950 Oldsmobile Rocket V-8, door-to-door with Glenn Roberts in his ’37 Chevy coupe powered by a Cadillac engine.
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