France wanted stock cars. Right off the street. Raced on dirt and, whenever possible, on Sundays. There was some opposition, but not much. In fact, “Big Bill” seemed to allow just enough arguing to make those in the room believe that they were making the decisions and not him. That even went for the organization’s new name. Byron suggested National Stock Car Racing Association. Vogt suggested National Association of Stock Car Auto Racing, which France liked because “NASCAR” rolled off the tongue. After Byron’s name won in a 7-4 vote, France reminded that there was already a NSCRA in Georgia, and perhaps they’d like to think about it. They revoted. This time, NASCAR won.
“‘Big Bill’ should have been a politician,” explained longtime Charlotte Observer motorsports scribe Tom Higgins, himself a NASCAR Hall of Famer, in 2017, about seven months before his death. “His invitation list to those meetings was just the right mix of friends versus foes. And when they closed those meetings with officer elections, which also determined who got the most shares of ownership, who do you think convinced them to give Bill France Senior the first presidency of NASCAR and the most shares? Bill France Senior, that’s who!”
It was true. The man who would later brag, “I can hold my board meetings in a phone booth” left the Streamline Hotel on Dec. 17, 1947, with the title of NASCAR president and 50% of those shares. Not knowing yet what they had signed over, the group posed for the now-famous photo of their meeting in the Ebony Room, “Big Bill” having smoothly positioned himself at the head of the table.
As Parks liked to say with a shake of the head and he-got-me grin, “Next thing you know, NASCAR belonged to Bill France.”
A new age, a new Streamline
France’s belief in one-man rule has proven wise beyond his 82-year life, which ended on June 7, 1992.
NASCAR was formerly incorporated on Feb. 21, 1948. The winner of its first race and championship was Red Byron, driving for Parks in a car prepared by Vogt. But, oddly enough, none of that was in a stock car. The postwar lag in streetcar production out of Detroit forced NASCAR to start by racing in ’48 using fender-less Modifieds, with the Strictly Stock division finally taking the green flag in Charlotte on June 19, 1949.
“Big Bill” reigned as NASCAR chairman and CEO until handing over the keys to Bill France Jr. in 1972, having survived financial crises, gas shortages, driver strikes and the deaths of multiple superstars. As the sport raced into the 1970s, it began its so-called Modern Era and spent the next three decades on an alpine-like climb.
“Bill Junior,” who died in 2007, was succeeded by Mike Helton as president, followed by Brian France, grandson of “Big Bill,” and since 2018, Steve Phelps. “Big Bill”‘s second son, the soft-spoken Jim France, is now NASCAR chairman. He was only three years old in February 1947. His niece, Bill France Jr’s daughter Lesa France Kennedy, serves as NASCAR’s executive vice chair. Most have their eyes on her son, 30-year-old Ben Kennedy, as the heir apparent to the stock car kingdom.
On Wednesday, they will all gather at the Streamline Hotel for a Founder’s Day celebration. They will toast their stock car racing forefathers in what is now known as the Sky Lounge Bar, the space formerly known as the Ebony Room, now wallpapered with photos of the men who gathered there to burn tobacco, sip amber fluids and draw up the paperwork that started the world’s largest stock car racing series.
That series is experiencing a bit of a rebirth, a reversal of recent misfortune that is much like the Streamline itself. After decades of disrepair, the old hotel vibrates with life. Remember that ’98 bus tour with “Bill Junior”? The place was in such terrible shape that day that he refused to get off the bus and go inside because, “It might collapse on top of us.” Now, after a $6 million overhaul and one Travel Channel “Hotel Impossible” star turn, it has become a Daytona hot spot. When Dale Earnhardt Jr. launched his new vodka line last February, he did so alongside his wife on the same roof where Parks once hung out at the bar with the charm school students.
This year’s Dec. 14 festivities mark the kickoff of NASCAR’s 75th anniversary celebration, with the promise of both eyes on 2023 and beyond, while keeping one foot planted in 1947.
“How cool would it be to go back and watch a race on the beach, right? Having to make sure that you’re trying to figure out when what’s low tide? What’s high tide?” Phelps says of the view from atop the Streamline, looking across Highway A1A at the Atlantic Ocean. “Then I look out my window here at my office and I see Daytona International Speedway. The vision to be able to create this in the 1940s and ’50’s, I mean, it’s just extraordinary. This is what Bill Senior envisioned.”
NASCAR’s fifth-ever president speaks of the sport’s recent gains in television ratings and attendance and the successes of experiments such as racing at the L.A. Coliseum and the raciness — with safety work currently being done — of the new Next Gen car. He talks about the gift of guidance that is his ability to lean on the France family. Then he reminds that one of “Big Bill’s” speeches from the Streamline Hotel, the one about “Stock car racing has got distinct possibilities for Sunday shows …” is displayed across a giant wall in NASCAR’s Research and Development Center in Concord, N.C. A constant, stories-tall reminder of what happened 75 years ago this week.
“There’s a statement that I’ve heard from both Jim France and Mike Helton and that’s where we are … they always say we are stewards for the sport. We need to leave it better than when we found it,” Phelps continues. “Everything we do ladders to that, that North Star. I think that’s helpful. So, when people come to work, when I come to work, we know what’s expected. And it started that day at the Streamline Hotel.”
