After a tiring month as chief of operations for NASCAR Speedweeks, Bill France finally relaxed late Sunday following Marvin Panch’s Daytona 500 victory and said, “The race was safe, the weather was beautiful, the crowd was enormous, everything was perfect.” France wasted no time in predicting, “Attendance for the fourth Daytona 500 next year will be 15 percent larger.”
Lee Petty won the 150-mile Cannonball Division race for compact stock cars Sunday at Daytona Int’l Speedway. The former hog farmer from Randleman, N.C., averaged 83.564 mph over a tricky 3.1-mile course. Petty’s Plymouth Valiant was 44 seconds ahead of “Fireball” Roberts’s Pontiac Tempest at the checkered flag.
Bob DeJong and Dean Holden won the 30-lap features as the indoor midget season concluded with two nights of racing at California’s Oakland Exposition Building. Tommy Copp finished fifth in the Saturday finale to claim the Pacific Coast Indoor Racing Championship. Copp, who won the 1959 title, edged Johnny Baldwin by 17 points.
Paul Goldsmith celebrated his escape from blizzard-bound St. Clair Shores, Mich., by wheeling a Pontiac to victory in the opening USAC stock-car race of the season on the one-mile dirt oval at the Arizona State Fairgrounds in Phoenix. Jim Rostek challenged Goldsmith, but finished second with Elmer Musgrave third.
Feuding between USAC and NASCAR is erupting again, this time over a USAC ban on Indianapolis 500 race drivers competing in the internationally sanctioned stock-car race at Daytona Int’l Speedway Feb. 26. USAC’s refusal to allow its members to participate resulted in a protest to the Federation Internationale de l’Automobile by Bill France, the Daytona promoter and head of NASCAR.
50 Years Ago — January 25, 1961 NASCAR has contracted to sanction racing at a paved half-mile track under construction near Bristol, Tenn. The new speedway is being built on a 100-acre tract four miles south of Bristol. The grandstands will initially seat 20,000. The track is scheduled to open July 30 with the Volunteer [...]
St. Louis speed merchant Bob Wente avoided a first-lap tangle and won the 50-lap USAC midget feature Saturday night on the concrete floor of Chicago’s International Amphitheatre. Former series champion Gene Hartley was less than a second behind Wente at the checkered flag while Chuck Rodee moved up from the sixth-starting spot to claim the show money.
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