1940's Sports | Automobile Racing: Stock Cars

White Lightning.

A competitive Indianapolis-type racer cost about $30,000 after the war. That was too much for a band of southerners who liked to build and drive race cars. They knew how to buy a heap at a junkyard and turn it into a race car for about $2,500. Their racers were called stock cars because they looked like passenger vehicles, and their competitions were originally called pasture races, because in the early days the drivers would gather in a farmer's pasture on Sunday afternoons to race. Most of the stock car tracks of the late 1940s were made of compacted clay, and many of the drivers had served their apprenticeship running moonshine liquor, 120 gallons at a time, from the stills where it was illegally made, to thirsty customers. Outrunning the law became a mark of honor among the moonshine drivers, and their outlaw attitude shaped stock car racing. The moonshiners were so prominent among drivers in the early stock...