kraftiekortie wrote:
funeralxempire wrote:
kraftiekortie wrote:
Race car drivers were solidly in the sports mainstream in the 1970s. For some reason, auto racing started becoming a regional phenomenon in the 80s.
I wonmder how much the splits in Indy Cars (USAC vs CART) and
F1 played a role.
Yep…that certainly could have played a role, bringing NASCAR to the fore, which had a more “redneck” sort of reputation which might have caused it to become more of a “Southern” thing.
For what it's worth, NASCAR's always been really strongly associated with the Southeast. Wilkes County, North Carolina seems to get treated as it's heart, but there's a really strong connection between Appalachian bootleggers and the early era of stock car racing.
Basically it was another revenue stream for bootleggers and people adjacent to that activity.
Bill France Sr. figured out how to make a corporate version of that, shifting the focus from 'modified' (like the bootleggers originally raced) towards 'strictly stock' or 'late model', cars that looked like production cars. In NASCAR the 'strictly stock' era ended in 1965 because they started letting teams build cars on a custom chassis.
He's a despicable Dixiecrat POS, just to ensure I'm on the record regarding him personally. It took a long time for the sport to really do any introspection on issues that descend from that.
Apparently in the midwest and northeast the modifieds and roadsters continued to be more popular for quite awhile. Sports car racing in that era seems like it was mostly focused in that region, along with California and Florida. USAC is headquartered in Indianapolis and SCCA is in Kansas.
I think they just took forever to realize how big they were about to get by the late '90s/early '00s, so it was still pretty 'southern'.
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