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DAVE DESPAIN: “I THINK WHAT SENIOR & JUNIOR HAD in COMMON WAS THEY WERE ALWAYS LOOKING 10 YEARS DOWN THE ROAD.”

SPEED™ WILL BROADCAST LIVE FROM the MAY 23 NASCAR HALL of FAME INDUCTION CEREMONIES STARTING at NOON, ET

When you talk about the sport of NASCAR, there are two people that stand above everyone else – Founder Bill France, Sr., and former NASCAR President Bill France, Jr.

Their place in history is unquestioned and will be among those immortalized on Sunday, May 23 as the NASCAR Hall of Fame welcomes its inaugural class live on SPEED starting at Noon, E.T.

In addition, SPEED will feature France, Sr. (premieres April 16, 9:30 p.m. ET) and France, Jr. (premieres April 23, 8:30 p.m. ET) in one-hour specials that will chronicle each of their lives, including never before seen or heard in public audio files from France, Sr., found during the move of International Speedway Corporation’s (ISC) historical archive.

FRANCE, SR.: A VISIONARY

If there is a story that might best epitomize what the elder France was all about, NASCAR on FOX & SPEED play-by-play announcer Mike Joy may have innocently unearthed it on the roof of the Talladega (Ala.) Superspeedway just prior to a race back in the mid-1980s.

“I’m up in the broadcast booth and I’m making sure our equipment is set up to do our broadcast, and I look out across the roof, and there sitting on an upturned cinder block was a very tall gentleman looking out at the grandstands,” Joy, 60, recalled. “I was curious, so I walked out and it was Bill France, Sr., and he had been retired for quite some time, but he still came to a lot of the races, especially Daytona and Talladega. He still had an active advisory role.

“I asked, ‘Bill, what are you looking at?’” Joy continued. “He said, ‘I’m just looking at the crowd filing in.’ He then pointed to the expanse of land in turns three and four and the backstretch and he said, ‘Mike, someday we’ll have seats all around these speedways. People will come from miles away to fill them. But the crowds will be packed and every race will be on television. It will get great ratings. This sport will grow to a level we can hardly imagine right now.’ He said, ‘I doubt I’ll be here to see it, but I can feel it. It’s going to happen.’ He said it with such certainty. Now, that was a time we were getting 75,000 people into Talladega and I thought that was all we’d ever get. Of course he was right. He had that vision.”

Visionary is a term often associated with France. Born William Henry Getty France on Sept. 26, 1909, just outside Washington D.C., he spent many a day visiting local tracks in and around his Maryland home. He entered the business world as a bank clerk, but his siren call towards the automobile, and his love of being a mechanic, pushed him to open and run his own service station.

By 1934, however, The Great Depression forced him, his wife Anne and infant son Bill, Jr. to close the station, take their $75.00 in life savings and move south towards ‘greener pastures.’ While some dispute still lingers on how Bill, Sr. actually arrived at staying in Daytona Beach, Fla., it became his destination after scouting it out and finding a job at an auto dealership. France later went on to open another service station.

At the same time, Daytona Beach was one of the most popular venues for land speed record runs, as 1934 also saw Great Britain’s Malcolm Campbell blasting through the sand at a record-breaking 250 mph. When land speed racers left for Utah’s more expansive Bonneville Salt Flats, a group of Florida race promoters took their place by hosting a closed-course race along the beach and A-1A Highway. France, who ran in those events, also hosted and promoted his own races by 1941. Then the sport really picked up steam at the end of WWII.

In December of 1947, France put together a meeting at the now famous Streamline Hotel. He assembled a group of drivers, car owners, race officials and promoters to address what France felt was the need for a single sanctioning body that would help organize races throughout the southeast and the country. After the meeting was over, France’s vision was realized and the National Association for Stock Car Automobile Racing (NASCAR) was born.

“He (France, Sr.) had the imagination,” said long-time play-by-play broadcaster and SPEED NASCAR host, Ken Squier. “He had the ability to see far over the horizon as to what the potential was (and) what the potential could be. He also had the business sense to make his visions realities. He was probably the Horatio Alger of the late 20^th century. He came penniless into Daytona and built a sports empire that – at the time – was second to none.”

“I think it was the power of his personality,” said Dave Despain, host of Wind Tunnel on SPEED. “He had the ability to get people to do things his way. He was smart enough to make sure everybody he dealt with got what they needed out of the deal – or got something out of the deal. My perception of him was that he was a very astute deal maker. Right time, right place probably had a lot to do with it too.”

But his vision for the future wasn’t limited to building NASCAR, as his promoter days also nudged him towards building race tracks. In 1957, France founded International Speedway Corporation (ISC) to build stock car racing’s first showplace with the 2.5-mile Daytona International Speedway, which opened in 1959, eventually hosting the sport’s crown jewel event, the Daytona 500. France wasn’t finished, opening the 2.66-mile, high-banked Talladega Superspeedway (Alabama International Motor-Speedway at the time) in 1969, instantly creating the world’s fastest closed-course racing circuit.

“I just don’t think that anyone else who was promoting racing because at the time, no body else had the combination of the vision, the drive, the resourcefulness and the personality to pull all of that together,” Joy added. “For example, building Daytona International Speedway took the city government, state government and federal government because they took part of the land that was the airport, (along with) quite a number of private investors whom were public corporations. But Bill, Sr. was one of those fellows that when people heard his stated vision for the sport, he was able to get them on board. They believed in it. They wanted it to grow. They wanted to help. I can’t think of another sport that was grown to the extent that Bill, Sr. nurtured and grew NASCAR.”

“Building Talladega was another one of those public-private partnerships, in that it was private money that built the track, but it was public land and the state of Alabama had stepped in to help him build the track,” Joy said.

After overcoming rumors and innuendo about the building of Talladega – including stories that it was built on an old Indian burial ground and was haunted – France ran into another obstacle at the track’s first major event. One that tested his mettle, and showed the strength and power of what he believed, and how far NASCAR had come.

Inaugural practice sessions and Charlie Glotzbach’s 199.466 mph pole run demonstrated speeds that, at the time, were unparalleled in the sport. Heights the tire companies struggled to adapt, enough so that cars had to come in and change tires every few laps to keep from severely chunking. Those issues prompted the Richard Petty-led Pro Drivers Association (PDA) to launch a protest and driver boycott of the event. According to Joy, safety concerns were only part of the story.

“Some drivers may have actually felt that way,” Joy said. “But there was an effort to organize drivers, who in large part were also the car owners, to have a larger voice and a larger stake in a sport they could see was growing very rapidly.

“France did a smart thing,” Joy continued. “If you’ll note on the tickets for Talladega or Daytona back in the day, the ticket advertises the length of the race, that it (was) sanctioned by NASCAR and that it’s (was) a 500-mile late model stock car race. (It) allowed France to fill the field with whomever he deemed necessary to put on a show for the paying fans. The first thing he tried to do was to get the drivers back by hopping into a car and hot lapping himself. He had Bill, Jr., entered into the Baby Grand race. Anything he could do to show that the track was safe to race on. When the PDA drew their line in the sand and said ‘We’re not racing,’ France filled the race with Grand American Series drivers from the day before like Richard Childress, ARCA drivers and occasional competitors such as Richard Brickhouse, who won the race. The PDA, realizing the sport would move on without them if they persisted. So they folded and came back to NASCAR.”

The other thing France did was offer free tickets to the next race at Talladega or Daytona, as a capacity crowd witnessed a different race than what they had expected. The moment helped crystallize France’s place in history.

“I think that (Talladega driver boycott) was a reflection of the power of personality side, the determination, which easily reached the point of stubborn, or the insistence that things were going to be done his way,” Despain said. “Also, he had the problem-solving part of it because he made the race happen. It wasn’t the race people expected or wanted to see, but when he threw in the free ticket for Daytona the following year, that pretty much took the edge off of it for the fans. The only real losers in that were his adversaries (drivers & union). It was him being willful enough and smart enough to make it happen. It was very much a reflection of the way he did business.”

The 1969 race season was only three years prior to France, Sr.’s retirement, officially handing the reins of the nation’s premier stock car sanctioning body over to his son, Bill France, Jr.

FRANCE, JR.: BUSINESS LEADER

Commonly known as Bill, Jr. or ‘Little Bill,’ France, Jr. was born just outside Washington, D.C. on April 4, 1933. He was an infant when Bill, Sr., moved to Daytona and grew up in and around the sport his father loved, and ingrained into his soul.

France, Jr., jumped into the family business at an early age, as he spent most of his days working concessions, flagging events, scoring, promoted, served as a steward and worked tirelessly, some say 12 hours a day for 13-straight months during the building of Daytona International Speedway, bulldozing, grading and compacting needed in building France, Sr.’s 2.5-mile oval dream.

And like his father, Bill, Jr., loved to compete, driving off-road motorcycles and competing in enduros like California’s Baja 1000. His enjoyment of motorcycle competition established the little-known, at the time, motocross race that blossomed into the Daytona Supercross. That event inspired the Daytona Beach Bike Week which is hugely popular today.

France, Jr. served as NASCAR Vice President from 1966 until he took over for his father on Jan. 10, 1972, becoming the NASCAR Chairman, CEO & President. Early on, his leadership fostered the growth of NASCAR’s Daytona 500 and the American Motorcycle Association’s (AMA) Daytona 200. That same year, R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company signed the first significant non-endemic marketing partnership with NASCAR, investing in what would become a 31-year relationship that saw more than $60 million dollars a year going into the promotion of NASCAR.

By 1973, the NASCAR Grand National Series was renamed the Winston Cup Series and the points fund increased from $750,000 to $2 million, later raising just the champion’s portion of the fund to $2 million and above by 1998.

“I think Bill, Jr. gets most of the credit for its emergence, but he was working from a platform that his dad built,” Despain said. “For that, I think Senior gets the credit, but bringing in R.J. Reynolds was a huge development that I think really set the stage for television, the Fortune 500 companies and all the marketing success that came behind that. A lot of that was Junior’s work.”

With a title sponsor in place, France, Jr. also knew that the sport needed a significant television presence. In the early and mid 1970s, racing was still considered an outlier sport, appearing in limited segments during ABC’s Wide World of Sports along with drag racing, ski jump, swimming, etc… France, Jr. led the charge in trying to get live coverage of NASCAR races on national television, which culminated in the landmark deal with CBS Sports in 1979 to broadcast the entire race live for the first time in the sport’s history.

As NASCAR’s fate would have it, that year’s Daytona 500 might have been one of the most memorable, if not important, in its history. A snowstorm in the Midwest and Northeast kept a large population seated in front of their televisions as Richard Petty snatched victory out of the jaws of defeat after leaders Donnie Allison and Cale Yarborough crashed on the final lap of the race heading into turn three. While Petty took checkers, the entertainment had just begun as Donnie’s brother, Bobby Allison, joined a knock down fight between the two aforementioned combatants.

The rating success and industry buzz from that race helped France, Jr. sign ESPN in 1980, which later added TNN and TBS, winding up with the large television contract with FOX and NBC in 1999 for the 2001 season. That move wound up being France, Jr.’s most significant until his retirement in 2000, handing the at-track leadership reins over to Mike Helton, the first non-France family president in the sports history.

“He drove a hard bargain,” Joy said of France, Jr. “He knew his circuit was the one sustainable, viable game in town, and he knew he had something let’s say that Indy Car Racing didn’t have, and that was the manufacturers and the close identity between the fans and the cars that were raced.”

France, Sr. remained active in the sport of NASCAR until his death on June 7, 1992, just as the sport he so loved started to experience some of the national success he had first envisioned 45 years earlier.

Bill France, Jr., was diagnosed with lung cancer in 1999, and battled the after effects of the disease and treatment until his death on June 4, 2007. Despite his health issues, ‘Little Bill’ remained an important figure in many of the decisions being made within the sport.

The France legacy is still very strong within the sport of NASCAR, as Bill France, Jr.s son, Brian, took over as the NASCAR Chairman & CEO in 2003, continuing his father’s legacy of overseeing business development. Brian’s older sister, Lesa France Kennedy, is the President of ISC, while Jim France, the brother of Bill France, Jr., is the Executive Vice President of NASCAR and founded the Grand American Road Racing Series.

“I think what Senior and Junior had in common is that they were always looking 10 years down the road,” Despain said. “Racers are very much focused on the world of what’s happening this weekend. Racers aren’t always that forward thinking, as they are dealing with the immediate reality of getting the most out of it they can. I think what Senior had and probably passed on to Junior, was the importance of having a long-term target and a plan for getting there. I don’t think they ever lost that. If you chart the growth of that sport, compared with most other sports, its pretty phenomenal, think about where they came from and where they ended up, and I think that was a product of them having a vision of the future and a relentless determination to get to that goal.”

“Bill France, Sr. was a promoter and a visionary, continually encouraging us to find new ways to grow the sport,” Joy added. “Bill, Jr. was a smart businessman who challenged us to be smart and efficient. In very different ways, they were both great to work for and learn from.”

SPEED is the nation’s first and foremost cable television network dedicated to motor sports and the passion for everything automotive. From racing to restoration, motorcycles to movies, SPEED delivers quality programming from the track to the garage. Now available in more than 79 million homes in North America, SPEED is among the fastest-growing sports cable networks in the country and, the home to NASCAR on SPEED and an industry leader in interactive TV, video on demand, mobile initiatives and broadband services. For more information, please visit SPEEDtv.com, the online motor sports authority.

- SPEEDtv.com, Press Release