France: Benevolent Dictator : Motorsports: NASCAR founder, who died Sunday, built stock car racing into a major league sport his own way.

The mantle of stock car racing has long since been passed to younger members of the France family, but the shadow of Big Bill France will remain as long as race cars that look like passenger cars run in front of hundreds of thousands of spectators at NASCAR races.

France, who died last Sunday at 82 after a long illness, is probably the most important man in American motor racing history.

Tony Hulman has been eulogized as the man who saved Indy car racing when he salvaged the Indianapolis Motor Speedway after World War II, but the 500 had been run 31 times before he took over. Wally Parks took drag racing off city streets and made the National Hot Rod Assn. a highly successful operation, but it has yet to reach the plateau enjoyed by NASCAR.

France, a self-styled “benevolent dictator,” made NASCAR, which has nearly 100 tracks running weekly shows across the United States as well as the high-profile Winston Cup and its $24-million series with such stars as Richard Petty, Dale Earnhardt, Davey Allison and Harry Gant.

In 1947, in a tiny room in Daytona Beach, Fla., France hammered out stock car racing’s first rules. Before France, the sport had been fragmented with fly-by-night promoters sporadically putting on races, using mostly renegade drivers, many of whom earned their livings running moonshine on the back roads of the Carolinas.

To showcase his dream a few years later, France took the racers off the beach at Daytona and built a huge 2 1/2-mile triangular oval where they would eventually attract more than 100,000 fans for the annual Daytona 500.

“Bill France is racing’s greatest hero,” Junior Johnson, a former driver and car owner, said after learning of the death of his old rival.

“They say Richard Petty’s the King, Earnhardt’s the Iron Man, Cale (Yarborough) the Wild Man and Darrell (Waltrip) is one thing or another. But Bill France is the hero of this sport. He was the pioneer. He’s what got us here, and he made all the decisions that made what’s happening today a success.”

France retired as president of NASCAR in 1972 after 25 years as boss of stock car racing. Bill France Jr. moved into his father’s position and the senior France’s other son, Jim, is also an executive with the organization.

The one thing the elder France insisted on was parity among the manufacturers. When one car appeared to gain an advantage, France would change the rules to regain balance. He brooked no favorites, even among his close friends.

When Chrysler complained at being deprived of its hemi-head engine in 1965, France said too bad. Chrysler quit the sport, taking Petty, its No. 1 attraction, with it. Petty sat out the year drag racing but returned in 1966.

When drivers sought to form a union in the 1950s, France suspended the ringleaders, Curtis Turner and Tim Flock--two the biggest names in racing--for four years. It didn’t matter to France that he and Turner had been co-drivers a few years earlier in a Mexican road race.

When drivers refused to drive on the Alabama International Raceway at Talladega when it opened in 1969 because, they said, it was too dangerous, France, then 59, climbed into a car and took it around at 176 m.p.h.

Even that did not convince the drivers, led by Petty, and they refused to race. France responded by rounding up a group of lesser-known drivers and ran the race. The regulars returned the next year.

Bobby Allison, the third-leading winner in NASCAR history, often felt frustrated by France’s changing rules.

“Early on, he ran NASCAR with an iron fist,” Allison recalled. “There were no arguments, no back talk, no nothing. If you were going to race in NASCAR, you were going to do it his way and not say anything until you were asked.

“Today, I feel he was very fair. Maybe if he he’d say something I didn’t like on a given day, he would also say something that Richard Petty or Junior Johnson didn’t like. We’d all have to comply with it.

“One day he told me he ruled like a benevolent dictator because a democratic deal (among race drivers) wouldn’t allow things to go ahead and progress.

“Big Bill knew there were a lot of people who wanted to see those cars on the track, and he knew that having them look like the ones at home in the driveway was important. He made the rules where there wasn’t anyone who could run away and hide. Another thing he did was keep the rules where it didn’t take a young fortune to get started.”

Richard Childress, a former driver who has won four Winston Cup championships as owner of the Chevrolet driven by Dale Earnhardt, says he has France to thank for his success.

“I’m probably where I am today because of Bill France,” Childress said. “In 1969 when they boycotted the race at Talladega, he talked me into going ahead and running the race. I owned my own car, and I’d been making a little money running Saturday night races, but he gave me more money for running Talladega than I’d ever seen in my life.

“I took it back home and bought my first land to build my shop on. I tried to always watch how he did things, and I tried to adopt his style. Everything he did, he did it right.”

Glen Wood, one of the famed Wood brothers of Stuart, Va., who were stock car racing pioneers with France, may have said it best when he said of France:

“He was a whale of a man.”