L.A.’S PRE-FAST LANE DAYS

In 1951, when the only races run at Daytona Beach were on the hard-packed sand, and eight years before Bill France built Daytona International Speedway, NASCAR introduced its brand of stock car racing to Los Angeles.

Carrell Speedway, long since razed to make way for the Artesia Freeway, was the site. On April 8, what is now known as the Winston Cup series visited California. It would be 12 years before Les Richter made NASCAR races a staple at Riverside International Raceway.

The track, which opened in 1940 as a half-mile dirt oval, was paved in 1948, but operated only six more years before it was condemned.

Marshall Teague came out from Daytona Beach and won the 100-mile race, for which he collected $1,000.

Stock car racing was vastly different from today’s high-profile sport. Cars in those days were truly stock, right off the showroom floor, and rarely even modified for safety purposes.

Frank “Rebel” Mundy, one of NASCAR’s original “good ol’ boys” from Georgia, showed how stock they were by driving a rental car in the race.

“Bill France had organized NASCAR in 1949 and he wanted to get the car companies involved so he talked with Nash Motors and told them, ‘If you furnish the car, I’ll furnish the driver,’ recalled Mundy, now 80, from his home in Atlanta.

“They agreed, so he called me and said he had a car for me to drive. We loaded up Bill’s little plane and Bill, Marshall Teague and his wife and I headed for Los Angeles.

“We arrived Friday, but when we got to the track to try the car out, the factory said we couldn’t have it because that model wouldn’t be introduced to the public for another week. They said we had to wait, that they didn’t want a car to show up on a race track before it got in the display rooms.

“Well, I thought, hell, I’ve come a long way, I’m going to drive, so I found a Hertz U-Drive and rented a Plymouth coupe. I took it to a filling station, got some whitewash and painted a big ‘X’ on the sides, taped up the headlights, put in a seat belt and headed for Carrell Speedway.

“I drove careful, not getting in anybody’s way and finished ninth or 10th. After the race, I washed off the whitewash, took the tape off and drove it back to the rental agency that night. The attendant looked it over, there weren’t any dings on it, but he said, ‘Damn, those tires are smooth.’

“I said, ‘Yeah, they must be out of alignment.’

“It wasn’t a bad deal. I collected $100 and the car rental was $37, so I cleared $63. That wasn’t bad in those days.”

Teague, who was killed in 1959 while testing an Indy car at Daytona, went wire-to-wire in a Hudson Hornet against a field of mostly West Coast drivers. He averaged 61.047 mph for the 200 laps.

The Hornet was the hot car of the day, and although its era lasted only four years, it was a meteoric one. In 1951, Herb Thomas won six races and four pole positions en route to the season championship. The next year, Hornet drivers did even better, winning 27 of 34 races, with Tim Flock and Thomas leading the standings.

Mundy returned to Carrell Speedway in 1953 and 1954 with a Hudson Hornet and won three AAA stock car races promoted by J.C. Agajanian. NASCAR and the AAA, forerunner of the United States Auto Club, were bitter rivals and ran competing series in the ‘50s. Mundy won AAA championships in 1952 and 1955.

The Hudson Hornet era ended when Carl Kiekhaefer introduced the Chrysler to NASCAR in 1954, Lee Petty winning seven races and the championship.

Behind Teague in that 1951 race, Johnny Mantz of Long Beach finished second in a ’51 Nash, with George Seeger of Whittier third in a 1950 Plymouth

The seventh-place finisher was Danny Letner, also in a Hudson Hornet--the same Danny Letner who finished third last month driving a Trophy Truck in the SCORE San Felipe 250 off-road race.

“People came up to me [in San Felipe] and instead of saying what a good race I’d driven, they asked me how I could drive a 750-horsepower Chevy truck like that, being as old as I am,” said Letner, who admits to 70. “I tell them I’ll keep racing as long as I’m competitive.”

Letner says his most vivid recollection of racing in the ‘50s was of all the cheating.

“There weren’t many rules and what there were, the boys with the Southern drawls you could hardly understand would interpret them any way they wanted,” Letner said. “After we won the Pacific Coast championship in 1956, we went down South to race with the Grand National [now Winston Cup] guys. We drove a Dodge in the convertible series.

“I remember they would tear the winner’s engine down in somebody’s farm house. One day Buck Baker won a race and when they pulled his engine, one old Southern boy tech inspector said, ‘Buck, how come this cam is cold and your engine is warm? How do you explain that?’

“Buck just stood there looking at it and said, ‘Damned if I know.’ It sounded so funny, with that drawl of his, that everybody started laughing and Buck kept the win.”

A few years ago, reminiscing over the early days of NASCAR, Richard Petty said, “If you wasn’t cheatin’, you wasn’t likely to be competitive.”

A crowd estimated at 10,000 attended the Sunday race at Carrell Speedway in what was a busy racing week in the Los Angeles area. The night before, Tex Luce won a 20-lap AMA motorcycle main event at Carrell before 5,112, and there were jalopy races at Lincoln Park Speedway and the Culver City Stadium. A week earlier, Sam Hanks had won an AAA 100-lap midget race on a half-mile dirt oval before 8,581 at the Pomona Fairgrounds.