Campaign for the American Reader: Pg. 69: "Driving With the Devil"

Neal Thompson's latest book is the highly acclaimed Driving with the Devil: Southern Moonshine, Detroit Wheels, and the Birth of NASCAR.

I asked Neal to apply the "page 69 test" to his book. Here is what he reported:

The first full sentence on page 69 of Driving with the Devil reads: "Hauling 120 gallons was like having four fat guys crammed in the backseat." And then this: "Do the math: a half ton of booze plus a three thousand-pound Ford plus eighty miles an hour on a ninety-degree arcing road, banking left and down, plus an unstable surface of red dirt beneath four wheels ... well, it equaled a Ford that was going to slide into a ditch and explode, unless you knew what you were doing."

Driving with the Devil is the narrative non-fiction story of the bootleggers who helped create the sport that became Nascar. I always intended for the book to do two things: tell racing fans something about their sport they didn't already know, and, mainly, tell the rest of the world how and why Nascar came to be. I was surprised to find a nicely encapsulated scene on page 69 that, in itself, comes close to achieving those two goals.

The man driving the car in this scene is a southern bootlegger named Roy Hall, a handsome, mischievous speed demon who, thanks to his moonshining skills, becomes one of the first and best racers on the dirt tracks of the early Nascar circuit. As Nascar legend Junior Johnson says elsewhere in the book: "Moonshiners put more time, energy, thought and love into their cars than any racer ever will. Lose on the track and you go home. Lose with a load of whiskey and you go to jail."

Roy Hall would go to jail, time and again. But the rest of the scene on page 69 shows how, for some southern boys, the thrill of the chase was worth the risk.

FULL TEXT OF PAGE 69:

Hauling 120 gallons was like having four fat guys crammed in the back seat. Do the math: a half ton of booze plus a 3,000-pound Ford plus eighty miles an hour on a ninety-degree arcing road, banking left and down, plus an unstable surface of red dirt beneath four wheels ... well, it equaled a Ford that was going to slide into a ditch and explode, unless you knew what you were doing. But that's when Hall shined, and why moonshiners would soon prove themselves to be natural, intuitive racers.

With his hands on the bottom of the steering wheel, Hall would throw himself into the turn, spinning the wheel in toward the curve. When he felt the car begin to slip, he would hit the gas, not the brake, actually accelerating through the turn, with the car moving forward and sideways at the same time. When the rear end began to slide too far, he would torque the wheel in the same direction; to the right in a left-hand curve, for example - otherwise, he'd spin out. If his split-second timing was dead-on, just before he reached the road's edge and the steep embankment beyond it, the mechanics and geometry and gravity of the moment converged in perfect synchronicity. Tires somehow found purchase on the dirt, the momentum of the slide yielded to the forward urging of the engine, and Hall and Ford and whiskey all straightened out and rocketed forward.

Until the next curve. Hall burned through many sets of tires in this manner. Said one '30s-era Atlanta mechanic: "He never knew what a brake was." The revenuers simply couldn't keep up. And when they tried, they sometimes wished they hadn't.

One night, two revenue agents spotted a loaded '39 Ford coupe heading south from the town of Tate, toward Atlanta. The agents sped after the coupe, following it through the tight curves of Highway 5. It was a dark night and the coupe was beginning to pull away from the revenuers. The agent behind the wheel wasn't familiar enough with the road and took a sharp curve too fast and spun off the road. The car plowed into a jagged pile of scrap marble that'd been dumped there. One agent was thrown from the car and landed amidst the sharp rocks, one of which struck his head and knocked him out.

Many thanks to Neal for the input.

Read an excerpt from Driving with the Devil.

Among the praise for Driving with the Devil:

"Thompson exhumes the sport's Prohibition-era roots in this colorful, meticulously detailed history."
-Time magazine

“Here’s the real story, not just of NASCAR, but of the new South that emerged from moonshine and speed.”
—Richard Ben Cramer, author of Joe DiMaggio: The Hero’s Life and editor of The Best American Sports Writing 2004

“Neal Thompson has written NASCAR’s Glory of Their Times. He tells the true story of NASCAR’s beginnings, revealing the sport’s strong whiskey roots and letting us get to know its key movers and shakers, including the triumvirate of racer Red Byron, mechanic Red Vogt, and bootlegger car owner Raymond Parks. Like Seabiscuit, Thompson makes a sport and an era come wonderfully alive.”
—Peter Golenbock, author of Miracle: Bobby Allison and the Saga of the Alabama Gang and American Zoom: Stock Car Racing—From Dirt Tracks to Daytona

“Driving with the Devil is a full-tilt excursion through the back roads of NASCAR’s past, when moonshiners and scofflaws pioneered the sport. This is a tale that sanitized corporate NASCAR would rather forget about, but with Neal Thompson at the wheel, it makes for wonderful reading.”
—Sharyn McCrumb, author of St. Dale

“Driving with the Devil is a treasure trove of historically relevant information that tracks the history of the American automobile industry, the culture and morality of the broader society, and the motivations and personalities of early stock-car-racing operatives. All of which have inexorably contributed to the foundation and fabric of NASCAR’s brand of stock-car racing as it manifests itself today.”
—Jack Roush, chairman of Roush Racing