Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, August 28, 1995 TAG: 9508280126
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JACK BOGACZYK STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
``I guess you can't even tell where Starkey Speedway was now,'' said Wood, one of NASCAR's Stuart-based Wood brothers. ``I can still see it though. Times were really different then.''
It was 31 years ago Sunday that the last NASCAR sanctioned race was run on Roanoke's quarter-mile track. It was the 50th race of the Grand National year, what has become Winston Cup racing in more recent years.
It also was a revival for the speedway, long ago replaced by industry and weeds along Merriman Road, south of Penn Forest Elementary School, in Southwest Roanoke County. After hosting the best of NASCAR's good ol' boys in 1961 and '62, the track closed. In 1964, Wood, future Hall of Fame driver Marvin Panch and Charlotte-based John Moose decided to reopen the track and promote another GN race, renaming the place Roanoke Raceway for one day.
Junior Johnson won the race - with some help.
``Believe me, if I had known it was going to be the last race in the history of that track, I wouldn't have loaned Junior that tire,'' Wood said, laughing.
Both were driving '64 Ford Fairlanes. The Roanoke 250, on Sunday afternoon, Aug.23, included two 25-lap qualifying races and a 200-lap feature. The winner over 50 miles was to earn $850. The field included Richard Petty, who would run all 61 races that year and win the first of his seven points championships.
Wood was on the pole for the race, with a qualifying speed of 55.970 mph on the paved quarter-mile. He also had ``real soft left-side tires'' thanks to a recapping job. Johnson won the other 25-lap race, and then came to Wood, asking to borrow one of those tires.
``Junior figured one of his was good enough and so one of mine should be good enough,'' Wood, 70, recalled. ``I thought, `I'm helping promote the race,' and I hated not to do it, so I loaned him one of my tires. Then I just wasn't quite good enough.''
Wood led the first five laps before Johnson took the lead. ``Then Ned Jarrett came up, banging on my back end, so I let him go by,'' Wood said. ``Pretty soon, here comes another one, and it's [David] Pearson. He's banging on me, and I just said, `No, I'm not letting him by, too. I'm staying right here.'''
Wood finished third, behind Johnson - who won by more than a lap - and Jarrett. Pearson was fourth, behind Wood, whose driving career included four Grand National victories. In a 22-car field, Petty was 15th. Johnson also had won the previous night, at Bowman-Gray Stadium in Winston-Salem, N.C. The Roanoke race was the third for the GN regulars in less than 48 hours. They had run Friday night at Columbia, S.C.
Johnson's average speed around the Starkey surface was 49.847 mph - or 105 mph slower than Petty's speed in winning the Daytona 500 that year. Petty's blown Plymouth engine in Roanoke didn't matter much. He still had a points lead of about 4,900 heading to Darlington for the Southern 500 two weekends later.
``That race in Roanoke was the last one I ever drove in,'' Wood said. ``It wasn't planned that way. It just happened. I never said I was quitting. Marvin drove the car on the big tracks, and I drove some of the short tracks. I knew he wanted to drive all of them, so I let him.''
The crowd for the race is recorded in some record books at 4,500. The day after the race, however, Panch told the Roanoke newspapers that only 2,100 were in attendance. It also was reported that although an unnamed group had an option on 100 acres in Catawba as a potential site ``for a superspeedway,'' the lack of interest for Starkey Speedway's comeback would likely doom that.
``The crowd was very disappointing,'' Panch said then.
``Maybe the people in this area don't like quarter-mile racing,'' Moose told the Roanoke papers on the day after the race. ``But they might have knocked themselves out of getting superspeedway racing by not coming out yesterday.''
The weather was perfect, too. Moose said he didn't think ``many sneaked in without paying. ... We're not crying about anything. We're just disappointed.''
``For the life of me, I don't know why we did it,'' Wood said 31 years later. ``I think it was Moose's hare-brained idea. ... Somehow, we didn't lose money. I think we might have made 50 bucks apiece. I guess I wasn't surprised more people didn't show. It was almost an abandoned track.''
Not only did Wood's last race as a driver come on the track. He won the first race in Starkey history, ``sometime in the early '50s,'' he said. ``It was a modified sportsman race. I was driving a '39 Ford Coupe as I can best remember.''
Roanoke hasn't had a race track since, unless you count the Whitey Taylor-promoted efforts at Victory Speedway - aka ``South Roanoke Speedway'' - a few years ago.
In the only other two would-be Winston Cup races at Starkey, Johnson won in '61 and Petty in '62. The first of those, on a Saturday night in June, drew a track-record crowd of 7,407 for a 150-lapper. The '62 race was run on a Wednesday night in August.
``That last race there was the first and last one I ever had anything to do with as a promoter,'' Wood said. ``I got a lot smarter after that.''
Keywords:
AUTO RACING
by CNB