bosco022

Smokey on the beach at Daytona circa 1957

bosco022

The old "beach" course at Daytona

bosco022

Daytona International in 1959

Falcon

Damn! That looks like the start of an NASA American Iron race, except those guys in the picture haven't run into each other, yet!

Supercharged111

I was thinking it's just a matter of time before the flag man gets his stand taken out. The crowd really isn't much better off either.

Bill Dearborn

Used to go to the Jalopy races all the time. There were little dirt tracks in every town in the country 50+ years ago. Pretty much all of them were configured this way. Didn't have a lot of people in the stands injured. I grew up in Erie, PA and in the late 50s they ran Jalopy races inside the local football stadium on the footrace track. At the end of each school year they would bring in a load of dirt and cover the cinders on the foot track, place some dirt in one of the end zones to make a pit area and go racing. The field/track has an outside concrete wall to separate the spectators from the field. You could sit outside of the box seat section several feet from the wall and have the cars banging away about 15 ft from where you were sitting. Pretty much every gas station in town had a race car.


Bill