That's racin': and its colorful, rowdy past is one reason the NASCAR hall of fame, which opens this month, has its home in Charlotte.

• Position: BOOK EXCERPT

While the builders of Daytona and Atlanta made significant gambles to see their projects come to fruition and experienced their share of delays and shortfalls, these paled in comparison with the outlandish risks and the obstacles faced by Curtis Turner and Bruton Smith in constructing Charlotte Motor Speedway. The chaotic process started in April 1959, when they called press conferences on the same day to announce competing speedway projects for the Charlotte area. Both men had huge ambitions for their projects; Turner planned a 1.5-mile track, and Smith envisioned a 2-mile track with a football field in the infield. Both also possessed huge aspirations in terms of their position within NASCAR and sought to challenge Bill France's dominance of the sport. Turner and France were old friends going back to the earliest days of NASCAR. They had raced a Nash together in the first Carrera Panamericana and partied and fished together, and the flamboyant Turner had long been one of France's and NASCAR's greatest human assets. However, by the late 1950s Turner was searching for his niche in racing beyond his career as a driver. He had cut back significantly on racing and in 1959 entered only 10 Grand National events. Turner was also a successful (sometimes) timber baron who flew around the Southeast making, and losing, millions of dollars in land and timber deals. In many ways, he saw himself as an equal to France and began to look for ways to put himself into a position of power in the sport.

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Smith had similar dreams. Even as a very young man, he successfully challenged France's domination of stock-car racing in the region through his Charlotte-area promotions under the rival NSCRA umbrella. The NSCRA gave NASCAR and France serious competition--especially in Georgia, South Carolina and the Charlotte area--in the late '40s and early '50s until the Army drafted Smith during the Korean War. By the time Smith returned from the service, France had effectively broken the NSCRA, and the competing series had gone out of business, with the tracks that hosted its races and the vast majority of its star drivers now in the NASCAR camp. Smith began promoting races in the Charlotte area under the NASCAR umbrella with a good bit of success. However, he also saw himself as a peer of France's, and the construction of a major speedway in Charlotte would prove his bona fides as a major player in the sport.

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Although Turner and Smith had grandiose visions for what their projects could do for their sport, for the Charlotte area and for themselves, they had much more in the way of dreams and pure chutzpah than they had in capital and other resources required to complete such a project. As Turner biographer Robert Edelstein observed, both Turner and Smith were "playing poker with less-than-stellar hands." Both soon realized that the odds of success for their individual projects were much lower than if they partnered. While neither cared to share the limelight with the other, they decided to pair up and focus their efforts on a tract of land to the northeast of Charlotte just over the line in Cabarrus County.

Turner and Smith began a frantic chase for money to finance the project in the summer and fall of 1959 as the duo announced that they would hold the first race at the track--an unprecedented 600-miler--the same day as the Indianapolis 500 in 1960: Sunday, May 29. Both hit the road selling stock in their corporation, "literally," as Humpy Wheeler recalled, "out of the trunks of their cars for $1 each." The corporation also made commercials and sent out mailings advertising its stock. The mailings in particular drew the attention of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Turner also sold several tracts of timber to finance construction and, ever the creative and outlandish businessman, even pursued schemes to commercially produce rockets to send satellites into space and explored the possibility of selling advertising on the margins of U.S. currency.

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Problems arose almost as soon as construction began in late 1959. One of the wettest on record, the winter of 1959-60 turned the site into a sea of mud and considerably slowed construction. The biggest setback came, however, when what the core-drill report termed as scattered "boulders" turned out to be "half a million yards of solid granite." Immediately, the cost of excavating the site rose from 18 cents a yard to $1.00 a yard, "TNT not included." "If they'd searched North Carolina for the worst possible place to build a racetrack," mechanic Smokey Yunick recalled, "that' s where they built it."

At this point, however, they had put too much money and prestige on the line to turn back. While Smith tried to keep the contractors moving--often with empty promises that they would be paid soon--Turner flew around the country calling in favors, selling stock and timberland and trying to get loans. As Edelstein observed, Turner began "a unique practice of exhausting desperation: He'll write paychecks on a Friday evening and then spend the weekend in a mad flying rush around the country, collecting money to cover checks and be at the bank the moment it opens Monday morning." At one point as the race date approached, contractors threatened to cease work until Turner and Smith paid their debts. Turner flew to Memphis, where he got a "Mafia guy" to give him a "phony cashier's check" made out to Turner for $250,000 and drawn on the fictitious "Bank of New York." "It was a nice lookin' check," Turner recalled. Turner took the check to a meeting with contractors, allowed them to examine it, but told them that he would not pay them until they completed their work. The ruse worked, and the contractors resumed operations. The delays did force Turner and Smith to ask NASCAR to move the date of the race to June 19, but it looked as if their gambles might pay off.

However, one week before scheduled qualifying runs, excavation contractor Owen Flowe threatened to shut down the entire operation. He had his men move heavy equipment onto the track, blocking paving of the last section, and refused to move it unless Turner and Smith paid $600,000 owed to his company. A phony cashier's check would not do the trick this time, and Turner and Smith did not have the money; they had even struggled to come up with money to place in escrow to guarantee the $106,775 purse, a NASCAR requirement. In the most audacious, and most dangerous, of their gambles yet--one right out of stock-car racing's wild and woolly bootlegger past--Turner, his...