'Fireball': Racing star's death spurred changes

Roger Roy
SENTINEL STAFF WRITER
Posted May 28, 2001

One week before NASCAR superstar Dale Earnhardt hit the wall on the final lap of the Daytona 500 on Feb. 18, the Orlando Sentinel published a series of articles spotlighting the common link in accidents that were killing one top driver after another: basilar skull fracture.
A few days later, the same injury would kill Earnhardt in front of a national television audience. "Racing Safety" is an ongoing series dealing with issues ranging from the Earnhardt crash investigation to broader questions related to the safety, business, culture and history of NASCAR.

DAYTONA BEACH -- The grave lies in the shade at the bottom of a gentle hill, far enough from the road that only visitors who venture down the stone path would note the name engraved on the weathered bronze plaque: E. Glenn "Fireball" Roberts.

It is a name known to thousands of the race fans who crowd into Daytona International Speedway, only a mile or so beyond the hill from Roberts' grave. But many know the name only because it is printed on their tickets, designating seats in one of the sprawling grandstands -- which now stretch nearly halfway around the giant speedway -- that are named for dead racing stars.

And so Roberts' name has become little more than a historical footnote, a name on a ticket signifying no more than a row or seat number.

But there was a time, before stock-car racing had its Intimidator or even its King, when Fireball Roberts ruled the high, fast banks at Daytona, an era when he dominated the sports' fastest tracks.

It was a long, improbable path from his teenage years racing hot rods on his hometown streets in Apopka to his place as the first superstar NASCAR could claim.

But his fall would be swift. And on Memorial Day of 1964 he would lie in a hospital not far from the racetrack outside Charlotte, his life slipping away.

In the nearly four decades since his death, money and television and celebrity have changed his sport in ways that Roberts surely could not have imagined.

But there is much that has not changed. And then, as now, the death of NASCAR's biggest star, in one of racing's deadliest years ever, would stun fans and spur a critical consideration of racing's safety.

'He had this hot rod'

The roar would roll up U.S. Highway 441 from Apopka to Mount Dora before heading south again, like a summer storm running laps.

But this thunder was man-made: Curt Haygood in his 1949 Ford with a 1950 Oldsmobile Rocket V-8, door-to-door with Glenn Roberts in his '37 Chevy coupe powered by a Cadillac engine.

"You probably could have heard us coming 10 miles away," Haygood said. "We'd fly down that road. But there wasn't any traffic. You could lay down on 441, and you wouldn't get run over."

Roberts' father, Glenn Sr., was a superintendent for the sawmills owned by the prominent family of Apopka Mayor John Land. The Roberts family lived in a distinctive brick house that still stands on the city's north side.

Glenn and his friends tinkered with cars and raced them whenever they could. As a teenager, he had excelled at motorcycles and go-carts, and his father encouraged him to race.

When the family moved to Daytona Beach before Glenn graduated, he lived with the Haygoods in Apopka until school ended. After high school, he left for engineering school at the University of Florida in Gainesville, hoping it would lead to a career designing auto engines.

But Roberts never got his mind off racing, said George McClure, his college roommate. Roberts raced every chance he got, at horse tracks and fairgrounds throughout Central Florida.

And on weekends, when Roberts drove from Gainesville to visit his parents in Daytona Beach, he'd try to set a new record with each trip.

"He had this hot rod . . . and man, it would move," McClure said. "If you were smart, you'd be hanging on tight the whole ride. If you were a religious man, you'd be praying."

McClure was with Roberts one day when police blocked a country road, trying to stop him.

"I figured he was caught, but Fireball just kind of slips off the road and down the shoulder and sort of up on the edge of the ditch and right on around them. And we're going 105 mph," McClure said. "I told him, 'The hell with this, I'm not riding with you anymore.' "

After a year of college, Roberts had had enough. He dropped out to race full time.

Bigger, faster tracks

It was a wonderful name for a race-car driver: Fireball. And it seemed even better when compared with the nicknames of other early racers -- Possum Jones, Banjo Matthews, Burrhead Nantz.

After he was famous, Roberts told people that his name had nothing to do with racing: As a teenage pitcher, he had earned it for a blistering fastball. But those who grew up with him in Apopka don't remember him being much of a baseball player.

Wherever he got the name, it stuck, and racing fans took notice of it as Roberts traveled the gritty Southern racing circuit.

Stock-car racing then meant dirt tracks and small purses, barely enough for even the top racers to live on. Even by the late 1950s, the winner's purse at most Grand National races was only $700 or $800.

But the money in NASCAR -- and the speed -- would skyrocket.

Through its first decade, NASCAR had a single track with the kind of high-speed banking that came to be described as a superspeedway -- the 1.4-mile Darlington Raceway, where NASCAR's first 500-mile race was run in 1950. NASCAR records show the race was won by Californian Johnny Mantz, who cruised around at an average 76 mph for six and a half hours. In second place was 21-year-old Fireball Roberts.

Speeds grew throughout the 1950s, and so did the sport's following. As more money flowed into stock-car racing, promoters built bigger, faster tracks.

In 1959, Bill France Sr. opened Daytona International Speedway. In 1960, superspeedways opened at Charlotte, Atlanta and Hanford, Calif.

The tracks would transform stock-car racing. And they would make Fireball Roberts a household name.

'The best damn garage'

To fans familiar only with NASCAR's modern era, two elements of the sport's early superspeedway days stand out.

The first is just how "stock" the cars really were. Modern Winston Cup cars have almost no factory parts other than the hood and trunk lid. But through the early 1960s, aside from steel roll bars, fat tires and loud exhaust, the race cars were almost indistinguishable from street models.

The second surprise is the astonishing speeds the cars reached on the big, new speedways.

On the short dirt tracks that still dominated the NASCAR schedule in 1960, the winner's average speed was usually no more than 60 or 70 mph. The perception of death-defying speed came as much from the booming engines and flying dirt as from actual speed.

But on the superspeedways, the big V-8s pushed cars to heart-stopping velocities.

In 1961, Roberts took the pole for the Daytona 500 with a speed of 155.7 mph in a Pontiac that he could have driven home that day. His qualifying pace was 10 mph faster than the winner's qualifying speed at that year's Indianapolis 500, for decades the touchstone of speed in American auto racing.

Many racers who had come up banging fenders on dirt tracks never adjusted to the high speeds of the big banked speedways. But Roberts excelled as speeds soared.

In 1959, Roberts was still delivering auto parts between races to support his wife and young daughter when he hooked up with Henry "Smokey" Yunick, a race mechanic who ran an auto shop that billed itself as "The best damn garage in Daytona."

The success of the Roberts-Yunick combination would foreshadow that of future NASCAR partnerships such as Gordon and Evernham, Earnhardt and Childress.

For three years, the fastest thing running on NASCAR's big speedways was Fireball Roberts at the wheel of one of Yunick's black-and-gold No. 22 Pontiacs.

Roberts ran 30 superspeedway races in that time. He won five, more than any other driver. But his qualifying record was staggering: Roberts won the pole for 15 of those 30 races.

Yunick, in an interview just weeks before his death earlier this month, said there was no mystery behind their speed.

"When you get the mechanic, the driver and the money on the same page, they're about unbeatable," Yunick said.

At the time, "big money" in NASCAR was "maybe $12,000 from Pontiac," Yunick said. But no one could squeeze more speed from the cars than Yunick. And Roberts would press them to their limits on the superspeedways.

"He was the first thinking driver," Yunick said. "Probably by 1960, he was the best race driver we had. He developed the strategy of trying to plan the race. Nobody had ever tried that before. They'd just drop the green flag, and you'd go like hell."

While he would bang bumpers and fenders when he had to, Roberts was never known as a rough driver, said Bobby Johns, a Miami racer who was a friend and competitor. Roberts' strength was a competitive intensity that seemed out of character with his otherwise easygoing personality.

At the hotels along the NASCAR circuit, Johns said, "If somebody swam underwater down and back in the pool, Fireball would swim down and back and down again. If somebody else dove off the high board, Fireball would dive off the roof."

He was the same on the racetrack.

"Fireball wouldn't bang you, wouldn't try to knock you out," Johns said. "But he just kept on coming, pushing you and pushing you. He'd run you to death."

Roberts set marks that would stand for decades.

In 1961, he led every lap while winning a 250-mile race at the 1.4-mile Marchbanks Speedway in California. For 39 years, it would stand as the only flag-to-flag superspeedway win.

By 1963, Roberts had won five 500-mile races, more than any other driver.

No one equaled his feats on the classic speedways that made up NASCAR's "grand slam" -- Daytona, Atlanta, Charlotte and Darlington. He won five poles on the grand slam speedways three years in a row, something no other driver has done two years in a row.

Nowhere did he shine brighter than at Daytona, where his feats made him the local hero. He won the inaugural July 4th race at Daytona in 1959, which was then 250 miles. He won his qualifying race for the 500 in 1960, and again in 1961.

And yet, as with Dale Earnhardt decades later, Roberts would watch stock-car racing's biggest prize, the Daytona 500, repeatedly slip through his fingers.

He owned the race

At the first Daytona 500 in 1959, Roberts climbed steadily from his start in 46th place to lead the race, until his fuel pump failed at lap 56.

In 1960, Roberts started from the pole and led until the 19th lap, when he dropped out with engine problems.

In 1961, Roberts was on the pole again, and had led nearly every lap when his engine blew with just 13 laps to go.

But 1962 would end the jinx. At the wheel of one of Yunick's 405-horsepower Pontiacs, Roberts would prove invincible.

In his qualifying race, Roberts ran away with the victory, posting a 156.9-mph average speed. He won a 10-lap "all star" race, the predecessor of today's The Winston. And he took the pole for the 500 with a blistering 158.7-mph qualifying speed.

On race day, Roberts battled for the lead with Junior Johnson before Johnson left with engine problems. From then on, Roberts owned the race and led the last 49 laps to finish nearly a half-lap ahead of second-place Richard Petty.

The 500 miles had run without a caution flag, and Roberts had led 144 of the 200 laps. His average speed of 152.5 mph made it the first Daytona 500 to break the 150-mph mark.

To complete his display of Daytona dominance that year, Roberts returned for the July 4th race, then called the Firecracker 250, and handily won that, too.

It was the year that Roberts' fans began calling Daytona "Fireball International Speedway."

It also was the year that Smokey Yunick told Roberts he was through as a racer.

'You should quit'

Even as Roberts dominated Daytona, Yunick realized that his driver had changed.

"Fireball won everything there was that year," Yunick said. "I told him, 'I'm proud of you, but I'll never race with you again. You should quit.' "

Yunick had seen it before races: Roberts' agitation, how he used his asthma inhaler repeatedly, how he would sweat through the back of his race suit waiting for the race to start. How he would hesitate when passing.

In the corner of Yunick's cluttered office at his now-closed garage is an ordinary bucket seat, covered in black vinyl, the seat belts still dangling from it. It is the seat from the car Roberts drove to win the 1962 Daytona 500.

"He'd always been very relaxed, very comfortable, in a car. He'd sit back just like this. But now he was hunched forward, very uneasy. You could see the gap between his back and the seat."

Yunick read it as a sign that Roberts was no longer comfortable with the risks.

It wasn't so much a matter of becoming afraid as it was just figuring out how bad the odds were, Yunick figured. What race driver of Roberts' era, if he faced the hard truth, could laugh off the risk?

"You gotta remember two things about what was happening then," Yunick said. "First, the number of people getting killed in those days was maybe twice what it is now. Second, we'd gotten the speeds up to where we were years ahead of the tires we had. Those tires would blow, and there wasn't a damn thing any driver could do about it.

"I can remember times when a tire would blow and Fireball would hit the . . . wall and, oh, he was in some terrible wrecks."

'Hello walls'

At the 1961 National 400 at Charlotte, Roberts was leading in one of Yunick's big, booming Pontiacs when his right front tire blew as he entered turn 3. Roberts' car smashed the guardrail, slipped down the banking and then slid back into oncoming traffic, where another car slammed its right side at more than 100 mph.

The right side of the car was demolished. Paint from the car that hit him was smeared on the side of Roberts' bucket seat. But Roberts had barely a scratch, Yunick said.

"The first thing he says to me is, 'Well, it looks like superior driving has saved the day again.' Just like that. He'd always say that. But by the time he'd said it that day, we'd spent maybe 10 minutes trying to get him conscious.

"I told him, 'Well, after you can see again and take a look at your car, you may feel otherwise.' Because it was all just luck. He could have lived or he could have died, but it was all luck."

Roberts had become the best-known name in stock-car racing.

Even people who knew nothing of NASCAR now knew the name Fireball Roberts.

And among racing fans, the seemingly fearless battles he fought with the superspeedway walls and guardrails had earned him an unsettling theme song.

Whenever Roberts and Yunick walked into a bar anywhere along the NASCAR circuit, it was only moments before the jukebox would take up Faron Young's sad country hit, "Hello Walls."

"Lonely walls, I'll keep you company," Young would croon. Roberts would laugh like a good sport and flash his race-driver smile for the crowd.

But Yunick had watched Roberts' jaunty fearlessness erode as the speeds climbed and the tires failed again and again.

Histories of NASCAR refer to "the legendary Smokey Yunick" so often it seems part of his name. But he was never known as a sentimental man, and at 77, hearing problems and a painful bout of leukemia had done little to soften him.

In a long conversation about his old friend just weeks before his own death, the only time Yunick's voice choked even a little was when he thought of Roberts at the wheel in those long, fast races.

"It was a terrible thing, Fireball sitting there hour after hour waiting for the tires to blow."

In Yunick's cars, Roberts had become the king of the superspeedways, the fastest driver on the fastest tracks.

But said another way, he was simply the man most likely to die on one of the fastest Sundays.

"I felt like he was going to kill himself, and I'd never had a driver killed," Yunick said. "At some point, you have to ask yourself, is it more important to say you won a race on such and such day, or be able to say you never had a driver killed? So I told him to quit."

Roberts was angry. "He moped around, told me to go to hell like you'd expect. But he knew what I was talking about."

Roberts didn't quit. In the 1963 season, he drove another Pontiac, sponsored for several races by McNamara Pontiac in Orlando, and again captured the pole for the Daytona 500. He led the race early but dropped behind with engine problems and failed to finish.

Later in the season, Roberts switched to a Ford run by the Holman-Moody team. The car was still sporting his No. 22 but was painted an odd lavender. He won four races, including the Daytona 400 and the Southern 500 at Darlington, a track many drivers disliked for its tricky mismatched turns, one sharper than the other, at which Roberts excelled.

At Darlington, Roberts in his purple Ford ran the 500 miles without a caution flag at a record 129.7 mph, shattering the old mark by 12 mph. It was his ninth win on a superspeedway.

Dead champion

Despite his speedway success, Roberts had never won the championship, simply because he never ran enough NASCAR races. In its early years, the NASCAR title wasn't worth much money. Like many drivers, Roberts ran only the races with big purses, rather than risking an expensive car for the chance of a slim payoff. And the big payoffs were on the fast tracks.

In the 1961 NASCAR series, race No. 5 of the season was the Daytona 500, which paid the winner $21,050. Race No. 6 was at a half-mile dirt track in Spartanburg, S.C., where the winner took home $800.

That year, Ned Jarrett won NASCAR's Grand National championship -- the series now known as the Winston Cup. Jarrett started 46 races and won $41,055. Roberts, who had started only 21 races, won $50,266.

When he made the switch to the Holman-Moody team and Ford sponsorship, some thought Roberts was planning on a title run.

But he would retain the distinction he now holds in many books and Web sites devoted to stock-car history: the best NASCAR driver to never win a championship. And the 1964 season would prove one of the deadliest in U.S. auto racing.

In the second race of the season, a 400-miler on the road course at Augusta, Ga., Roberts handily won his 33rd NASCAR victory. It would be his last.

Three races later at Riverside, Calif., Joe Weatherly, the two-time defending NASCAR champion, lost control and hit a retaining wall. The wreck did not seem severe, but when emergency crews reached him, the 41-year-old driver was dead, his helmet cracked. His head had gone outside his open window and struck the wall.

Then as now, fire was a driver's worst nightmare, and in those days before safety fuel cells in gas tanks, deadly fires were much more common. Weatherly, afraid of being trapped in a burning car, had worn only a lap belt, not the shoulder harness many drivers used.

At the Daytona 500 weeks later, young Richard Petty led a pack of 500-horsepower Plymouths that blew away the competition. While the Fords turned laps around 160 mph, Petty's Plymouth was clocked at 174.4 mph -- 20 mph faster than his speed a year earlier.

It marked another step up in NASCAR speeds, but the tires now became even more vulnerable. At the Atlanta 500 in April, only 10 cars finished in a field of 39 as tires blew all around the track. Roberts was among those to crash heavily.

After the sobering experience at Atlanta, Petty accused some drivers of dangerously lightening their cars to make them faster: "I'm afraid that someone may die before any safety measures are taken."

'A horrible feeling'

Weatherly's death and the gnawing worry about tires set the stage for the World 600 that May in Charlotte. It was the only NASCAR superspeedway on which Roberts had not won a race.

The week before Charlotte, Yunick was at Indianapolis, testing a car for the Indy 500, when Roberts showed up.

"He told me, 'You were right, I should get out.' He'd gotten a three-year contract with a beer company, but they were going to let him out of it after he drove at Charlotte," Yunick said.

"I never saw him again."

After his frightening wreck at Charlotte in 1961, Roberts had told the Charlotte Observer: "Fire is the danger I fear the most. It's a horrible feeling to be out of control and burning."

Drivers had no fireproof suits in those days. But they used a homemade substitute to protect themselves.

"We'd soak our racing suits in Boraxo, and that was supposed to make them kind of fire-resistant," racer Bobby Johns said. "But Fireball was allergic to it, so he didn't soak his clothes."

In a fire, there would be nothing to protect Roberts but his cotton racing suit.

With first-place paying a fat $24,000 and a record crowd of 68,000 fans, there were 44 cars starting the Charlotte race. After four hours of blown tires and flaming gas tanks, only 16 would cross the finish line.

On lap 7, with the cars' fuel tanks still nearly full, Junior Johnson and Ned Jarrett tangled going into the backstretch at 140 mph -- it was never clear later exactly how it happened -- and Roberts either hit one of them or spun trying to avoid them. Roberts' car slammed the wall and flipped as the track erupted in orange flames and billowing black smoke.

Jarrett was the first to reach Roberts, who was conscious and pleading for help.

"Oh my God. I'm on fire! Help me, Ned."

A photo published in the next day's newspapers shows the cars burning on the track as Jarrett struggles to strip off Roberts' burning clothes.

Roberts had second- and third-degree burns over 75 percent of his body. His legs and arms were charred. It was his first serious injury in 17 years of racing.

'Roberts 'very critical' '

At Indianapolis, at just about the time Roberts crashed at Charlotte, Johns was qualifying in Yunick's car when it went out of control. Johns was uninjured, but the car was finished.

When Yunick heard about Roberts' crash, he loaded his wrecked car on the trailer and drove all night to Charlotte. But only family members were allowed in the hospital.

"They said he wouldn't know me anyway," Yunick said.

For weeks, it seemed Roberts might survive. The hospital in Charlotte was inundated with calls, cards and flowers.

Newspapers carried running accounts of his progress with headlines such as "Roberts 'very critical,' " and "Fireball conscious, cooperative." The stories said he was in good spirits and recovering. They did not say that doctors had amputated the fingers of one hand and were preparing to amputate a leg.

Five weeks after the crash, Roberts slipped into a coma and died the next day. He was 35 years old.

Growing death toll

Weatherly and Roberts would not be the only NASCAR drivers to run their final races that deadly season.

Driver Jimmy Pardue would die at Charlotte later that year during tests designed to make safer tires. Billy Wade, one of the drivers who pulled Pardue's body from his demolished car, would die also a few months later during tire tests at Daytona.

And just a week after Roberts' fiery crash at Charlotte, sometime NASCAR driver Dave McDonald would die in a flaming wreck at the Indy 500 that also claimed the life of popular Indy and Formula One driver Eddie Sachs.

The staggering death toll on America's racetracks that year sparked a flurry of changes to improve safety.

Gas tanks were lined with fuel cells to prevent spills in crashes, dramatically reducing the number of fires. Drivers were required to wear fire-retardant racing suits.

Stock cars were equipped with webbed netting over the open drivers side windows to prevent the kind of head injuries that had killed Joe Weatherly. And tire companies introduced safety liners in race tires to prevent the blowouts that caused so many crashes.

'A championship quality'

On the day Roberts died at Charlotte, NASCAR was at Daytona for the Firecracker 400, at the track where Roberts had won every race he entered just two years before.

Roberts was still a young man when he died, but he had bridged distinct eras of his sport. At 19, he had driven in NASCAR's first sanctioned event, a modified race on the Beach and Road Course at Daytona in 1948. And he had won stardom on the new superfast tracks that would help transform stock-car racing into today's megasport.

But a new star was already rising in NASCAR.

Roberts died on Richard Petty's 27th birthday, in the year when Petty would win the first of his seven Daytona 500s and the first of his seven NASCAR championships.

It was customary at the time to name races for recently dead drivers, and the Fireball Roberts 200 at Old Bridge, N.J., would be won by Wade, not long before Wade's own death at Daytona.

NASCAR's big-money races now are named not after drivers, but auto parts, soft drinks and beer. And Roberts' name has slipped into the past.

Bobby Johns, who got his first NASCAR ride when Roberts persuaded Yunick to let Johns drive a year-old car that nearly won him the 1960 Daytona 500, is glad the sport has grown. Its popularity and wealth are beyond the imagination of those early racers, Johns said. Still, something seems missing.

"The sport is so big now, there's so much money and so many fans," Johns said. "But people forget about the men who made this sport what it is today."

Roberts never won his championship. He never finished his final race. But his grave, at least on days when the roar of engines does not carry over the hill, is a peaceful place.

And anyone willing to walk down the marble path to his grave can still read a short list of his greater victories, as well as an inscribed reminder that a man's life is more than the sum of the races he won:

"He brought to stock car racing a freshness, distinction, a championship quality that surpasses the rewards collected by the checkered flag."

-