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Race Pioneer

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By BOB D'ANGELO

The Tampa Tribune

Published: August 20, 2008

He was NASCAR's "party crasher," an "unwelcome surprise." He raced cars and was his own mechanic. In his youth, he ran moonshine - and outran the authorities - in his native Virginia to finance his expenses.

And when Wendell Scott, the first black driver on the NASCAR circuit, won his first race in Jacksonville in 1963, he was not confirmed as the winner and was denied a trophy until four weeks later - and the one he finally received was a cheaply made, wooden one.

A wooden victory, indeed.

Brian Donovan, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and a former driver himself, finally gives Scott his due in a biography that strips away the veneer of NASCAR's good ol' boy image. In "Hard Driving: The Wendell Scott Story, The American Odyssey of NASCAR's First Black Driver" (Steerforth Press, $25.95), Donovan shows how Scott's career was every bit as ground-breaking as Jackie Robinson's feat of breaking baseball's color barrier.

Perhaps even more. During Robinson's career, baseball had not yet expanded west of St. Louis or south of Washington. Scott broke Southern stock-car racing's color barrier in 1952 and competed in the Deep South a decade before the civil rights movement reached its zenith.

Donovan caught up to Scott 14 months before his death on Dec. 23, 1990, and this book is a result of interviews with the driver and more than 200 other people in and out of the auto racing business. It weaves a tale of frustration, including Darlington Raceway's refusal to allow Scott to compete there during the 1960s.

NASCAR boss Bill France Jr. insisted to Donovan in an interview before his death in 2007 that he could not "recall any time anybody tried to keep Wendell from racing."

"I feel he was always treated fairly by NASCAR," France said. "That's a flat statement."

Since some of the principals in the book are dead, Donovan's narrative at times is skewed to Scott's point of view. There is some balance, however, as Donovan writes that France's father, NASCAR chief Bill France Sr., "deserves credit for his handling of the situation during ... his years in NASCAR's minor leagues."

But Donovan also takes the elder France to task for not stepping in and correcting the injustice at Darlington.

"Clearly, France was unwilling to confront the speedway's racist president, Bob Colvin, and to disturb Darlington's Confederacy-boosting, proud-to-be-a-redneck atmosphere, which helped draw huge crowds to the South Carolina track," Donovan writes.

Scott was a talented driver and a self-taught mechanic who was a genius of improvisation. He needed those skills, too, as his cars were not up to the standards of his rivals. But he loved to drive and never considered himself a pioneer.

"The racial issue didn't have anything to do with it," he told Donovan. "I'd been a fast driver all my life, and I wanted to do it without paying tickets."

Scott refinanced his home seven times during his 18-year career to meet expenses. He competed in 495 Grand National and Winston Cup races, completing 324 of them. The movie "Greased Lightning" is loosely based on Scott's life.

"Despite his accomplishments, Scott looked back on his NASCAR career with some deep dissatisfaction," Donovan writes, "convinced that the sport had never given him a fair chance to show what he could do."

He never had a factory-team ride or a professional pit crew, but Scott was a shining example of courage and perseverance. Donovan does a good job trying to balance Scott's career and put it into context with the racial and social complexities of the 1950s and '60s.

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