(AUTHOR’S NOTE: This is the second of three installments of a collection of stories from local racing in Richmond, Virginia, during the decade following WWII. First installment to be found HERE)
Part II – The 1950s
This first story is intended to stir up discussion. 1951 saw the first Richmond NASCAR Grand National race. Well, sort of. . . .
On September 12, 1951, Royall Speedway hosted the NASCAR Short Track Division cars. That year, Bill France had created a new division essentially to run Grand National (Cup) cars on tracks smaller than one-half mile. News Stories and ads used the term Grand National (although “late model” was used more frequently for both divisions), and many of the drivers were the same. Lee Petty, Dick Rathmann and Jim Paschal all finished in the top 10 in 1951 points for both divisions.
Jim Reed, who won seven GN events while he wasn’t ruling the Short Track Division (50 wins), won the Richmond race, with Petty finishing ninth. Locals Cal Johnson and Eddie Crouse finished fourth and sixth.
Reed won another Short Track Division race at Royall the next season, and in 1953 – after the first true Grand National race had been run at the fairgrounds – Bob Welborn won two Short Track Division races in an unusual program of twin 200s at Royall.
Maybe it wasn’t really the first Grand National race, but it was the first time Grand National cars raced in Richmond.
If a lot of individual things happened in 1951, you can look at 1954 somewhat collectively, because along with 1948, it was the other truly chaotic year in Richmond racing history, and it started off with baseball news.
Richmond had for some years enjoyed baseball via the Richmond Colts, a lower-level minor league team, but civic leaders thought the city deserved better (with a Richmond mindset, they likely could have justified moving the Yankees to town), and when the then-minor league Baltimore Orioles were essentially kicked out of Baltimore so the St. Louis Browns could move in an become the major league Baltimore Orioles, Richmond promised a new stadium, and the team agreed to move 150 miles south.
That meant the Colts and their home, Mooers Field, were no longer welcome. Owner Eddie Mooers moved the team, then leased the ballpark to Nelson Royall, who built a race track over the former ballfield.
(See cover photo for the race track built over a baseball field. The photo is widely reproduced online; I have no idea of its origin, although it would well be one of the Richmond newspapers.)
Now Royall already owned Royall Speedway, of course, so presumably he wasn’t happy with how things were going with getting Richmonders out to Chesterfield County on Friday nights – not everybody had a car back then; special buses left central Richmond to provide transportation for some.
Plus, in 1951, another short track, called Richmond Speedway, was built on the other side of town from Royall (the north), and clearly, Richmond was having a hard time supporting two tracks. Maybe Nelson Royall thought a track IN the city would become the fan favorite, so he closed Royall and built and opened Mooers Field Speedbowl
Actually, he built it twice, because the drivers and fans didn’t like the original track, so after a few weeks, Royall rebuilt it, larger and more banked.
So far, this makes some sense, sort-of. Richmond Speedway (now promoted by racing legend Joe Weatherly of Norfolk) and Mooers Speedbowl both had NASCAR sanction, and they raced on different nights.
It might be worth noting here that maybe things weren’t going as well as they might have. On Memorial Day Weekend, plans were made to move the races from Mooers to the previously shuttered Royall, but in the days before social media spreading word of such changes instantaneously, the word didn’t get to all fans and teams, and about half showed up at each venue. Promoters Royall and Rose ran an abbreviated program, free of charge to fans, at Mooers, and nobody explained what happened at Royall.
Whether that explains what happened next isn’t clear, but then Royall leased Royall Speedway to racer Emanuel Zervakis and a partner, who began weekly racing on Friday, June 4, and suddenly, Richmond had THREE weekly tracks (although it’s unclear whether Mooers ran every week after Royall reopened), all NASCAR sanctioned, plus occasional events at the fairgrounds. Nobody seems to have publicly defended this as a good idea.
That didn’t matter, though, because it was about to get even worse. In mid-July, Zervakis announced that Royall was dropping its NASCAR sanction because the sanctioning body had required a reduction in purse that was more than the drivers could live with. They brought back the old Richmond Stock Car Racing Association to promote the track, effective Friday, June 5.
NASCAR responded by telling Weatherly to move Richmond Speedway’s racing to Friday as well, competing directly with the “outlaws.” Then, when Royall and NASCAR patched up their differences, NASCAR told Weather to move his races again. He ran the track for one last week and quit.
Within a month, Royall was the only track with NASCAR sanction, with both Mooers and Richmond running “hot rod/amateur” races involving street cars that were only slightly modified for racing. Mooers found improbable success for a while, but all three tracks ended the year much the worse for the chaos, and by the middle of the next season, Richmond would be down to a single track.
By 1955, Weatherly was back in town, promoting both Royall Speedway and the ARE fairgrounds (along with Paul Sawyer, who would stick around a lot longer), although neither track was running regularly. Richmond Speedway had been paved and had a new promoter, and Royall and Rose were again running Mooers Speedbowl.
Everything was in place except the fans, who seemed to have found something else to do besides deciding which of three (or four) race tracks to attend. This also was part of a general cooling of the explosion of racing’s popularity that had begun in the late 1940s. Tracks everywhere were closing, and finding one for sale in the newspaper classified ads wasn’t too difficult
Richmond Speedway folded Memorial Day Weekend, never to reopen. Royall appears to have run its last regular race that weekend, although ait hosted a traveling circuit the following week. By June, Mooers was all that was left of local racing in Richmond, and it would stay that way for the next three years, with many of the top drivers choosing to race elsewhere, particularly (and curiously) at Brunswick Speedway in Lawrenceville, 70 miles to the south.
After the 1958 season, Eddie Mooers announced he was selling the Speedbowl property for development. It looked like Richmond would be without a track, but then J.M. Wilkinson bought some property for a planned residential development and discovered that it included Royall Speedway. Fans persuaded him to reopen the track, which he did, as Southside Speedway, in 1959.
(End of Part II, Part III to follow later soon)
Frank Buhrman