Driving with the Devil book review page 3

Before too long there was infighting inside the NSCRA and it soon started to fall apart. Prior to this it was every bit as big as Bill France’s Nascar, but Big Bill took advantage of the situation and quickly offered larger payouts and literally stole all of the great drivers from Bruton Smith’s NSCRA. The NSCRA was no more, but that wasn’t the end of Bruton Smith. He ended up owning some of the largest speedways and superspeedways of Nascar.

Once Nascar was all alone and the sole representative of southern stock car racing it just grew and grew and grew. They went from champion racers like Red Byron and the famous Flock brothers to Lee Petty (patriarch of the famous Petty racing family), Junior Johnson and others. It became with Nascar out with the old and in with the new. Older racers like Red Byron and the Flocks were pretty much forgotten along with Nascar’s roots or heritage.

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Bill France and then his son encouraged this. They wanted to distance themselves and Nascar from its moonshine past. But with the formation of the Georgia Racing Hall of Fame and numerous books like Neal Thomson’s Driving with the Devil all the old days are coming back. People can see and envision the excitement that really created Nascar. Nascar, Big Bill France, and even current Nascar president Mike Helton took the view that the old, moonshine tainted days were a bad memory.

Nascar president Mike Helton even went so far as to say that the old southern ways and heritage of Nascar were gone to the press. The fans got really upset and he was forced to take back his statement. Since then Nascar has been forced to update its website with articles on the story behind men like Raymond Parks, Roy Hall, Lloyd Seay, Red Byorn, Red Vogt, the Flock brothers and others.



Raymond Parks was the oldest living member of this rare club and legendary group of men whom saw Nascar from its start all the way through to its current years over 50 years later. He died just last year and probably took a bunch of these great memories with him never to be heard again. This is why books like Driving with the Devil are so important as they keep a record of what it really was like for younger generations to cherish and enjoy.

I am glad that Neal Thompson took on the challenge of writing this book. I learned a lot that I didn’t know about the formation of Nascar. The book is very well written and very entertaining. You can actually sit back on a quiet afternoon and see and through this book experience what it must have been like with the modified motors built by Red Vogt in his back room. The dirt race tracks of the day and the clouds of dirt around the racers cars at every turn. And you can just imagine the excitement the fans had when legends like Lloyd Seay came screaming around the turn at Daytona on two wheels many years ago.

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I know I wasn’t alive when this all happened, but as I’ve said before and I’ll say again – that must have been one hell of an exciting time to be around the south and stock car racing. Driving with the Devil literally is one of the most captivating and interesting books I have ever read. It gave me a chance to relive the south and these great days of moonshine, whisky tripping, revenuers and running from the law and the formation of stock car racing and Nascar. I would highly recommend it to anyone.

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Other sources of information on Nascar’s early history and formation:

- Driving with the Devil by Neal Thompson
- encyclopediaofalabama.org/face/Article.jsp?id=h-1049
- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibition
- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASCAR
- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Parks_(car_owner)
- georgiaracinghistory.com