November 2, 2022 • 28 mins
Derek gets some surprising news from NASCAR, Rajiv almost throws up at a race track, and we learn about the moonshining roots of racing.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Campsite media in there. As I've always said, there are
two noble professions left. There are two honorable professions left
(00:22):
in this country. Number one is podcasting. Number two is
race car driving. And right now I'm about to attempt
to do both. Well, technically, not driving the race car.
I'll be riding along in the passenger seat. But that's
a blurry distinction that you should not focus on. What's
really important is that I'm about to fulfill a childhood
dream by getting to drive in a race car at
(00:44):
full speed around Charlotte Motor Speedway. This is going to
be a very very big day for me. Uh and
you're coming along for it, Thank you very much. We'll
see how this goes. Yeah, there it is. Hm. I
(01:26):
made it two laps, and I've been sitting in the
car for the last twenty minutes in the parking lot
with my eyes closed, trying not to throw up. Ever since,
that was one of the most violent experiences I've ever
had in my life. As soon as you get into
the turn, that wall of Asphalle just looks up at
you and you're just pinned into your seat and just like,
(01:48):
oh God, horrible. I felt like my brain was just
being squished, um that I could not imagine doing that
for a two hours, three hours just I will never
tolerate someone ship talking Nascar again. All right, let gonna
see if I get back to this hotel. So it
(02:12):
looks like I'm not cut out for race car driving,
But embarrassing myself on Mike wasn't the only reason I'd
come down to Charlotte. Because not only is North Carolina
the biggest tobacco producer in the US and where Derek's
tobacco came from, it's also the heartland of NASCAR. There's
twelve major tracks within a day's drive, and dozens more
smaller asphalt and dirt ovals. It's also where almost every
(02:34):
NASCAR team is based, including a small outfit called Motorsports
Business Management, owned and operated by veteran driver Carl Long.
Are you doing good? Ye? A long time? Yeah, you
just get back from Canada. Yeah. I was on there
for a month. And then Carl longs an old hand
in the world of NASCAR. He's been in the sport
for more than thirty years as a driver, crew chief
(02:56):
and now as a team owner. It's a lot of
work to keep up with the NASCAR season circus. But
today is a Monday and the closest thing he'll have
to a weekend for a while, so he's got some
time to talk. What you got, what you want to do?
Four time? Miss, we can sit down. I got yes,
it's word. Yeah. Let me check with the guys out
from Yeah, no quicktion, make sure they're all good. He's
(03:18):
doing a story on Derek. Really yeah. Carl and Derek
are actually old friends. They go back more than ten
years when they met in the parking lot before race
in Virginia. Derek and I just was parked beside each
other at the Richmond Speedway and got to talking and
found out we had a lot of things. I grew
up on a tobacco farm, and so I worked on
(03:39):
a on a farm every year. There wasn't any harvesting machines.
It was just all manual labor. And my uncle would
always tell me, is early in the morning, all he
wanted to see was assholes and elbows, just to go
up the road and hang buy the ground, leave you say.
You know, so you can probably see how Derek and
Carl became fast friends. And then when we were part
beside each other, like I said, we just laughed and
(04:02):
had had a good time talk on each other. From
what Carl could tell, Derek was the real deal, not
just some rich guy playing dress up on the weekend.
I felt like that as a driver, and him going
from the petty driving experience too to his truck to
he's racing on his other stuff on ice and just
he just had a passionate race he wanted to do it.
(04:25):
At the time, Derek was working with another race team
and according to Carl, it wasn't a great situation, but
the guy that was kind of managing his team really
uh I guess head champagne tastes would a beer budget
and it was spending a lot. So the people that
he had helped him and didn't have the experience to
(04:45):
coach him. All they were worried about is could he
write the check for him so they could go and
go race. It was clear that Derek han ambition and
Carl had the experienced help him on his skills, so
they shook hands and decided to create their on team,
Motorsports Business Management or MBM for short, the team that
(05:05):
Carl still runs today. There's a million little things you
have to do in order to get a brand new
team off the ground, but Carl was glad to have
Derek as a partner. Derek was just one of the
best overall people that you could be around, uh to
help do everything. He wasn't lazy, wasn't selfish. He enjoyed racing,
He enjoyed drinking. Sometimes. I think he was a professional
(05:27):
head at some races. He would go he takes some
of my guys out at night. He'd be spring chicken,
ready to go to next day. My guys would be, oh, man,
We've tried to go out with Derek. Oh God, I
don't know how you could drink that much and still function.
You know, he was buying drinks for everybody in the bar,
you know, just having a good time. Within a few
(05:47):
short months, MBM was making a name for itself. Their
crowning achievement came in when Derek raced in New Hampshire
and became the first indigenous driver in the NASCAR Cup
Series Hoist the Lobster at the end of three hundred
and one lapse from the Hampshire Motor Speed one. But
less than a year after that race, it all came
(06:08):
to a screeching hult when Derek was arrested and Carl
got a phone call from NASCAR. No matter what, Derek
was gonna get banned, and we dissolved Derek's partnership where
he was no longer an owner of NBA Motorsports from
(06:31):
Campside Media and Dan Patrick Productions. This is running Smoke.
I'm Roger Gola and this is episode four White Lightning.
(06:51):
Whenever a driver is accused of misconduct, NASCAR acts quickly.
Officials told Carl that he had seventy two hours to
completely remove any trace of Derek from MBM Motorsports or
the entire team's eligibility would be in jeopardy. On top
of that, NASCAR and definitely suspended Derek from racing in
the series. They didn't call me. They didn't. I just
(07:12):
I read it on Basically somebody sent me to link
saying that they suspended me. Not even I didn't even
go to court yet, you're already banning me and I'll
like it made my uh my debut or in the
in the top tier the Cup Series and then next
Dar all the year after Boom, I'm fucking suspended. We
(07:35):
reached out to NASCAR for comments several times, but they
never responded to our requests. In any case, NASCAR was
not going to stand up in defense of Derek. That
was an issue for the courts to deal with. Usually
you're you're innocent until you're proven guilty, right, But right
off the bat they fucking banned me. But being suspended
from NASCAR, of all sports because of smuggling and tax
(07:57):
of Asian charges, well there's a articular irony there. I mean,
look at NASCAR, I mean it was it was built
off bootlegging, you know, with the moonshiners and all that,
and basically it is the same thing going on over here.
We'll get into all that right after the break. It's
(08:20):
no overstatement to say that without moonshining, there would be
no Nascar. The sport was the product of a unique
combination of V eight engines and high proof liquor that
could have only come together in the American South. And
this week we're gonna take a trip through history to
tell you all about how that cocktail came together. For
our non Southern listeners, for whom I have nothing but pity,
(08:40):
let me give you a quick lesson on moonshine, white lightning,
clear corn, mountain dew, whatever you wanna call it. It's
a crystal clear, unaged whiskey made from corn rye, barley,
or whatever else you have on hand. It's made in
small batches by mountain men in bibs and beards who
work by the light of the moon and backwood shacks.
But what really separates moon shine from any other liquor
(09:01):
is the fact that it's untaxed, unregulated, and therefore illegal.
Back in the nineteen thirties, when the US government banned alcohol,
moonshine was the only way a lot of people in
America could wet their whistle, which made it a very
lucrative business. Government agents fight hopelessly against illegal liquor. These
homemade stills are about a few of thousands seas than destroyed.
(09:24):
Other thousands produced millions of gallons, and countless hundreds prosper
in business of bootlegging. But moonshining represents so much more
than some folks making money on the side. For the
people who made shine, it's a symbol of pride and
self reliance, and in that way, it's a lot like
tobacco on Mohawk territories. For communities that have often been
(09:45):
on the short end of the stick, liquor and cigarettes
offered away for them to stand on their own feet,
even if it meant you were a criminal in the
eyes of the law making, moonshine was a god given right.
It was it was tradition, It was family bis this
Neil Thompson as a journalist and the author of Driving
with the Devil about the early days of American racing,
(10:05):
and and the moonshine was was used for many things.
It was medicine in some cases it was currency. It
was a homemade craft, and in their view, the government
had no rights to that. It was their product um
and there was their right to deliver it wherever they
saw fit. This is where the story of American stock
(10:27):
car racing begins. But delivery is a very polite way
of saying contraband smuggling. And where there's contraband, there's cops.
So moonshiners took their four V eight coops and stiffened
up the rear springs so when they filled the trunk
with liquor, it with the squat and look suspicious. They
knew that cops liked to shoot out radiators, so they
put sheet metal and their grills to protect their motors.
(10:50):
Some moonshiners even had James Bond type gadgets that dropped
nails or spilled oil behind you. Even though there was
an intense captain mouse aspect to this, this chase, this game, UM,
there was also a sense of mutual respect. One of
the guys I talked to UM there was a story
(11:10):
about him once delivering flowers to the hospital bed of
a revenue agent who he'd out run and left it
a ditch on the side of the road, but knew
he knew the agent had gotten hurt, left him some
flowers and just signed it the coup, meaning his Ford
V eight coup. Henry Ford famously said that auto racing
began five minutes after the second car came off the
(11:31):
production line. I'd be surprised if it took that long
for whiskey runners to get the same idea. They were
running moonshine, trying to get away from revenue agents, UM,
trying to stay alive and stay out of jail. And
along the way they learned to drive fast, fix up
their cars to go faster than the revenue agents, and
then on weekends for fun, they started racing each other.
(11:52):
Moonshiners would hire young kids to drive for the young,
fearless kids to drive for him. Tom Jensen is the
Curatorial Affairs director of the NASCAR Hall of Fame and
a longtime motorsports journalist. And the people who own these
businesses tended to know each other, and one guy would
say to another, you know, my driver's got the fastest
(12:14):
car in the county, and the other guy would say, no,
my drivers the fastest car in the county. So they
decided to have a race with just the two of them. Well,
word would get out and some neighbors would show up,
and you know, maybe the next week there would be
three or four guys from the next county over with
their race cars. Stock car racing was radically different than
(12:37):
the sort of racing that Americans have known up until then,
which was something reserved for the ultra wealthy. It was
sports cars. It was sort of the open wheel cars
that that you see in Lamands and Formula one and
indie cars, the types of cars that poor southern boy
could never dream of affording. Um And most of those
earlier car races happen on tracks that were built specifically
(13:03):
for those races, and most of those races happened up
North or in the Midwest, stock car racing offered something
totally different. It brought motorsports to the everyman. Teenagers scraped
money together and fixed up junkyard cars. Main street mechanics
would sponsor buddies to turn a few laps down at
the local track down South, where you didn't have any
(13:23):
real professional sports until like the nineteen sixties. Um this
sort of sports starved part of the country adopted stock
car racing as as its own. You know, it was
truly a home grown sport throughout the South, um modest
in the beginning. For years, stock car racing was just
(13:44):
a ragtag affair. There were dozens of different race leagues
in competition series, full of shady promoters and hobbist drivers.
It wasn't until Bill France, an aspiring race or in
Daytona Beach, brought together all the biggest promoters under one
banner that racing really became profess Chinel. France gave it
a name to the National Association for Stock Car Auto
(14:05):
Racing or NASCAR for short and right away, Big Bill
had a big problem moonshiners. He was trying to build
an above board, legit racing league that was family friendly
and amenable to corporate sponsors. Bootwiggers aren't exactly the crowd
to put on a suit and tie and talk nice
in front of a microphone. But at the same time,
the moonshiners were the ones winning the races because this
(14:27):
Hall of Famer Junior Johnson once said, nobody ever loves
a car more than a moonshiner does, because if you
go to a race and lose, you go home. If
you go on a moonshine run and lose, you go
to jail. Folks like that weren't going to play by
the rules, and Bill France found that out right away.
The winner of the very first NASCAR race ever was
(14:49):
disqualified for using modified heavy duty rear suspension, a trick
straight out of the bootleggers handbook. You know, I've talked
to one x moonshiner who who told me, Um, you know,
the best way to get a hillbilly to do something
is to tell him not to do it. It was
how they were raised to view the government with distrust
and to avoid paying taxes at all costs. Um. So
(15:13):
this this attitude, uh, that was there from the start
of stock car racing. Uh, this sort of nonconformity it
was in the blood of both the moonshiners and in
turn the NASCAR racers. One of my favorite stories is
there was a track in Georgia, I believe it was
called Middle Georgia Raceway that opened the late sixties, and
(15:36):
shortly after it opened, the FEDS rated it. And underneath
the track there was a entire moonshine operation. There's a
gallon distillery and they made an illegal liquor down there,
and um, they arrested the track general manager. They introduced
(16:02):
his evidence, the fact that he had bought three thousand
pounds a yeast some absurd amount, and he said, now
that was for our concession stands, and a jury of
his peers acquitted him in like a couple of hours.
There's an old joke in the racing world that sums
(16:24):
it all up. A race car driver reads a rule
book twice, first to see what it says, and then
again to see what it doesn't say. They would interpret
it like people interpret the Bible. They see what they
want to see. Give you a good example, and again
(16:44):
we'll go back to Junior Johnson. Rule book says car
got away thirty four hundred pounds at the start of
the race. Don't say nothing, Matt would have got away.
After the race, he would weld hundred pounds a lead
to the inside of each of the four rims on
his car to make minimum weight, and at the first
pit stop it would take forever to change the tires
(17:07):
because they weighed a hundred and sixty pounds each, but
from then on his card before hundred pounds lighter than
anyone else's, which technically was not against the rules. By
the sixties and seventies, NASCAR was flourishing under Bill France's leadership.
(17:27):
The racing was more intense, the fans were more committed,
and the racers were more professional. But France still had
a problem. NASCAR was just a Southern sport, a side
show to the MLB and NFL. Bill wanted the main stage,
and it took a blizzard and a fist fight to
get him there. Coming up after the break, you're listening
(17:55):
to Running Smoke. It's February ninety nine and the NASCAR
season is kicking off in Daytona Beach. Usually it's a
race that only Southerners would pay an they attention to,
but this time it was going nationwide. A freak blizzard
had canceled every sporting event in the Northeast, forcing NBC
(18:16):
to put NASCAR in its prime time slot. A sports
starved country tuned into its first stock car race and
the action was intense. Fans in the stands were on
their feet cheering as drivers came around the front stretch.
It's the last lap and a side by side battle
heats up between Donnie Allison and Kaylee Yarborough. Kale's crew
chief is none other than the bootleggers patron st Junior Johnson.
(18:38):
On the last lap, coming around turn two on the
back stretch, Kale makes a move on Donnie and now
their neck and neck. Their doors are inches away from
each other as they reached speeds upwards of a hundred
and fifty miles per hour. Folks back home how their
noses pressed up against the TV and silence falls over
wrapped bus terminals and airport bars across the country, and
(19:00):
then they slide down into the enfields as Richard Petty
comes from behind and takes the checker flag, winning the
Dayton of five hundred. But while Petty is taking his
victory lap, the two drivers on the infield grass climb
out of their cars, fight and Donnie Alie, you couldn't
(19:24):
write a better finish, the most amazing astoonishing. For the
first time in its history, NASCAR was now on the
national map. Sponsors wanted in, and NASCAR provided an incredible
opportunity for any company that wanted eyeballs on their brand.
What's better than a billboard moving at a hundred and fifty.
(19:45):
Money flowed into the sport and the race winnings went
even higher. So competition got tougher, drivers got better, and
mechanics got more creative. Instead of dumpster diving in junkyards,
engineers developed new exotic, purpose built hearts for their engines
and suspension systems. They took the sport out of the
hands of back Aird Mechanics and brought it into the
(20:06):
space age innovation and rule ending was getting to be
an expensive necessity for anyone that wanted to remain competitive.
I think where the real escalation took place was in
the early to mid nine nineties when it it kind
of became an arms race of who could outspend the
other to try to gain an advantage. Because what had
(20:29):
happened is there were fewer and fewer places to get
an advantage, and there were smaller advantages to get. NASCAR's
job as a governing body was to level the playing
field and keep it as fair as possible, no matter
how much money teams were putting into their cars. But
racers will still look for every advantage they can get.
(20:50):
For instance, when I first got into the sport in
the late nineties, was the first time they started hiring
quote unquote professional pit crew NASCAR teams. The top teams
went from having fat, middle aged guys who were mechanics
also double doing the pit stops, to creating recruiting programs
(21:15):
where they go to college campuses and recruit athletes who
played on football and basketball teams. And so they replaced
the forty year old guy with a beer belly with
a twenty two year old kid who was who was
cut and fit and athletic, and they were paying these
guys a lot of money, and things like that just
(21:38):
just drove the costs way up. At that time, Spending
money doesn't guarantee you will be successful. Not spending money
guarantees you will not be successful. As the sport got
more expensive, it became more exclusive, It became harder and
harder for blue collar guys to find success. And it
(21:58):
became easier for well funded teams to outmuscle smaller outfits
on the track. A few people understand how difficult it
is to compete in the sport better than Carl Long,
Derek's old business partner. He knows just how much every
dollar counts when you're racing at the back of the pack.
It's ass and I and on the dollar amounts just
and I haven't even started adding up for this weekend.
(22:18):
I might even actually have two sheets I do. I
was just figuring it. So so here's here's something for you.
This is just to tell you what I spent at
Atlanta in exfinity. The rap on the car was fifteen
hundred bucks, and that's cheap. We spent thirteen thousand, six
hundred times spent in hotels for one night, bands four
hundred nstry fee was two hundred Fuel just to put
(22:39):
in my tractor to get down there was fifteen hundred bucks.
And back food and drinks and our coolers two hundred bucks.
Sixty for box of lug nuts that you just used
once to throw away to rent the engines was thirty
thou dollars pit bonuses that was labor just for the weekend,
it was twenty thousand, five hundred. I have to rent.
I picked guns, that was seven hundred, was three hundred
bucks transmit ation with six all At all, Carl spent
(23:02):
more than eighty thousand dollars to run a single race
that weekend. And that's not even counting truck payments, insurance
and rent. So I'm I'm in a hole on a
good weekend, finishing eleventh with no damage. I'm in a
whole fifty bucks as it is. It's like the old
timers say, how do you make a small fortune, Well,
you take a large fortune and you go racing. For me.
(23:25):
At my my level, the most important talent a driver
can have is somebody to write a check to put
him in a seat. The most important talent is to
be able to write a check. In less than fifty years,
NASCAR went from a blue collar sport where shade tree
mechanics could raise their sedans on Sundays to a multi
billion dollar enterprise with tracks across the country, race cars
(23:47):
worth half a million dollars, and drivers who were trained
to race as soon as they can walk. Back in
the day, pit lane would have been full of pot
bellied mechanics, tuning carburetors with their pocket knives. Now it's
full of movie star celebrity owners and more computers than
mission control. For a team like MBM that was barely
scraping by on its best weekends, Derek was a godsend.
(24:10):
It's tough not to imagine how far they would have
come over the last ten years. If Derek hadn't been arrested,
we would be further up the uh probably further food chain.
We would have definitely ran. I guess if if we
had all of the money he spent, all lawyers and
stuff like right now, it was invested in racing. Hell,
Hendrick might needed a barrow something from us. Do you
(24:31):
think you would have kept racing cup if it wasn't
for this? Probably? Oh yeah, we um, I probably uh.
I probably have a couple of top twenties. As soon
as I am free from all this stuff, I'm gonna
(24:54):
look for a goddamn good lawyer in the States and
sue NASCAR too, because now it's it's gonna be six
years in April that they banned me, and you figure
all the races that I'm missing. You even put it
at forty place and say well, I'm losing all that money.
(25:15):
I told Carl about it. He goes, goddamn, he goes,
we're into twenties now, so suit him for the place.
The difference between a forty place finish and the twentieth
place finish could be tens of thousands of dollars winnings.
But it also means being closer to the front of
the pack where the action and the attention is. It
means a chance at moving up in the sport. But
(25:37):
now if Derek is allowed to race again, he may
have to start all over. You can't. It doesn't matter
if you've got if you've got billions of dollars, You
got to start at the bottom. Like anything else. You
can't just jump in a cup car and go racing.
You have to work your way up. Now, I haven't
raced in the car and over five years, so I
(25:57):
don't know if I'm gonna have to start back again
in the bottom. Basically, go to do the trucks, do
short track, then go to a mile and a half
and then a superspeedway and start over in the Exfinity.
Do a few races in there and then you know,
then finally it will give me my license to run
in a cup, to go to Daytone or wherever. I mean,
it's you know, it sucks. Uh, we're fighting it and
(26:21):
they put a ban on me. You know, like, uh,
aren't you supposed to be like proven, You gotta be
guilty before they do something. Right now, it's you're guilty,
and then you gotta prove yourself innocent, which is not right.
I mean, I'm innocent right from the start. So Carl
had a lot of back and forth with NASCAR officials
(26:42):
to see what it would take for Derek to get
back in the car, and the answer they gave him
was unequivocal. When Derek is free of criminal charges, then
he's free to race for NASCAR. For Derek to get
back on the track, he had no option but to
face a jury next time on running smoke. They just
(27:06):
want to just round up as many people as they
can and charge everybody and try to get as much
money as they can out of everybody. I'm just helping
a friend that's gangster something. They think we're criminals. They
want to make us look like criminals, and their eyes
were doing something wrong. And remember Derek's lawyer getting all
excited and pumping his fists and it was really happy,
(27:28):
So I'm like, Wow, that's gotta be a good thing.
Running Smoke is a production of camp Site Media, Dan
Patrick Productions, and Workhouse Media. The series was written and
reported by me Roger Gola. Our producers are Lea Pape's,
Laine Gerbig and Julie Dennischet. Our editors are Michelle Lands
(27:50):
and Emily Martinez. Sound designed and original music by Mark McAdam.
Additional sounded mixing by ewen Ly from You, with additional
reporting by Susie McCarthy. Our executive producers are Dan Patrick,
Josh Dean of camp Side Media, Paul Anderson, Nick Pinella,
and Andrew Greenwood for Workhouse Media. Fact checking by Mary Mathis,
artwork by Polly Adams, and additional thanks to Greg Horne,
(28:12):
Johnny Kapman, Sierra Franco, Elizabeth van Brocklin, and Sean Flynn.
Campsite media in there. As I've always said, there are
two noble professions left. There are two honorable professions left
(00:22):
in this country. Number one is podcasting. Number two is
race car driving. And right now I'm about to attempt
to do both. Well, technically, not driving the race car.
I'll be riding along in the passenger seat. But that's
a blurry distinction that you should not focus on. What's
really important is that I'm about to fulfill a childhood
dream by getting to drive in a race car at
(00:44):
full speed around Charlotte Motor Speedway. This is going to
be a very very big day for me. Uh and
you're coming along for it, Thank you very much. We'll
see how this goes. Yeah, there it is. Hm. I
(01:26):
made it two laps, and I've been sitting in the
car for the last twenty minutes in the parking lot
with my eyes closed, trying not to throw up. Ever since,
that was one of the most violent experiences I've ever
had in my life. As soon as you get into
the turn, that wall of Asphalle just looks up at
you and you're just pinned into your seat and just like,
(01:48):
oh God, horrible. I felt like my brain was just
being squished, um that I could not imagine doing that
for a two hours, three hours just I will never
tolerate someone ship talking Nascar again. All right, let gonna
see if I get back to this hotel. So it
(02:12):
looks like I'm not cut out for race car driving,
But embarrassing myself on Mike wasn't the only reason I'd
come down to Charlotte. Because not only is North Carolina
the biggest tobacco producer in the US and where Derek's
tobacco came from, it's also the heartland of NASCAR. There's
twelve major tracks within a day's drive, and dozens more
smaller asphalt and dirt ovals. It's also where almost every
(02:34):
NASCAR team is based, including a small outfit called Motorsports
Business Management, owned and operated by veteran driver Carl Long.
Are you doing good? Ye? A long time? Yeah, you
just get back from Canada. Yeah. I was on there
for a month. And then Carl longs an old hand
in the world of NASCAR. He's been in the sport
for more than thirty years as a driver, crew chief
(02:56):
and now as a team owner. It's a lot of
work to keep up with the NASCAR season circus. But
today is a Monday and the closest thing he'll have
to a weekend for a while, so he's got some
time to talk. What you got, what you want to do?
Four time? Miss, we can sit down. I got yes,
it's word. Yeah. Let me check with the guys out
from Yeah, no quicktion, make sure they're all good. He's
(03:18):
doing a story on Derek. Really yeah. Carl and Derek
are actually old friends. They go back more than ten
years when they met in the parking lot before race
in Virginia. Derek and I just was parked beside each
other at the Richmond Speedway and got to talking and
found out we had a lot of things. I grew
up on a tobacco farm, and so I worked on
(03:39):
a on a farm every year. There wasn't any harvesting machines.
It was just all manual labor. And my uncle would
always tell me, is early in the morning, all he
wanted to see was assholes and elbows, just to go
up the road and hang buy the ground, leave you say.
You know, so you can probably see how Derek and
Carl became fast friends. And then when we were part
beside each other, like I said, we just laughed and
(04:02):
had had a good time talk on each other. From
what Carl could tell, Derek was the real deal, not
just some rich guy playing dress up on the weekend.
I felt like that as a driver, and him going
from the petty driving experience too to his truck to
he's racing on his other stuff on ice and just
he just had a passionate race he wanted to do it.
(04:25):
At the time, Derek was working with another race team
and according to Carl, it wasn't a great situation, but
the guy that was kind of managing his team really
uh I guess head champagne tastes would a beer budget
and it was spending a lot. So the people that
he had helped him and didn't have the experience to
(04:45):
coach him. All they were worried about is could he
write the check for him so they could go and
go race. It was clear that Derek han ambition and
Carl had the experienced help him on his skills, so
they shook hands and decided to create their on team,
Motorsports Business Management or MBM for short, the team that
(05:05):
Carl still runs today. There's a million little things you
have to do in order to get a brand new
team off the ground, but Carl was glad to have
Derek as a partner. Derek was just one of the
best overall people that you could be around, uh to
help do everything. He wasn't lazy, wasn't selfish. He enjoyed racing,
He enjoyed drinking. Sometimes. I think he was a professional
(05:27):
head at some races. He would go he takes some
of my guys out at night. He'd be spring chicken,
ready to go to next day. My guys would be, oh, man,
We've tried to go out with Derek. Oh God, I
don't know how you could drink that much and still function.
You know, he was buying drinks for everybody in the bar,
you know, just having a good time. Within a few
(05:47):
short months, MBM was making a name for itself. Their
crowning achievement came in when Derek raced in New Hampshire
and became the first indigenous driver in the NASCAR Cup
Series Hoist the Lobster at the end of three hundred
and one lapse from the Hampshire Motor Speed one. But
less than a year after that race, it all came
(06:08):
to a screeching hult when Derek was arrested and Carl
got a phone call from NASCAR. No matter what, Derek
was gonna get banned, and we dissolved Derek's partnership where
he was no longer an owner of NBA Motorsports from
(06:31):
Campside Media and Dan Patrick Productions. This is running Smoke.
I'm Roger Gola and this is episode four White Lightning.
(06:51):
Whenever a driver is accused of misconduct, NASCAR acts quickly.
Officials told Carl that he had seventy two hours to
completely remove any trace of Derek from MBM Motorsports or
the entire team's eligibility would be in jeopardy. On top
of that, NASCAR and definitely suspended Derek from racing in
the series. They didn't call me. They didn't. I just
(07:12):
I read it on Basically somebody sent me to link
saying that they suspended me. Not even I didn't even
go to court yet, you're already banning me and I'll
like it made my uh my debut or in the
in the top tier the Cup Series and then next
Dar all the year after Boom, I'm fucking suspended. We
(07:35):
reached out to NASCAR for comments several times, but they
never responded to our requests. In any case, NASCAR was
not going to stand up in defense of Derek. That
was an issue for the courts to deal with. Usually
you're you're innocent until you're proven guilty, right, But right
off the bat they fucking banned me. But being suspended
from NASCAR, of all sports because of smuggling and tax
(07:57):
of Asian charges, well there's a articular irony there. I mean,
look at NASCAR, I mean it was it was built
off bootlegging, you know, with the moonshiners and all that,
and basically it is the same thing going on over here.
We'll get into all that right after the break. It's
(08:20):
no overstatement to say that without moonshining, there would be
no Nascar. The sport was the product of a unique
combination of V eight engines and high proof liquor that
could have only come together in the American South. And
this week we're gonna take a trip through history to
tell you all about how that cocktail came together. For
our non Southern listeners, for whom I have nothing but pity,
(08:40):
let me give you a quick lesson on moonshine, white lightning,
clear corn, mountain dew, whatever you wanna call it. It's
a crystal clear, unaged whiskey made from corn rye, barley,
or whatever else you have on hand. It's made in
small batches by mountain men in bibs and beards who
work by the light of the moon and backwood shacks.
But what really separates moon shine from any other liquor
(09:01):
is the fact that it's untaxed, unregulated, and therefore illegal.
Back in the nineteen thirties, when the US government banned alcohol,
moonshine was the only way a lot of people in
America could wet their whistle, which made it a very
lucrative business. Government agents fight hopelessly against illegal liquor. These
homemade stills are about a few of thousands seas than destroyed.
(09:24):
Other thousands produced millions of gallons, and countless hundreds prosper
in business of bootlegging. But moonshining represents so much more
than some folks making money on the side. For the
people who made shine, it's a symbol of pride and
self reliance, and in that way, it's a lot like
tobacco on Mohawk territories. For communities that have often been
(09:45):
on the short end of the stick, liquor and cigarettes
offered away for them to stand on their own feet,
even if it meant you were a criminal in the
eyes of the law making, moonshine was a god given right.
It was it was tradition, It was family bis this
Neil Thompson as a journalist and the author of Driving
with the Devil about the early days of American racing,
(10:05):
and and the moonshine was was used for many things.
It was medicine in some cases it was currency. It
was a homemade craft, and in their view, the government
had no rights to that. It was their product um
and there was their right to deliver it wherever they
saw fit. This is where the story of American stock
(10:27):
car racing begins. But delivery is a very polite way
of saying contraband smuggling. And where there's contraband, there's cops.
So moonshiners took their four V eight coops and stiffened
up the rear springs so when they filled the trunk
with liquor, it with the squat and look suspicious. They
knew that cops liked to shoot out radiators, so they
put sheet metal and their grills to protect their motors.
(10:50):
Some moonshiners even had James Bond type gadgets that dropped
nails or spilled oil behind you. Even though there was
an intense captain mouse aspect to this, this chase, this game, UM,
there was also a sense of mutual respect. One of
the guys I talked to UM there was a story
(11:10):
about him once delivering flowers to the hospital bed of
a revenue agent who he'd out run and left it
a ditch on the side of the road, but knew
he knew the agent had gotten hurt, left him some
flowers and just signed it the coup, meaning his Ford
V eight coup. Henry Ford famously said that auto racing
began five minutes after the second car came off the
(11:31):
production line. I'd be surprised if it took that long
for whiskey runners to get the same idea. They were
running moonshine, trying to get away from revenue agents, UM,
trying to stay alive and stay out of jail. And
along the way they learned to drive fast, fix up
their cars to go faster than the revenue agents, and
then on weekends for fun, they started racing each other.
(11:52):
Moonshiners would hire young kids to drive for the young,
fearless kids to drive for him. Tom Jensen is the
Curatorial Affairs director of the NASCAR Hall of Fame and
a longtime motorsports journalist. And the people who own these
businesses tended to know each other, and one guy would
say to another, you know, my driver's got the fastest
(12:14):
car in the county, and the other guy would say, no,
my drivers the fastest car in the county. So they
decided to have a race with just the two of them. Well,
word would get out and some neighbors would show up,
and you know, maybe the next week there would be
three or four guys from the next county over with
their race cars. Stock car racing was radically different than
(12:37):
the sort of racing that Americans have known up until then,
which was something reserved for the ultra wealthy. It was
sports cars. It was sort of the open wheel cars
that that you see in Lamands and Formula one and
indie cars, the types of cars that poor southern boy
could never dream of affording. Um And most of those
earlier car races happen on tracks that were built specifically
(13:03):
for those races, and most of those races happened up
North or in the Midwest, stock car racing offered something
totally different. It brought motorsports to the everyman. Teenagers scraped
money together and fixed up junkyard cars. Main street mechanics
would sponsor buddies to turn a few laps down at
the local track down South, where you didn't have any
(13:23):
real professional sports until like the nineteen sixties. Um this
sort of sports starved part of the country adopted stock
car racing as as its own. You know, it was
truly a home grown sport throughout the South, um modest
in the beginning. For years, stock car racing was just
(13:44):
a ragtag affair. There were dozens of different race leagues
in competition series, full of shady promoters and hobbist drivers.
It wasn't until Bill France, an aspiring race or in
Daytona Beach, brought together all the biggest promoters under one
banner that racing really became profess Chinel. France gave it
a name to the National Association for Stock Car Auto
(14:05):
Racing or NASCAR for short and right away, Big Bill
had a big problem moonshiners. He was trying to build
an above board, legit racing league that was family friendly
and amenable to corporate sponsors. Bootwiggers aren't exactly the crowd
to put on a suit and tie and talk nice
in front of a microphone. But at the same time,
the moonshiners were the ones winning the races because this
(14:27):
Hall of Famer Junior Johnson once said, nobody ever loves
a car more than a moonshiner does, because if you
go to a race and lose, you go home. If
you go on a moonshine run and lose, you go
to jail. Folks like that weren't going to play by
the rules, and Bill France found that out right away.
The winner of the very first NASCAR race ever was
(14:49):
disqualified for using modified heavy duty rear suspension, a trick
straight out of the bootleggers handbook. You know, I've talked
to one x moonshiner who who told me, Um, you know,
the best way to get a hillbilly to do something
is to tell him not to do it. It was
how they were raised to view the government with distrust
and to avoid paying taxes at all costs. Um. So
(15:13):
this this attitude, uh, that was there from the start
of stock car racing. Uh, this sort of nonconformity it
was in the blood of both the moonshiners and in
turn the NASCAR racers. One of my favorite stories is
there was a track in Georgia, I believe it was
called Middle Georgia Raceway that opened the late sixties, and
(15:36):
shortly after it opened, the FEDS rated it. And underneath
the track there was a entire moonshine operation. There's a
gallon distillery and they made an illegal liquor down there,
and um, they arrested the track general manager. They introduced
(16:02):
his evidence, the fact that he had bought three thousand
pounds a yeast some absurd amount, and he said, now
that was for our concession stands, and a jury of
his peers acquitted him in like a couple of hours.
There's an old joke in the racing world that sums
(16:24):
it all up. A race car driver reads a rule
book twice, first to see what it says, and then
again to see what it doesn't say. They would interpret
it like people interpret the Bible. They see what they
want to see. Give you a good example, and again
(16:44):
we'll go back to Junior Johnson. Rule book says car
got away thirty four hundred pounds at the start of
the race. Don't say nothing, Matt would have got away.
After the race, he would weld hundred pounds a lead
to the inside of each of the four rims on
his car to make minimum weight, and at the first
pit stop it would take forever to change the tires
(17:07):
because they weighed a hundred and sixty pounds each, but
from then on his card before hundred pounds lighter than
anyone else's, which technically was not against the rules. By
the sixties and seventies, NASCAR was flourishing under Bill France's leadership.
(17:27):
The racing was more intense, the fans were more committed,
and the racers were more professional. But France still had
a problem. NASCAR was just a Southern sport, a side
show to the MLB and NFL. Bill wanted the main stage,
and it took a blizzard and a fist fight to
get him there. Coming up after the break, you're listening
(17:55):
to Running Smoke. It's February ninety nine and the NASCAR
season is kicking off in Daytona Beach. Usually it's a
race that only Southerners would pay an they attention to,
but this time it was going nationwide. A freak blizzard
had canceled every sporting event in the Northeast, forcing NBC
(18:16):
to put NASCAR in its prime time slot. A sports
starved country tuned into its first stock car race and
the action was intense. Fans in the stands were on
their feet cheering as drivers came around the front stretch.
It's the last lap and a side by side battle
heats up between Donnie Allison and Kaylee Yarborough. Kale's crew
chief is none other than the bootleggers patron st Junior Johnson.
(18:38):
On the last lap, coming around turn two on the
back stretch, Kale makes a move on Donnie and now
their neck and neck. Their doors are inches away from
each other as they reached speeds upwards of a hundred
and fifty miles per hour. Folks back home how their
noses pressed up against the TV and silence falls over
wrapped bus terminals and airport bars across the country, and
(19:00):
then they slide down into the enfields as Richard Petty
comes from behind and takes the checker flag, winning the
Dayton of five hundred. But while Petty is taking his
victory lap, the two drivers on the infield grass climb
out of their cars, fight and Donnie Alie, you couldn't
(19:24):
write a better finish, the most amazing astoonishing. For the
first time in its history, NASCAR was now on the
national map. Sponsors wanted in, and NASCAR provided an incredible
opportunity for any company that wanted eyeballs on their brand.
What's better than a billboard moving at a hundred and fifty.
(19:45):
Money flowed into the sport and the race winnings went
even higher. So competition got tougher, drivers got better, and
mechanics got more creative. Instead of dumpster diving in junkyards,
engineers developed new exotic, purpose built hearts for their engines
and suspension systems. They took the sport out of the
hands of back Aird Mechanics and brought it into the
(20:06):
space age innovation and rule ending was getting to be
an expensive necessity for anyone that wanted to remain competitive.
I think where the real escalation took place was in
the early to mid nine nineties when it it kind
of became an arms race of who could outspend the
other to try to gain an advantage. Because what had
(20:29):
happened is there were fewer and fewer places to get
an advantage, and there were smaller advantages to get. NASCAR's
job as a governing body was to level the playing
field and keep it as fair as possible, no matter
how much money teams were putting into their cars. But
racers will still look for every advantage they can get.
(20:50):
For instance, when I first got into the sport in
the late nineties, was the first time they started hiring
quote unquote professional pit crew NASCAR teams. The top teams
went from having fat, middle aged guys who were mechanics
also double doing the pit stops, to creating recruiting programs
(21:15):
where they go to college campuses and recruit athletes who
played on football and basketball teams. And so they replaced
the forty year old guy with a beer belly with
a twenty two year old kid who was who was
cut and fit and athletic, and they were paying these
guys a lot of money, and things like that just
(21:38):
just drove the costs way up. At that time, Spending
money doesn't guarantee you will be successful. Not spending money
guarantees you will not be successful. As the sport got
more expensive, it became more exclusive, It became harder and
harder for blue collar guys to find success. And it
(21:58):
became easier for well funded teams to outmuscle smaller outfits
on the track. A few people understand how difficult it
is to compete in the sport better than Carl Long,
Derek's old business partner. He knows just how much every
dollar counts when you're racing at the back of the pack.
It's ass and I and on the dollar amounts just
and I haven't even started adding up for this weekend.
(22:18):
I might even actually have two sheets I do. I
was just figuring it. So so here's here's something for you.
This is just to tell you what I spent at
Atlanta in exfinity. The rap on the car was fifteen
hundred bucks, and that's cheap. We spent thirteen thousand, six
hundred times spent in hotels for one night, bands four
hundred nstry fee was two hundred Fuel just to put
(22:39):
in my tractor to get down there was fifteen hundred bucks.
And back food and drinks and our coolers two hundred bucks.
Sixty for box of lug nuts that you just used
once to throw away to rent the engines was thirty
thou dollars pit bonuses that was labor just for the weekend,
it was twenty thousand, five hundred. I have to rent.
I picked guns, that was seven hundred, was three hundred
bucks transmit ation with six all At all, Carl spent
(23:02):
more than eighty thousand dollars to run a single race
that weekend. And that's not even counting truck payments, insurance
and rent. So I'm I'm in a hole on a
good weekend, finishing eleventh with no damage. I'm in a
whole fifty bucks as it is. It's like the old
timers say, how do you make a small fortune, Well,
you take a large fortune and you go racing. For me.
(23:25):
At my my level, the most important talent a driver
can have is somebody to write a check to put
him in a seat. The most important talent is to
be able to write a check. In less than fifty years,
NASCAR went from a blue collar sport where shade tree
mechanics could raise their sedans on Sundays to a multi
billion dollar enterprise with tracks across the country, race cars
(23:47):
worth half a million dollars, and drivers who were trained
to race as soon as they can walk. Back in
the day, pit lane would have been full of pot
bellied mechanics, tuning carburetors with their pocket knives. Now it's
full of movie star celebrity owners and more computers than
mission control. For a team like MBM that was barely
scraping by on its best weekends, Derek was a godsend.
(24:10):
It's tough not to imagine how far they would have
come over the last ten years. If Derek hadn't been arrested,
we would be further up the uh probably further food chain.
We would have definitely ran. I guess if if we
had all of the money he spent, all lawyers and
stuff like right now, it was invested in racing. Hell,
Hendrick might needed a barrow something from us. Do you
(24:31):
think you would have kept racing cup if it wasn't
for this? Probably? Oh yeah, we um, I probably uh.
I probably have a couple of top twenties. As soon
as I am free from all this stuff, I'm gonna
(24:54):
look for a goddamn good lawyer in the States and
sue NASCAR too, because now it's it's gonna be six
years in April that they banned me, and you figure
all the races that I'm missing. You even put it
at forty place and say well, I'm losing all that money.
(25:15):
I told Carl about it. He goes, goddamn, he goes,
we're into twenties now, so suit him for the place.
The difference between a forty place finish and the twentieth
place finish could be tens of thousands of dollars winnings.
But it also means being closer to the front of
the pack where the action and the attention is. It
means a chance at moving up in the sport. But
(25:37):
now if Derek is allowed to race again, he may
have to start all over. You can't. It doesn't matter
if you've got if you've got billions of dollars, You
got to start at the bottom. Like anything else. You
can't just jump in a cup car and go racing.
You have to work your way up. Now, I haven't
raced in the car and over five years, so I
(25:57):
don't know if I'm gonna have to start back again
in the bottom. Basically, go to do the trucks, do
short track, then go to a mile and a half
and then a superspeedway and start over in the Exfinity.
Do a few races in there and then you know,
then finally it will give me my license to run
in a cup, to go to Daytone or wherever. I mean,
it's you know, it sucks. Uh, we're fighting it and
(26:21):
they put a ban on me. You know, like, uh,
aren't you supposed to be like proven, You gotta be
guilty before they do something. Right now, it's you're guilty,
and then you gotta prove yourself innocent, which is not right.
I mean, I'm innocent right from the start. So Carl
had a lot of back and forth with NASCAR officials
(26:42):
to see what it would take for Derek to get
back in the car, and the answer they gave him
was unequivocal. When Derek is free of criminal charges, then
he's free to race for NASCAR. For Derek to get
back on the track, he had no option but to
face a jury next time on running smoke. They just
(27:06):
want to just round up as many people as they
can and charge everybody and try to get as much
money as they can out of everybody. I'm just helping
a friend that's gangster something. They think we're criminals. They
want to make us look like criminals, and their eyes
were doing something wrong. And remember Derek's lawyer getting all
excited and pumping his fists and it was really happy,
(27:28):
So I'm like, Wow, that's gotta be a good thing.
Running Smoke is a production of camp Site Media, Dan
Patrick Productions, and Workhouse Media. The series was written and
reported by me Roger Gola. Our producers are Lea Pape's,
Laine Gerbig and Julie Dennischet. Our editors are Michelle Lands
(27:50):
and Emily Martinez. Sound designed and original music by Mark McAdam.
Additional sounded mixing by ewen Ly from You, with additional
reporting by Susie McCarthy. Our executive producers are Dan Patrick,
Josh Dean of camp Side Media, Paul Anderson, Nick Pinella,
and Andrew Greenwood for Workhouse Media. Fact checking by Mary Mathis,
artwork by Polly Adams, and additional thanks to Greg Horne,
(28:12):
Johnny Kapman, Sierra Franco, Elizabeth van Brocklin, and Sean Flynn.
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