50 years ago, a real 'chase'

By DAVID GREEN

Well, this 2006 Chase for the Cup is getting interesting, all right. After the first three of 10 rounds, the sun is certainly not shining on the Hendrick Motorsports team, except perhaps to give somebody a sunburn.

Fifty years ago, the forerunner of today's superteam, Carl Kiekhaefer's Mercury Outboards operation, was having problems of its own en route to a second consecutive Grand National championship title.

It was the eighth season for Big Bill France's new series for new-model production stock cars, and things were rolling right along. The schedule had grown to include some 56 races on the 1956 calendar, spanning the country. Of course, no one driver could hope to compete in all the races, because many of them were scheduled in same-day, head-to-head conflict, one in the east and another in the west.

The Kiekhaefer team was a juggernaut, having stormed to domination the year before in its first year of operation. Tim Flock won 16 races and 18 poles, and on 11 occasions, he led from start to finish to score victories on the way to his second Grand National championship title. Right out of the gate, the new entry had established itself as the New York Yankees of stock car racing -- the team that outstripped every other, and set the standard for achievement.

For '56, Kiekhaefer hired the driver who had given Flock his stiffest competition the year before, Buck Baker. Speedy Thompson would drive a third Kiekhaefer entry. The team won 22 of the first 27 races, but all was not milk and honey. Flock quit the team in April.

Kiekhaefer replaced Flock with the other two-time champion in the young series' history -- Herb Thomas. That worked OK for awhile, but Thomas, too, quit Kiekhaefer after winning three races and went back to driving his own Chevrolet.

In a Hollywood-like script, the championship came down to a scrap between Thomas and Baker. During the middle of the season, both the Kiekhaefer team and Thomas' independent entry seemed to have lost their magic. During a 17-race stretch that ended on Labor Day with the Southern 500 at Darlington, a victory by Thompson on July 27 at Shelby, N.C., was the only win for the Kiekhaefer team, while Thomas failed to win a race.

Still, Thomas had forged a lead in points. A record number of race winners (19) were spreading the victories amongst themselves, and Thomas ran consistently high enough to move ahead in the standings.

And so it came down to the final four races of the season. The circuit returned to Shelby's Cleveland County Fairgrounds half-mile dirt oval. Just past the halfway point of a 200-mile race, Thomas moved his Chevy past Thompson to take second place in Turn 2. As the two cars exited the turn, they hooked bumpers and Thomas went head-on into the guard rail. His No. 92 was hammered in a chain-reaction pileup, and Thomas suffered critical injuries.

Baker won, and although he still trailed Thomas in points, the leader would not be competing in the last three races of the year. Baker won the title.

However, it was a hotly controversial triumph. Many observers felt Thompson deliberately wrecked Thomas to help his teammate, Baker, win the championship, although no wrongdoing was ever proved.

It was the end of the line for the most spectacularly successful team in NASCAR history. The Kiekhaefer effort swept championships and dominated NASCAR racing for the two-year stretch of 1955-56, and at the end of '56, Kiekhaefer abruptly shut down the operation and ended his tenure in NASCAR.

All that happened on a much smaller stage, on small, dimly lit dirt tracks. The spectators numbered in the thousands, not the hundreds of thousands. There was no television audience. To paraphrase a line from President Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, the world would little note nor long remember what happened at Shelby, N.C., that night in October.

But it helped build the sport that is such a roaring success today. And it laid the foundations for championship battles such as the Chase that fans are enjoying this fall.