Best hall of them all

By DAVID GREEN

Bud Moore and Donnie Allison. Two of my all-time favorites. Going into the International Motorsports Hall of Fame, this week -- Thursday night, at Talladega.

How sweet it is.

Bud and Donnie are special entrants in this year's class of inductees. Like the IMHOF itself, they transcend the sport for which they are best known -- stock car racing.

Bud, in the same decade in which he won back-to-back Grand National championships with the late Joe Weatherly in 1962-63, took time out from NASCAR to manage Ford's entry into the highly popular Trans Am sports car series. He proved to be a champion there, too, with Parnelli Jones driving the Mustangs he fielded to the 1970 title.

Donnie, just five years after I watched him dominate south Florida late model modified racing, was not only a NASCAR winner, but also a rookie in the Indianapolis 500. He finished fourth in an A.J. Foyt-owned car. He came back the next year and validated his rookie run with a sixth-place finish.

These two guys are perfect examples of why, in my humble opinion, the Talladega hall and museum are the best in all of auto racing.

I don't dislike the others. I love the National Motorsports Press Association's own Joe Weatherly Museum at Darlington. The Auto Racing Hall of Fame in Novi, Mich., is great. The Indianapolis Motor Speedway museum is fabulous. The Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles has some great motorsports stuff, and the NHRA's shrine in suburban Pomona is wonderful, as is "Big Daddy" Don Garlits' showplace in Ocala, Fla.

But IMHOF -- established, by the way, by the stock car man himself, William H.G. France -- is the most complete auto racing shrine. It has everything. All forms of the sport are well recognized.

It's kind of ironic. More than 60 years ago, France set out to establish something new and different, revolutionary and radical, and it was not welcomed by the establishment. The American Automobile Association, which had been the only major sanctioning body for the sport since the early 20th century, denigrated everything outside the Triple A umbrella as "outlaw" racing.

Some forms of the sport deserved the label. There was competition that had few safety regulations, and there were rogue promoters who took the ticket revenue and skipped town without waiting to pay any prize money.

France addressed all those topics, at least as well if not better than the Triple A Contest Board. And in 1955, when the Association withdrew from auto racing and some lawmakers in Washington were demanding that this brutal, dangerous sport be shut down, France led the fight to save auto racing. Not just stock car racing, but all racing.

And he went on to lead his own discipline of the sport to the verge of becoming the predominant form in the U.S.

The museum he envisioned was all-encompassing. The IMHOF roster includes the stars of all forms of racing, not just France's specialty.

I'm sure the new institution now being built in Charlotte will be a fine one. It will probably set the standard for the new generation of NASCAR fans.

In another ironic twist, I suspect that for long-term race fans, the hall Big Bill himself established in Alabama will still be the best one.

If there were a hall of fame for halls of fame, the IMHOF would be auto racing's representative.