As much as lots of people don’t want to admit it, one of the reasons that racing was so popular in the 1960s was because it was high theater. Really, it was. You had these huge colossus companies beating each other’s brains in and trying to out cheat the other and then you had the gutsy and unflappable drivers who drove to 11/10s at all times in cars that were barely fit to turn a corner to begin with. You also had an important element that rears its head up in this video: death. Joe Weatherly suffers a vicious crash in this video and he was killed on impact. The race did not stop, the event did not end, they finished it. Chances are, many of the people had no idea he was dead until they got home from the race and watched the news. As macabre and weird as it is to say, people buy tickets when they know what they’re watching could be deadly.
While we’re always on the side of safety today, the simple fact is that the crashes we see on a near weekly basis at NASCAR races take place at amazing speeds and as viewers, we barely flinch because we have the expectation that no matter the circumstance, the driver will be fine. Back in ’64 if you saw someone endo or roll a car at speed, there was a better than average chance you witnessed that driver’s last mistake.
Like all old NASCAR videos, this one has killer cars, all the legendary drivers, and plenty of action. One of the neat things about NASCAR road course races both then and now is that they validated the drivers’ ability. These guys were race car drivers whether they were going left or left AND right, the old time legends had the skills to wrassle the cars around whatever was in front of them.
PRESS PLAY BELOW TO SEE HISTORIC VIDEO FROM THE 1964 NASCAR RIVERSIDE 500 –
Those are Stock Cars! The things they are “racing” today are just sheet metal, tube frame, kinda look like a cars S**t boxes. When they go back to racing stock cars let me know……
I agree completely ! That was real racing. Night and day difference from the sad state of “stock car racing” today.
It was a sad day that day with Joe Weatherly’s loss. Our Father, the late Bobby Sykes built Parnelli’s motors for Bill Stroppe. They were experimenting with new valves. Dropped a valve and that was that.I was only 10 at the time.Dad went to work for Gurney 6 months later to build the dyno room and motor’s etc. That didn’t last for long. Gurney’s shop boss didn’t care for dad so back to Stroppes for a while than back to Keith Blacks to do R and D for the 426 hemi and other projects until 1972. The rest is history. May they all rest in peace !