Happy Birthday Pops.

[LUKE'57]

Stock car legend Curtis Turner was the class of the convertible division and won 22 of the 42 convertible races the first year of the division ('56) along with the Southern 500 of that year.



He tried to repeat at Darlington in '57 but Lee Petty had other ideas and cramped more than Pop's style and sent him to the pits with a busted radiator and a badly wrinkled Smokey Yunick Ford. (Yep, a Smokey Yunick FORD)



Turner got kicked out of Nascar in '61 for TRYING to organize the drivers as part of the Teamsters but never got the deal past France. He was promised a loan to bale out his cash strapped Charlotte Motor Speedway for his efforts that never materialized so it was all for naught. While on his forced "vacation" from Nascar, Pops terrorized other sanctions including USAC and even winning the Pikes Peak Hill Climb defeating the Unsers.



Turner was reinstated in late '65 and showed them that he had lost nothing in the layoff by winning the first race at the new Rockingham track in this Wood Brothers Galaxie.



One of the last things he did for Ford was to shake down the new "half-chassis" '66 Fairlane that was the granddaddy of all the later front steer chassised cars that ran into the eighties with all sorts of bodies including the '83 T-bird that gave the Monte Carlo SS cars so much grief.



There'll never be another Curtis Turner just like there'll never be another John Wayne.
As always, the pics are of mine and by brother's models. Hope you enjoy.

[malscar]

Love it. Curtis was a great racer, as were quite a few others in that period. Shame how France was such a dictator in Nascar.

[tonioseven]

That was a cool history lesson The models are great as well

[Raikkobin]

I'm not a fan of nascar at all and this definately turned my interest up a notch. Great to see passion and interest as you truly have, cool history lesson as well! Keep it up!!

[LUKE'57]

Thanks guys. Raikkobin, glad you liked them. I'm not a fan of what passes for Nascar today either. I think you would like the early guys as they were racers down to the core and nothing at all like these poster boys for GQ they pass off as racers these days.

[gionc]

Cool! Great stuff to share your passion for classics today, here in europe we know few about the Nascar and less about nascar legends...your PSD job are ever fun to see