Nascar

whose early racers were bootleggers…”

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Beginning in the Prohibition era, drivers began transporting moonshine from rural areas or illegally importing booze from Canada. To keep ahead of the law they had to make resourceful changes to their vehicles to elude the authorities on winding backroads with hairpin turns. If it hadn’t been for whiskey, NASCAR wouldn’t have been formed. Stock car racing had its roots in Appalachia, where producing and selling homemade whiskey offered liquid salvation for family farms seeking to escape crippling poverty, especially during the Great Depression, which hit the region particularly hard. While automaker Henry Ford banned drinking by his workers, his Ford V-8 was literally the engine that drove moonshining after its 1932 debut (Thompson 2007).

Bootleggers had experimented with different cars over time, but they were never quite fast enough for their tastes until the Ford V-8 was able to come up with an engine. During the 1930s, moonshiners began to race their whiskey cars at local fairgrounds and racetracks, where they discovered that lots of people liked to watch them race around.  The need for mechanics, drivers, promoters, and track owners was met by those who had deep ties to the illegal alcohol business of moonshine. It was not until the 1950’s that new NASCAR Management tried to dismiss any ties with moonshining.