Wendell Scott

Race Car Driver

• Born: August 28, 1921
• Birthplace: Danville, Virginia
• Died: December 23, 1990
• Place of death: Danville, Virginia

Sport: Auto racing

Early Life

Wendell Scott was the founding father of African American stock-car racing. He was born on August 28, 1921, in Danville, Virginia, and studied at Danville High School, leaving after eleventh grade. He did not perform especially well in athletics or academics but played baseball enthusiastically. Baseball remained a lifelong interest.

During World War II, Wendell served in the U.S. Army from 1942 to 1945 and was stationed in Cheyenne, Wyoming, and Europe. An able mechanic, Wendell ended his war service in charge of a convoy of trucks. Many successful National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing (NASCAR) drivers bloomed under the same sort of apprenticeship. Wendell joined Grand National racing in 1961, at Spartanburg, South Carolina.

The Road to Excellence

Wendell’s initial success came in 1959, when he won the Sportsman Racing Championship at Southside Speedway in Richmond, Virginia. The same year, he captured the Virginia Championship for stock car drivers. During his early years, Wendell struggled for the financial backing necessary to turn out a competitive racing machine. In one race, he endured the frustration of a broken seat and gas pedal.

During the 1961 racing season, Wendell ranked thirty-second in national point standings. The next year, he demonstrated his true racing form. At the wheel of a 1961 Chevrolet, he started forty-one races and finished among the top ten on seventeen occasions. In 1963, Wendell started forty-seven races with fifteen top-ten finishes. Wendell still drove his faithful 1961 Chevrolet, logging 6,163.4 miles in competitive racing. He recorded his only 1963 NASCAR victory in a Jacksonville, Florida, race. His next-best performance that year was a fifth-place finish at Spartanburg, South Carolina.

The Emerging Champion

In 1964, Wendell began the season in a 1962 Chevrolet. Halfway through the season, Wendell opted for a 1963 Ford and immediately enjoyed greater success. With the Ford, he generated greater acceleration. In 1966, he finished sixth in the Grand National standings, earning $16,780 in forty-five starts, finishing three times among the top five, and ranking seventeen times in the top ten. For many years, he occupied the spotlight as the only African American driver on the circuit.

Like many auto racers, Wendell possessed superstitions. He never wore green or allowed green coloring on his automobile or allowed peanuts to be consumed in his pits or garage area. He did experience some prejudice as a black racer but never let it affect him.

Wendell launched his racing career just as NASCAR began to achieve momentum as a sport. The Daytona International Speedway opened in 1959, while speedways opened at Atlanta, Georgia, and Charlotte, North Carolina, in 1960. The 1961 Firecracker 400 race at Daytona Beach, Florida, was televised, signifying national coverage for the sport.

Continuing the Story

Wendell’s best NASCAR season came in 1969, when he finished eleven times in the top ten and collected $27,542 in prize money. In May, 1973, Wendell was involved in a nineteen-vehicle wreck during the Talladega race. Wendell’s 1971 Mercury was demolished, and he suffered the first serious injuries of his racing career. He ended up with three fractured ribs, two fractures in the pelvic girdle, a fractured right knee, two fractures of the left knee, a fractured leg, and an arm laceration that necessitated sixty stitches.

Wendell died on December 23, 1990, at the age of sixty-nine, having suffered from spinal cancer, bilateral pneumonia, high blood pressure, and kidney ailments. He frequently described himself as an aging pugilist: “I guess I’m like a washed-up prize fighter. He knows it’s the last round, and he knows he’s beat, but he keeps trying to land that knockout punch.” At his Danville, Virginia, funeral, many NASCAR drivers paid respects to the pioneer racer who started more than five hundred Grand National races and finished among the top five twenty times.

Summary

In 1977 the film Greased Lightning reprised Wendell Scott’s life, career, successes, and setbacks. Wendell’s life was an example of how hard it was for any NASCAR racer, white or black, to succeed. It is of sociocultural significance that Wendell’s successful years, in the late 1960’s, occurred during the era of the Civil Rights movement, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s prominence and death, and racial tensions that threatened to pull the United States into major social disorder. Wendell battled to survive as a lone black driver in a culture of racial discrimination and segregation. As there were no African American drivers on the NASCAR circuit even at the start of the twenty-first century, Wendell’s accomplishments seem all the more admirable.

Bibliography

Alleyne, Sonia, and T. R. Witcher. “The New Face of NASCAR.” Black Enterprise 34, no. 9 (April, 2004): 108-118.

Black American Racers Association. Black Racers Yearbook 1974: Official Annual of the Black American Racers Association. Trenton, N.J.: The Association, 1974.

McLaurin, James. NASCAR’s Most Wanted: The Top Ten Book of Outrageous Drivers, Wild Wrecks, and Other Oddities. Washington, D.C. : Brassey’s, 2001.

Strosnider, J. Steve. Tales from the Track: Stories from the Early Days of Racing. Victoria, B.C.: Trafford, 2002.