Free The Purple Decades by Tom Wolfe Page A

of them can resist it. Coming out of the turn they go into a wildass race down the backstretch, both of them trying to get into the third turn first, and all the way across the infield you can hear them ricocheting off each other and bouncing at a hundred miles an hour on loose dirt, and then they go into ferocious power slides, red dust all over the goddamned place, and then out of this goddamned red-dust cloud, out of the fourth turn, here comes Junior Johnson first, like a shot, with Pearson right on his tail, and the good old boys in the stands going wild, and the qualifying runs haven’t started yet, let alone the race.
    Junior worked his way up through the minor leagues, the Sportsman and Modified classifications, as they are called, winning championships in both, and won his first Grand National race, the big leagues, in 1955 at Hickory, on dirt. He was becoming known as “the hardest of the hard-chargers,” power sliding, rooting them out of the groove, raising hell, and already the Junior Johnson legend was beginning.
    He kept hard-charging, power sliding, going after other drivers as though there wasn’t room on the track but for one, and became the most popular driver in stock car racing by 1959. The presence of Detroit and Detroit’s big money had begun to calm the drivers down a little. Detroit was concerned about Image. The last great duel of the dying dog-eat-dog era of stock car racing came in 1959, when Junior and Lee Petty, who was then leading the league in points, had it out on the Charlotte raceway. Junior was in the lead, and Petty was right on his tail, but couldn’t get by Junior. Junior kept coming out of the curves faster. So every chance he got, Petty would get up right on Junior’s rear bumper and start banging it, gradually forcing the fender in to where the metal would cut Junior’s rear tire. With only a few laps to go, Junior had a blowout and spun out up against the guardrail. That is Junior’s version. Petty claimed Junior hit a pop bottle and spun out. The fans in Charlotte were always throwing pop bottles and other stuff onto the track late in the race, looking for blood. In any case, Junior eased back into the pits, had the tire changed, and charged out after Petty. He caught him on a curve and—well, whatever really
happened, Petty was suddenly “up against the wall” and out of the race, and Junior won.
    What a howl went up. The Charlotte chief of police charged out onto the track after the race, according to Petty, and offered to have Junior arrested for “assault with a dangerous weapon,” the hassling went on for weeks—
    â€œBack then,” Junior tells me, “when you got into a guy and racked him up, you might as well get ready, because he’s coming back for you. H’it was dog eat dog. That straightened Lee Petty out right smart. They don’t do stuff like that anymore, though, because the guys don’t stand for it.”
    Anyway, the Junior Johnson legend kept building up and building up, and in 1960 it got better than ever when Junior won the biggest race of the year, the Daytona 500, by discovering a new technique called “drafting.” That year stock car racing was full of big powerful Pontiacs manned by top drivers, and they would go like nothing else anybody ever saw. Junior went down to Daytona with a Chevrolet.
    â€œMy car was about ten miles an hour slower than the rest of the cars, the Pontiacs,” Junior tells me. “In the preliminary races, the warmups and stuff like that, they was smoking me off the track. Then I remember once I went out for a practice run, and Fireball Roberts was out there in a Pontiac and I got in right behind him on a curve, right on his bumper. I knew I couldn’t stay with him on the straightaway, but I came out of the curve fast, right in behind him, running flat out, and then I noticed a funny thing. As long as I stayed right in behind him, I