NASCAR, fast car, not gonna be last car

The Appalachian State University Library Stock Car Racing Collection is preserving racing history for future generations by building a comprehensive repository of stock car racing materials.

Fans, scholars and journalists from across the country utilize the collection, which contains 1,600 books, 300 videos and DVDs, 160 serial titles, as well as photographs, race programs, press kits, and a clippings file covering more than 1,500 topics. It is considered the primary public source for archived materials related to the sport. Interest is widespread, with the staff receiving inquiries from France, Australia and the BBC.

{module Share this!|none}After receiving key donations—including boxes of Richard Petty’s media coverage and fan correspondence as his wife, Lynda, cleaned out their North Carolina home—Appalachian opened a stock car racing collection in 2000.

“We live so close to the founders of what’s become a major national sport, that it’s natural for us to be at the center of documenting its history and culture and what it has meant to this region,” said Appalachian’s Dean of Libraries Mary Reichel.

Stock car racing got its start in Southern Appalachia, with moonshiners transporting illegal goods at insane speeds along mountains roads. It evolved into weekend races to see who drove the fastest car. Competition became formally organized in 1947 with the founding of the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing (NASCAR).

The collection includes thousands of images from the 1960s to 1980s taken by NASCAR photographer T. Taylor Warren; Hank Schoolfield’s live audio broadcasts from his Universal Racing Network in the late 1960s to early 1980s; and exhibit curator Suzanne Wise’s own research on 1940s and 1950s driver Louise Smith, the first woman to be inducted into the International Motorsports Hall of Fame. Brought in by NASCAR’s Bill France to draw more spectators at his races, Smith won 38 competitions during a 10-year period and was known for her frequent and spectacular crashes.