The first was cost Late Model Stock Cars were comparatively inexpensive. The division was successful for a number of reasons. Eventually, some of the lower division car owners built cars and moved up to Late Model Stock Car.” We had 25 – 30 cars every Saturday night, and we ran every week. you would be parking on the drag strip, so obviously the change was successful. “If you didn’t get to the track by 7 p.m. “As Old Dominion Speedway and other tracks started getting more cars, the fans increased,” Darne said. “At one time it was the biggest division in NASCAR,” Gore said. It was Lance Childress at NASCAR who first put the Late Model Stock Car division in the NASCAR rulebook. Eventually, NASCAR decided they’d better put it in the rulebook.” Then Southside picked them up, then Orange County and South Boston. “Joe Carver at Langley (Va.) was the first to bring in Late Model Stock Cars,” Gore said.
1984 August 17 | Friday: Elton Sawyer (43) Chevrolet Camaro prepares to qualify for the Winston 50 NASCAR Winston Racing Series Late Model Stock Car event at Southside Speedway in Richmond, Virginia. And as the ’79 season rolled into 1980 and the car counts (and crowds) grew at Old Dominion, the people who said the new car would never work began paying attention. But they eventually came back.”īilly Earl won the first Late Model Stock Car championship. They’d tow right past the front gate on their way to somewhere else. “A lot of racers left,” Gore noted, “because they had the big cars (Late Model Sportsman). Gore said the class had 10 or 11 cars by the end of the first year, then just grew from there.ĭarne observed, “The next year we had many Late Model Stock Cars, and Dick dropped the Sportsman Division.” “One car builder told me, ‘You’ll never see one of those come out of my shop.’” “NASCAR, promoters all told me it could never work,” Gore said. “We could almost stay with them.”īy the end of the year, the Late Model Stock Cars ran standalone races. “We had five cars the first race, and Dick had us start in the back of the Sportsman race,” Darne said. The Late Model Stock Car became a division in 1978. It used untouched motor parts and Camaro front ends.” 1983 September 10 | Saturday: Barry Beggarly (10) Pontiac Ventura races Maurice Hill (69) Chevrolet Camaro in the Puryear 100 NASCAR Winston Racing Series Late Model Stock Car event at Orange County Speedway in Rougemont, North Carolina. Gore said, “You could build a car for $4,000 with the motor. Competitors asked that the division not include the word “limited,” so the Late Model Stock Car was born. When the car count goes down, so does the fan base, as many of the fans attend because they have a friend or family member driving or on a crew.”Ī new set of rules were created that utilized stock parts. “Many cars were just sitting in the garages. “Cars had become so costly the local car owners couldn’t afford to run every week,” Darne noted. One of those competitors was Bobby Darne. “It was colder than hell,” Gore recalled about the day he met with Doug Hartley, Billy Earl, Al Dailey and others to hash out a set of rules. In the winter prior to the 1978 racing season, he called some competitors to his office to discuss the creation of a new division.
Gore sometimes started his quicker Limited Sportsman cars with the Late Model Sportsman in features to fill the field. “That’s when the money got crazy.”Īnd the car counts diminished. “I could see the handwriting on the wall,” Gore said. But as Gore observed, the cost to racers was “getting out of hand.” On top of that, NASCAR allowed each track to have four national championship races offering extra purse and points, so when tracks had their big races, they drew cars away from other local tracks. In the late ‘70s, the Late Model Sportsman cars were the local top division. They were the brainchild of Dick Gore, who at the time promoted the now-defunct Old Dominion Speedway in Manassas, Va. NASCAR’s Late Model Stock Car division has run on short tracks throughout the southern Mid-Atlantic - the Carolinas, Virginia, and Tennessee - for 40 years, making it one of the most successful weekly short track stock car racing divisions ever created.