Heartbreak, triumph vivid for HOF nominee Moore

Only a handful of men currently alive can say with certainly that they were there at NASCAR's birth. One of those was Spartanburg, S.C., native Bud Moore. As one of the top mechanics in the sport, he won championships with Buck Baker. As a full-time car owner, he won championships with Joe Weatherly. He was a guiding force in the early careers of Darrell Waltrip and Dale Earnhardt. After tragedy struck his team twice within a 12-month period, Moore assisted NASCAR with several key safety initiatives that remain in place today. Over a 37-year span as car owner, Moore won 63 races and his cars finished in the top 10 nearly half of the time.

Hall of Fame bio

A decorated World War II infantryman, Bud Moore became a successful Cup Series car owner almost immediately upon fielding a team in 1961.

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Q: How did you get started in racing?

Moore: Well, that's a pretty long story. I really got started in late 1946, early 1947. Myself and Cotton Owens were in Spartanburg. Cotton built him a modified car to start with and started running it, and me and Joe Eubanks got together and we built one. So we started running the modifieds, the flat-head Fords.

I was doing more of the mechanicing, Joe Eubanks was doing more of the driving. I tried to drive but I knocked too many fences down. Anyway, that's how we got started. We won quite a few races and Cotton Owens won quite a few. All the modifieds run together: the Flock brothers and Jack Smith, you name them, all of them were running back then. We'd run a race in Columbia, S.C. on Thursday night, run Charlotte Fairgrounds on Friday night and we'd run Lakewood in Atlanta or we'd run Asheville- Weaverville or Augusta on Sunday. So we'd run three races a week.

I do remember the latter part of '47, or early part of '48, we won 13 Thursday nights in a row in Columbia. During the time, we won something like 20 of 22 races at Columbia.

Q: At what point did you decide to move up into Grand National?

Moore: We sort of got the idea after Bill France formed NASCAR. We helped get the thing rolling. Also, when they ran the first Grand National race in 1949, we started looking into it. We started running some in a '49 Ford. Then we started running a 1950 Oldsmobile when they came out, the Oldsmobile 88. We ran the first race they ran in Darlington in 1950. I think we finished 14th.

I was part-owner and chief mechanic. I was better at being a mechanic than being a driver, I'll put it that way.

Q: Some of your greatest success as a chief mechanic came in the latter part of that decade, didn't it?

Moore: Me and Joe Eubanks, we ran Fords together. I was a chief mechanic on Buck Baker's car in 1957 and also Speedy Thompson's car. Baker won the championship in '57 and Thompson won Darlington in '57. We had a lot of success that year and I was voted mechanic of the year in 1958.

Back in '56, we were running the '55 Ford and we were out in Chattanooga, Tenn. -- a mile dirt track. Pete DePaolo had four '56 Fords out there and he had all these drivers driving them. But they didn't have the right kind of screens on them to keep the dirt out of the radiator. And almost any of them didn't finish. We ran second or third in that race, and DePaolo knew we were racers so he gave us two of those '56 Fords they had out there. We brought them back and started running them.

In '58, we ran the Chevrolet. That's when the 348 engine came out and we had quite a bit of trouble with it at first, but we got it figured out. Me and Jack Smith teamed up in 1959 and we ran a '59 Chevrolet. Also, we left Chevrolet in 1959 and got a 1960 model Pontiac. We won quite a few races and set a world record on July 4 at Daytona when we won the 250-mile race and averaged 146 mph.

That's how it all got started.

Q: What was your relationship with Joe Weatherly like?

Moore: We had a good relationship. We won two championships with him and don't remember how many races, but there were quite a few. We lost him in Riverside, Calif., because of a brake problem. He was always called the clown prince of racing. He was always pulling some sort of stunt on somebody and carrying on a lot of foolishness. But he was a heck of a race driver. (Continued)