Raymond Parks: Stock Car Racing’s First Team Owner

Before there was Rick Hendrick or Jack Roush, and even before there was Carl Kiekhaefer or Roger Penske, there was Raymond Parks.

Parks may not be as well known to today’s racing fans as Hendrick, Roush or Penske (in fact, how many still remember Carl Kiekhaefer and his mighty Mercury Marine-sponsored Chryslers of the mid-1950s?). But Parks was the first owner of what we now recognize as a multi-car NASCAR racing team, except Parks organized his first team even before Bill France Sr. organized NASCAR.

By the way, Parks was among those at that meeting when France organized and assumed control of American stock car racing. In fact, Parks was the last survivor of that famous gathering in 1947 in the Streamline Hotel on Daytona Beach. Parks died recently at the age of 96.

Most of what I know about Raymond Parks comes from the amazing book, Driving with the Devil: Southern Moonshine, Detroit Wheels, and the Birth of NASCAR, written by Neal Thompson and published in 2006.

Thompson’s thoroughly researched book covers the years before there was a NASCAR, when moonshiners such as Raymond Parks hot-rodded their cars to outrun law enforcement officials as they made their deliveries, and then, just for fun, raced each other around dirt ovals.

Parks organized the first racing team to publicize his legitimate businesses, including service stations and the Parks Novelty Machine Company. He bought a pair of 1939 Fords that were driven by his younger cousins, Lloyd Seay and Roy Hall. The crew chief for the cars was Red Vogt, who, among other things, may have been the first to use pneumatic power tools to change tires during a pit stop at a stock car race.

And when another “Red,” Red Byron, won NASCAR’s first official driving championship, he was driving one of Raymond Parks’ cars.

Photo Credit: Todd Lappin

Read more from Larry Edsall at iZoom