Moonshine and nascar, a couple stories I hadn't heard before

Raymond Parks, �the first person to put together a formalized, legitimate racing team,� ran away from his home in the mountains of northern Georgia at age 14 to become an apprentice to a moonshiner he had met in the county jail after being locked up for buying hooch for his father.

Working at a still and hauling corn whiskey around Atlanta, Parks made a fortune bootlegging, and invested his ill-gotten gains in legitimate enterprises such as service stations and the growing sport of stock car racing.

Parks didn�t have to venture far to find two talented drivers for his racing team. His cousins Lloyd Seay and Roy Hall happened to be some of the top moonshine runners in northern Georgia.

Seay won the first big stock car race in 1938 at Atlanta�s Lakewood Speedway in front of 20,000 fans, and Hall would eventually win the national stock car championship in 1941. When stock car racing resumed after World War II in September 1945, a riot nearly ensued at Lakewood Speedway after police banned five racers, including Hall, who had been convicted of liquor-hauling violations.
(how does them not having a drivers license affect their driving on a race track?) With 30,000 fans chanting for Hall, who had his driver�s license revoked after being arrested no less than 16 times, the authorities relented and let the bootleggers race. Hall took the checkered flag.

Atlanta, however, did not welcome the moonshiners back, and Bill France began to recruit the moonshiners to race in Virginia and the Carolinas. So, nascar was created because Atlanta didn't want the moonshiners racing their.

Also,

Junior Johnson went to talk to the RJ Reynolds company about sponsorship, just when they discovered the federal law was changing in 1971 and preventing them from future advertising on tv... so, they already had a big budget for advertising, and nothing to do with it.... so Jr got Bill France to meet with them, and the Winston Cup racing was created.

The Shop magazine, dec 2018 issue, and https://www.history.com/news/how-prohibition-gave-birth-to-nascar