In Honor Of Darlington

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PettyBlue

Guest
..and tonight's Truck Series race at the Lady In Black, here's a few screen grabs from what's arguably the best stock car movie ever made: Thunder In Carolina. The film's climax is the 1959 Southern 500.

Oldsmobile pace car driver Curtis Turner prepares to lead the three wide field off for the start-

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Fireball Roberts in a Smokey Yunick Pontiac is on the pole, with future NASCAR pace car driver Elmo Langley on the outside, and a big ol' Buick in between.

Lee Petty was outside on the third row beside a couple "Squarebirds". Spoilers? Let's bring back tail fins!

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I belive that that's Bob Welborn in the 49.

Richard started his first Southern 500 one row ahead of his daddy in his yet-to-be-famous #43.

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Oldsmobile's mighty 98 was one of the cars to beat that year.

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"Stock" still meant stock, and other than removing the headlights and hubcaps along with installing a plumbing pipe roll bar and a lap belt, this car was right off the showroom floor.

It was also not unusual to see cars that had been raced a couple seasons and rebuilt.

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Here's "Mitch Cooper"'s '57 Chevrolet.

Common templates?

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..I don't think so! :D

Radios were still a few years away as well..

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That's Ed McGrath in the hat- He plays a wealthy Rick Hendrick type team owner that buys up all the best talent. Some things don't change! ;)
 
There are so many great scenes in that picture that it was hard to pick just a few. :)

(p.s.- thanks for fixing the title ;) )
 
Thank you so much for those shots. The two T-birds beside Lee are Banjo Matthews and Joe Weatherly. That brand new Olds was just a stripped down street car with water color lettering, hence the water pipe roll bars but the '57 Chevy was the real deal, check out the "Black Widow" six lug hubs, at least in the close ups. I'm not sure if they used it for the crash at the end or not. I do know that it took two cars to get the final crash filmed.

Soapy Castles (who had a small speaking part in the film as he asks veteran stunt man Cory Loftin if he's ready to take the '57 Ford out for his qualifying run. You should have seen the look on the real owner when he saw his car rolled on the backstretch and hadn't been told it was going to happen) tried to tell the movie people that to drive the car through the prepunched hole in the guard rail would merely stick the nose heavy car in the ground.

They wouldn't listen and he drove it through the break and it did just as he said. After a quick trip into town to search the used car lots for another '57 ol' Soap painted it up, pitched it sideways and rolled it through the hole and got the shot.

The Cooper character was patterned after Curtis Turner, the car owner after Carl Kiekhaefer, the (I don't know why he was one armed) mechanic after Buddy Shuman, the young leadfoot who cooked the engine in the Olds after a very young Junior Johnson and even the lady car owner had a real life counterpart.

. And that front row had Fireball on the pole, the middle Olds was driven by Elmo Langley and the #22 Chevy was driven by Speedy Thompson.


There's a guy on one of the model boards that I post on that built this model of Cooper's '57 from the new Black Widow kit and did a fine job on it.

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I kinda figured that the Olds was a "dummy'- entering a movie car in an actual race would have to wait for "Days of Thunder"- but it's really not too far away from what they ran. There's a lot of great "in car" footage in the older film too. Maybe I'll "have to" watch it again to get some more screen shots. ;)
 
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