One of the editors here at Stock Car Racing suggested I write a column on the economics of racing. Heck, guys, I could write a book on that subject.
Let's start with this theory: Somebody figured out if you had a dollar in 1960, it would take $5 now to buy what that dollar would have back then. That ought to tell you something. Anyway, let's start around 1960. We didn't have crew chiefs back then. We had somebody who looked after the crew and the car, but everybody on the team worked as crewmen. The newspapers started the bit about crew chiefs. The writers would go talk with the person they felt was in charge. The very top salary for anybody on the crew was about $100 a week in 1960.
I tell people the important point about this era was that people did not gravitate to racing because of the money. They came into the sport because they loved racing. That is the difference today. Now, a person mechanically-minded will read that crewmen are making big money in racing, and they will try to get into the sport just for the money.
Every crew had its own people in the early '60s. Then, team owners would look around and say, "That is a pretty good guy working on that team over there. Let's give him $105 to come to work for us." Well, that's when the swapping around became popular.
In 1960, you would go to town and buy a car off the showroom-spend maybe $3,000. You'd bring it home and four or five guys would spend a week taking it apart, taking out the headliners and stuff such as that. Then it would take about a week to put in rollbars and put on shocks. By the time you finished, you may have $5,000 in the car. The engines then were stock. We'd take them apart and shine up the parts and put them back together. We'd probably run an engine four or five races before tearing it down-or a least run it until it started using oil. Today an engine costs you $50,000 to $60,000.
Back then it was an out-of-the-pocket deal. The factories were not giving you any help at the time. You didn't have any sponsors, either. Everybody was working out of what the tracks paid you, and tracks were paying $1,500 to win a 100-mile race. In the late '50s, the factories were in racing, and paying a lot of the bills, but they went away by 1960.
Appearance money came about in the mid-'60s. That was when tracks would pay you so much to come race at their place. Later on they would pay up to $3,000 for you to show.
In the early days, we collected our money at the track after each race. If you didn't run well, you didn't make much money. We'd usually leave on a racing trip and take $100 with us to buy food and gas. We had to win or we wouldn't have enough money to get back home.