Stock car racing in the 1960s featured intense behind the scenes battles between the factories, rules makers, track owners, promoters, and racing teams. Everyone was trying to keep up with the rapid year-to-year changes that brought more cubic inches, more horsepower, smoother shapes, and faster cars. The fans were the beneficiary as they were treated to incredible competition and incredible race cars. The '60s were a sensational era of stock car racing that will never be seen again. Factory engineers produced wild and powerful stock cars that raced in shootouts from Southern dirt and small ovals to bigger and bigger super-speedways. The racer's edge sought by each factory led one small team after another to pack up and pull out. This was the era of back-door racer support from General Motors, Ford's "Total Performance" agenda to win everything, and Chrysler's fantastic Hemi-powered stockers. Special racing engines and exotic prototypes with advanced concepts that never saw the light of day all added up to fantastic drama and incredible racing, all told in these pages.

What is it that makes a man strap himself into an automobile and drive it hundreds of laps around a track at speeds surpassing 200 miles per hour? Critically acclaimed journalist G. Wayne Miller decided to find out by spending a year on the NASCAR circuit with Roush Racing's legendary owner Jack Roush and his four title-contending Winston Cup drivers: Mark Martin, Jeff Burton, Matt Kenseth, and Kurt Busch. Miller plumbs the allure of speed and the exploding popularity of stock-car racing through the dramatic 2001 season, which opened with the most famous Daytona 500 in history, when NASCAR legend Dale Earnhardt died as his car slammed into the wall on the final turn. Miller takes us inside the minds and behind the wheels of the of the hottest drivers of the past two seasons, as they cope with the thrills and the dangers along the way to the Cup. Miller also takes us inside Roush Racing, a $125 million business, showing a side of NASCAR that few fans ever get to see. For longtime fans and curious newcomers alike, Men and Speed takes you for a wild ride through the fastest sport in the land.

The true story behind NASCAR’s hardscrabble, moonshine-fueled origins, “fascinating and fast-moving . . . even if you don’t know a master cylinder from a head gasket” (Atlanta Journal-Constitution). “[Neal] Thompson exhumes the sport’s Prohibition-era roots in this colorful, meticulously detailed history.”—Time Today’s NASCAR—equal parts Disney, Vegas, and Barnum & Bailey—is a multibillion-dollar conglomeration with 80 million fans, half of them women, that grows bigger and more mainstream by the day. Long before the sport’s rampant commercialism lurks a distant history of dark secrets that have been carefully hidden from view—until now. In the Depression-wracked South, with few options beyond the factory or farm, a Ford V-8 became the ticket to a better life. Bootlegging offered speed, adventure, and wads of cash. Driving with the Devil reveals how the skills needed to outrun federal agents with a load of corn liquor transferred perfectly to the red-dirt racetracks of Dixie. In this dynamic era (the 1930s and ’40s), three men with a passion for Ford V-8s—convicted felon Raymond Parks, foul-mouthed mechanic Red Vogt, and war veteran Red Byron, NASCAR’s first champ—emerged as the first stock car “team.” Theirs is the violent, poignant story of how moonshine and fast cars merged to create a sport for the South to call its own. In the tradition of Laura Hillenbrand’s Seabiscuit, this tale captures a bygone era of a beloved sport and the character of the country at a moment in time.

NASCAR is one of the most popular sports in the country. And with the speed, excitement, and drama involved, it’s no wonder. Dynamic and engaging, The Most Victorious Cars of NASCAR Racing highlights some of the sport’s significant winning moments, focusing on particular cars.

The rapid evolution of Charlotte, North Carolina, from “regional backwater” to globally ascendant city provides stark contrasts of then and now. Once a regional manufacturing and textile center, Charlotte stands today as one of the nation’s premier banking and financial cores with interests reaching broadly into global markets. Once defined by its biracial and bicultural character, Charlotte is now an emerging immigrant gateway drawing newcomers from Latin America and across the globe. Once derided for its sleepy, nine-to-five “uptown,” Charlotte’s center city has been wholly transformed by residential gentrification, corporate headquarters construction, and amenity-based redevelopment. And yet, despite its rapid transformation, Charlotte remains distinctively southern—globalizing, not yet global. This book brings together an interdisciplinary team of leading scholars and local experts to examine Charlotte from multiple angles. Their topics include the banking industry, gentrification, boosterism, architecture, city planning, transit, public schools, NASCAR, and the African American and Latino communities. United in the conviction that the experience of this Sunbelt city—center of the nation’s fifth-largest metropolitan area—offers new insight into today’s most pressing urban and suburban issues, the contributors to Charlotte, NC: The Global Evolution of a New South City ask what happens when the external forces of globalization combine with a city’s internal dynamics to reshape the local structures, landscapes, and identities of a southern place.

Packed with evocative photography and a history written by some of the sport’s most knowledgeable journalists, NASCAR 75 Years is the definitive story of America’s favorite motorsport.

"Jeff Hammond has been around racing for a long time-almost as long as me-and he has seen a lot. He's had a lot of success down in the pits where races are won, and he has a lot of stories to tell-some good, some bad-and they are all right here, in this terrific book." -Richard Petty When you stand out there before a race, and you hear the cheering of 150,000 people, and you know that millions of other people are watching on television... well, you just can't imagine the pump. It is just something you can't get enough of. I used to tell people when the day came that I could hear the words, "Gentlemen, start your engines," and not get goose bumps, that was the day I was going to walk away. It hasn't happened yet. I'm broadcasting now, instead of crew chiefing, but I still feel that way. Still get those goose bumps. "Racing is all about chemistry. Hammond and I had it. We were always on the same page. Sometimes I was on the front page though, and he was on the back page!" -Darrell Waltrip