The Dirt Under the Asphalt: An Underground History of Stock Car Racing

Many other books have been written about NASCAR, mainly about its drivers and other celebrities who compete in the sport of stock car racing, but there have been very few books written or published about the internal workings of NASCAR.

This book takes a look at NASCAR from day one to present-day and tells the story of how NASCAR has maintained its operation as a dictatorship since the late forties, how drugs played a part in its rapid rise in popularity, and how it has been run by the France family of Daytona Beach, Florida.

The Dirt under the Asphalt is a book that pulls no punches and paints no pretty pictures. It does, however, offer the author’s insight into the most prominent track owners and drivers who got NASCAR started and kept it going through tough times in the fifties and sixties.

Jack Flowers covered his first stock car race when he was sixteen and the sports editor of The Moultrie Observer (Georgia). It was the Rebel 300 in Montgomery, Alabama, and it was won by Buck Baker in one of Carl Keikaefer’s Chrysler 300s.

Since then, Flowers, now seventy, has worked for eleven different daily newspapers, mostly in Florida, covering stock car racing off and on, along with other forms of auto racing and the Indianapolis 500.

Leaving the daily newspaper business in 1979, Flowers began working for auto racing trade publications that cover NASCAR.

Today he still writes weekly stories about NASCAR for Area Auto Racing News (AARN) , and National Speed Sport News (NSSN).

While working for Grand National Scene (now NASCAR Scene) and Speedway Scene (no longer in publication), Flowers and Tom Higgins, the retired motorsports writer of The Charlotte Observer (North Carolina), covered every NASCAR race, from coast to coast, for seventeen consecutive years.