How a Hated, 1950s Rich Yankee NASCAR Team Owner Got the Last Laugh

• After helping to persuade Walter P. Chrysler to build a powerful car featuring a hemi engine, Carl Kiekhaefer first arrived on the sands of Daytona with a C-300.

• After hiring Tim Flock to drive, the new car owner won on the Beach & Road Course race in his first attempt—despite the car’s automatic transmission.

• In 1955, Flock went on to win 18 races and a record 19 poles and his second Grand National championship driving the C-300, which soon had standard transmissions for racing.

Regarded as a rich Yankee, car owner Carl Kiekhaefer was hardly welcomed with open arms in a NASCAR series predominated by Southerners during the two seasons he competed in 1955 and 1956.

“The rest of us were racing out of junk yards,” said Smokey Yunick, who kept a photo of Kiekhaefer framed by a toilet seat on the wall of his garage. Fans sometimes threw Coca-Cola bottles at his cars, recalled Madeline Knight, whose husband Alf was a race promoter. Scurrilous stories were often spread about the stout, bespectacled German-American, such as the time he supposedly got angry and buried one of his Cadillacs with a bulldozer.

The rumors and innuendo eventually culminated in the movie, Thunder in Carolina, starring Rory Calhoun, whose character tried to succeed in the racing game despite opposition from an “evil jerk millionaire” team owner.

Kiekhaefer, who loved to not only win but dominate, usually had the last laugh. When approached for a story about his election to the National Motorsports Press Association Hall of Fame at Darlington, Kiekhaefer said, “We won most of the races back then, you know.”