Episode 4: White Lightning

a blurry distinction that you should not focus on. What's really important is that I'm about to fulfill a childhood dream by getting to drive in a race car at full speed around Charlotte Motor Speedway. This is going to be a very very big day for me. Uh and you're coming along for it, Thank you very much. We'll see how this goes. Yeah, there it is. Hm. I made it two laps, and I've been sitting in the car for the last twenty minutes in the parking lot

with my eyes closed, trying not to throw up. Ever since, that was one of the most violent experiences I've ever had in my life. As soon as you get into the turn, that wall of Asphalle just looks up at you and you're just pinned into your seat and just like, oh God, horrible. I felt like my brain was just being squished, um that I could not imagine doing that for a two hours, three hours just I will never tolerate someone ship talking Nascar again. All right, let gonna

see if I get back to this hotel. So it looks like I'm not cut out for race car driving, But embarrassing myself on Mike wasn't the only reason I'd come down to Charlotte. Because not only is North Carolina the biggest tobacco producer in the US and where Derek's tobacco came from, it's also the heartland of NASCAR. There's twelve major tracks within a day's drive, and dozens more

smaller asphalt and dirt ovals. It's also where almost every NASCAR team is based, including a small outfit called Motorsports Business Management, owned and operated by veteran driver Carl Long. Are you doing good? Ye? A long time? Yeah, you just get back from Canada. Yeah. I was on there for a month. And then Carl longs an old hand in the world of NASCAR. He's been in the sport for more than thirty years as a driver, crew chief and now as a team owner. It's a lot of

work to keep up with the NASCAR season circus. But today is a Monday and the closest thing he'll have to a weekend for a while, so he's got some time to talk. What you got, what you want to do? Four time? Miss, we can sit down. I got yes, it's word. Yeah. Let me check with the guys out from Yeah, no quicktion, make sure they're all good. He's doing a story on Derek. Really yeah. Carl and Derek are actually old friends. They go back more than ten years when they met in the parking lot before race

in Virginia. Derek and I just was parked beside each other at the Richmond Speedway and got to talking and found out we had a lot of things. I grew up on a tobacco farm, and so I worked on a on a farm every year. There wasn't any harvesting machines. It was just all manual labor. And my uncle would always tell me, is early in the morning, all he wanted to see was assholes and elbows, just to go up the road and hang buy the ground, leave you say. You know, so you can probably see how Derek and

Carl became fast friends. And then when we were part beside each other, like I said, we just laughed and had had a good time talk on each other. From what Carl could tell, Derek was the real deal, not just some rich guy playing dress up on the weekend. I felt like that as a driver, and him going from the petty driving experience too to his truck to he's racing on his other stuff on ice and just he just had a passionate race he wanted to do it.

At the time, Derek was working with another race team and according to Carl, it wasn't a great situation, but the guy that was kind of managing his team really uh I guess head champagne tastes would a beer budget and it was spending a lot. So the people that he had helped him and didn't have the experience to coach him. All they were worried about is could he write the check for him so they could go and

go race. It was clear that Derek han ambition and Carl had the experienced help him on his skills, so they shook hands and decided to create their on team, Motorsports Business Management or MBM for short, the team that Carl still runs today. There's a million little things you have to do in order to get a brand new team off the ground, but Carl was glad to have Derek as a partner. Derek was just one of the best overall people that you could be around, uh to

help do everything. He wasn't lazy, wasn't selfish. He enjoyed racing, He enjoyed drinking. Sometimes. I think he was a professional head at some races. He would go he takes some of my guys out at night. He'd be spring chicken, ready to go to next day. My guys would be, oh, man, We've tried to go out with Derek. Oh God, I don't know how you could drink that much and still function. You know, he was buying drinks for everybody in the bar, you know, just having a good time. Within a few

short months, MBM was making a name for itself. Their crowning achievement came in when Derek raced in New Hampshire and became the first indigenous driver in the NASCAR Cup Series Hoist the Lobster at the end of three hundred and one lapse from the Hampshire Motor Speed one. But less than a year after that race, it all came to a screeching hult when Derek was arrested and Carl

got a phone call from NASCAR. No matter what, Derek was gonna get banned, and we dissolved Derek's partnership where he was no longer an owner of NBA Motorsports from Campside Media and Dan Patrick Productions. This is running Smoke. I'm Roger Gola and this is episode four White Lightning. Whenever a driver is accused of misconduct, NASCAR acts quickly. Officials told Carl that he had seventy two hours to completely remove any trace of Derek from MBM Motorsports or

the entire team's eligibility would be in jeopardy. On top of that, NASCAR and definitely suspended Derek from racing in the series. They didn't call me. They didn't. I just I read it on Basically somebody sent me to link saying that they suspended me. Not even I didn't even go to court yet, you're already banning me and I'll like it made my uh my debut or in the in the top tier the Cup Series and then next

Dar all the year after Boom, I'm fucking suspended. We reached out to NASCAR for comments several times, but they never responded to our requests. In any case, NASCAR was not going to stand up in defense of Derek. That was an issue for the courts to deal with. Usually you're you're innocent until you're proven guilty, right, But right off the bat they fucking banned me. But being suspended from NASCAR, of all sports because of smuggling and tax

of Asian charges, well there's a articular irony there. I mean, look at NASCAR, I mean it was it was built off bootlegging, you know, with the moonshiners and all that, and basically it is the same thing going on over here. We'll get into all that right after the break. It's no overstatement to say that without moonshining, there would be no Nascar. The sport was the product of a unique combination of V eight engines and high proof liquor that

could have only come together in the American South. And this week we're gonna take a trip through history to tell you all about how that cocktail came together. For our non Southern listeners, for whom I have nothing but pity, let me give you a quick lesson on moonshine, white lightning, clear corn, mountain dew, whatever you wanna call it. It's a crystal clear, unaged whiskey made from corn rye, barley,

or whatever else you have on hand. It's made in small batches by mountain men in bibs and beards who work by the light of the moon and backwood shacks. But what really separates moon shine from any other liquor is the fact that it's untaxed, unregulated, and therefore illegal. Back in the nineteen thirties, when the US government banned alcohol, moonshine was the only way a lot of people in America could wet their whistle, which made it a very

lucrative business. Government agents fight hopelessly against illegal liquor. These homemade stills are about a few of thousands seas than destroyed. Other thousands produced millions of gallons, and countless hundreds prosper in business of bootlegging. But moonshining represents so much more than some folks making money on the side. For the people who made shine, it's a symbol of pride and self reliance, and in that way, it's a lot like

tobacco on Mohawk territories. For communities that have often been on the short end of the stick, liquor and cigarettes offered away for them to stand on their own feet, even if it meant you were a criminal in the eyes of the law making, moonshine was a god given right. It was it was tradition, It was family bis this Neil Thompson as a journalist and the author of Driving with the Devil about the early days of American racing, and and the moonshine was was used for many things.

It was medicine in some cases it was currency. It was a homemade craft, and in their view, the government had no rights to that. It was their product um and there was their right to deliver it wherever they saw fit. This is where the story of American stock car racing begins. But delivery is a very polite way of saying contraband smuggling. And where there's contraband, there's cops. So moonshiners took their four V eight coops and stiffened up the rear springs so when they filled the trunk

with liquor, it with the squat and look suspicious. They knew that cops liked to shoot out radiators, so they put sheet metal and their grills to protect their motors. Some moonshiners even had James Bond type gadgets that dropped nails or spilled oil behind you. Even though there was an intense captain mouse aspect to this, this chase, this game, UM,

there was also a sense of mutual respect. One of the guys I talked to UM there was a story about him once delivering flowers to the hospital bed of a revenue agent who he'd out run and left it a ditch on the side of the road, but knew he knew the agent had gotten hurt, left him some flowers and just signed it the coup, meaning his Ford V eight coup. Henry Ford famously said that auto racing began five minutes after the second car came off the

production line. I'd be surprised if it took that long for whiskey runners to get the same idea. They were running moonshine, trying to get away from revenue agents, UM, trying to stay alive and stay out of jail. And along the way they learned to drive fast, fix up their cars to go faster than the revenue agents, and then on weekends for fun, they started racing each other. Moonshiners would hire young kids to drive for the young,

fearless kids to drive for him. Tom Jensen is the Curatorial Affairs director of the NASCAR Hall of Fame and a longtime motorsports journalist. And the people who own these businesses tended to know each other, and one guy would say to another, you know, my driver's got the fastest car in the county, and the other guy would say, no, my drivers the fastest car in the county. So they

decided to have a race with just the two of them. Well, word would get out and some neighbors would show up, and you know, maybe the next week there would be three or four guys from the next county over with their race cars. Stock car racing was radically different than the sort of racing that Americans have known up until then, which was something reserved for the ultra wealthy. It was

sports cars. It was sort of the open wheel cars that that you see in Lamands and Formula one and indie cars, the types of cars that poor southern boy could never dream of affording. Um And most of those earlier car races happen on tracks that were built specifically for those races, and most of those races happened up North or in the Midwest, stock car racing offered something totally different. It brought motorsports to the everyman. Teenagers scraped

money together and fixed up junkyard cars. Main street mechanics would sponsor buddies to turn a few laps down at the local track down South, where you didn't have any real professional sports until like the nineteen sixties. Um this sort of sports starved part of the country adopted stock car racing as as its own. You know, it was truly a home grown sport throughout the South, um modest in the beginning. For years, stock car racing was just

a ragtag affair. There were dozens of different race leagues in competition series, full of shady promoters and hobbist drivers. It wasn't until Bill France, an aspiring race or in Daytona Beach, brought together all the biggest promoters under one banner that racing really became profess Chinel. France gave it a name to the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing or NASCAR for short and right away, Big Bill

had a big problem moonshiners. He was trying to build an above board, legit racing league that was family friendly and amenable to corporate sponsors. Bootwiggers aren't exactly the crowd to put on a suit and tie and talk nice in front of a microphone. But at the same time, the moonshiners were the ones winning the races because this Hall of Famer Junior Johnson once said, nobody ever loves a car more than a moonshiner does, because if you

go to a race and lose, you go home. If you go on a moonshine run and lose, you go to jail. Folks like that weren't going to play by the rules, and Bill France found that out right away. The winner of the very first NASCAR race ever was disqualified for using modified heavy duty rear suspension, a trick straight out of the bootleggers handbook. You know, I've talked to one x moonshiner who who told me, Um, you know, the best way to get a hillbilly to do something

is to tell him not to do it. It was how they were raised to view the government with distrust and to avoid paying taxes at all costs. Um. So this this attitude, uh, that was there from the start of stock car racing. Uh, this sort of nonconformity it was in the blood of both the moonshiners and in turn the NASCAR racers. One of my favorite stories is there was a track in Georgia, I believe it was called Middle Georgia Raceway that opened the late sixties, and

shortly after it opened, the FEDS rated it. And underneath the track there was a entire moonshine operation. There's a gallon distillery and they made an illegal liquor down there, and um, they arrested the track general manager. They introduced his evidence, the fact that he had bought three thousand pounds a yeast some absurd amount, and he said, now that was for our concession stands, and a jury of his peers acquitted him in like a couple of hours.

There's an old joke in the racing world that sums it all up. A race car driver reads a rule book twice, first to see what it says, and then again to see what it doesn't say. They would interpret it like people interpret the Bible. They see what they want to see. Give you a good example, and again we'll go back to Junior Johnson. Rule book says car got away thirty four hundred pounds at the start of the race. Don't say nothing, Matt would have got away.

After the race, he would weld hundred pounds a lead to the inside of each of the four rims on his car to make minimum weight, and at the first pit stop it would take forever to change the tires because they weighed a hundred and sixty pounds each, but from then on his card before hundred pounds lighter than anyone else's, which technically was not against the rules. By the sixties and seventies, NASCAR was flourishing under Bill France's leadership.

The racing was more intense, the fans were more committed, and the racers were more professional. But France still had a problem. NASCAR was just a Southern sport, a side show to the MLB and NFL. Bill wanted the main stage, and it took a blizzard and a fist fight to get him there. Coming up after the break, you're listening to Running Smoke. It's February ninety nine and the NASCAR season is kicking off in Daytona Beach. Usually it's a race that only Southerners would pay an they attention to,

but this time it was going nationwide. A freak blizzard had canceled every sporting event in the Northeast, forcing NBC to put NASCAR in its prime time slot. A sports starved country tuned into its first stock car race and the action was intense. Fans in the stands were on their feet cheering as drivers came around the front stretch. It's the last lap and a side by side battle

heats up between Donnie Allison and Kaylee Yarborough. Kale's crew chief is none other than the bootleggers patron st Junior Johnson. On the last lap, coming around turn two on the back stretch, Kale makes a move on Donnie and now their neck and neck. Their doors are inches away from each other as they reached speeds upwards of a hundred

and fifty miles per hour. Folks back home how their noses pressed up against the TV and silence falls over wrapped bus terminals and airport bars across the country, and then they slide down into the enfields as Richard Petty comes from behind and takes the checker flag, winning the Dayton of five hundred. But while Petty is taking his victory lap, the two drivers on the infield grass climb out of their cars, fight and Donnie Alie, you couldn't

write a better finish, the most amazing astoonishing. For the first time in its history, NASCAR was now on the national map. Sponsors wanted in, and NASCAR provided an incredible opportunity for any company that wanted eyeballs on their brand. What's better than a billboard moving at a hundred and fifty. Money flowed into the sport and the race winnings went even higher. So competition got tougher, drivers got better, and

mechanics got more creative. Instead of dumpster diving in junkyards, engineers developed new exotic, purpose built hearts for their engines and suspension systems. They took the sport out of the hands of back Aird Mechanics and brought it into the space age innovation and rule ending was getting to be an expensive necessity for anyone that wanted to remain competitive.

I think where the real escalation took place was in the early to mid nine nineties when it it kind of became an arms race of who could outspend the other to try to gain an advantage. Because what had happened is there were fewer and fewer places to get an advantage, and there were smaller advantages to get. NASCAR's job as a governing body was to level the playing field and keep it as fair as possible, no matter

how much money teams were putting into their cars. But racers will still look for every advantage they can get. For instance, when I first got into the sport in the late nineties, was the first time they started hiring quote unquote professional pit crew NASCAR teams. The top teams went from having fat, middle aged guys who were mechanics also double doing the pit stops, to creating recruiting programs where they go to college campuses and recruit athletes who

played on football and basketball teams. And so they replaced the forty year old guy with a beer belly with a twenty two year old kid who was who was cut and fit and athletic, and they were paying these guys a lot of money, and things like that just just drove the costs way up. At that time, Spending money doesn't guarantee you will be successful. Not spending money guarantees you will not be successful. As the sport got more expensive, it became more exclusive, It became harder and

harder for blue collar guys to find success. And it became easier for well funded teams to outmuscle smaller outfits on the track. A few people understand how difficult it is to compete in the sport better than Carl Long, Derek's old business partner. He knows just how much every dollar counts when you're racing at the back of the pack. It's ass and I and on the dollar amounts just and I haven't even started adding up for this weekend. I might even actually have two sheets I do. I

was just figuring it. So so here's here's something for you. This is just to tell you what I spent at Atlanta in exfinity. The rap on the car was fifteen hundred bucks, and that's cheap. We spent thirteen thousand, six hundred times spent in hotels for one night, bands four hundred nstry fee was two hundred Fuel just to put in my tractor to get down there was fifteen hundred bucks. And back food and drinks and our coolers two hundred bucks.

Sixty for box of lug nuts that you just used once to throw away to rent the engines was thirty thou dollars pit bonuses that was labor just for the weekend, it was twenty thousand, five hundred. I have to rent. I picked guns, that was seven hundred, was three hundred bucks transmit ation with six all At all, Carl spent more than eighty thousand dollars to run a single race that weekend. And that's not even counting truck payments, insurance and rent. So I'm I'm in a hole on a

good weekend, finishing eleventh with no damage. I'm in a whole fifty bucks as it is. It's like the old timers say, how do you make a small fortune, Well, you take a large fortune and you go racing. For me. At my my level, the most important talent a driver can have is somebody to write a check to put him in a seat. The most important talent is to

be able to write a check. In less than fifty years, NASCAR went from a blue collar sport where shade tree mechanics could raise their sedans on Sundays to a multi billion dollar enterprise with tracks across the country, race cars worth half a million dollars, and drivers who were trained to race as soon as they can walk. Back in the day, pit lane would have been full of pot

bellied mechanics, tuning carburetors with their pocket knives. Now it's full of movie star celebrity owners and more computers than mission control. For a team like MBM that was barely scraping by on its best weekends, Derek was a godsend. It's tough not to imagine how far they would have come over the last ten years. If Derek hadn't been arrested, we would be further up the uh probably further food chain.

We would have definitely ran. I guess if if we had all of the money he spent, all lawyers and stuff like right now, it was invested in racing. Hell, Hendrick might needed a barrow something from us. Do you think you would have kept racing cup if it wasn't for this? Probably? Oh yeah, we um, I probably uh.

I probably have a couple of top twenties. As soon as I am free from all this stuff, I'm gonna look for a goddamn good lawyer in the States and sue NASCAR too, because now it's it's gonna be six years in April that they banned me, and you figure all the races that I'm missing. You even put it at forty place and say well, I'm losing all that money. I told Carl about it. He goes, goddamn, he goes, we're into twenties now, so suit him for the place.

The difference between a forty place finish and the twentieth place finish could be tens of thousands of dollars winnings. But it also means being closer to the front of the pack where the action and the attention is. It means a chance at moving up in the sport. But now if Derek is allowed to race again, he may have to start all over. You can't. It doesn't matter if you've got if you've got billions of dollars, You

got to start at the bottom. Like anything else. You can't just jump in a cup car and go racing. You have to work your way up. Now, I haven't raced in the car and over five years, so I don't know if I'm gonna have to start back again in the bottom. Basically, go to do the trucks, do short track, then go to a mile and a half and then a superspeedway and start over in the Exfinity. Do a few races in there and then you know, then finally it will give me my license to run

in a cup, to go to Daytone or wherever. I mean, it's you know, it sucks. Uh, we're fighting it and they put a ban on me. You know, like, uh, aren't you supposed to be like proven, You gotta be guilty before they do something. Right now, it's you're guilty, and then you gotta prove yourself innocent, which is not right.

I mean, I'm innocent right from the start. So Carl had a lot of back and forth with NASCAR officials to see what it would take for Derek to get back in the car, and the answer they gave him was unequivocal. When Derek is free of criminal charges, then he's free to race for NASCAR. For Derek to get back on the track, he had no option but to face a jury next time on running smoke. They just want to just round up as many people as they can and charge everybody and try to get as much

money as they can out of everybody. I'm just helping a friend that's gangster something. They think we're criminals. They want to make us look like criminals, and their eyes were doing something wrong. And remember Derek's lawyer getting all excited and pumping his fists and it was really happy, So I'm like, Wow, that's gotta be a good thing. Running Smoke is a production of camp Site Media, Dan Patrick Productions, and Workhouse Media. The series was written and

reported by me Roger Gola. Our producers are Lea Pape's, Laine Gerbig and Julie Dennischet. Our editors are Michelle Lands and Emily Martinez. Sound designed and original music by Mark McAdam. Additional sounded mixing by ewen Ly from You, with additional reporting by Susie McCarthy. Our executive producers are Dan Patrick, Josh Dean of camp Side Media, Paul Anderson, Nick Pinella,

and Andrew Greenwood for Workhouse Media. Fact checking by Mary Mathis, artwork by Polly Adams, and additional thanks to Greg Horne, Johnny Kapman, Sierra Franco, Elizabeth van Brocklin, and Sean Flynn.