Moonshine Runners, History, and Their Cars

Moonshine Runners, History, and Their Cars

Johnson will tell you with a straight-on, dead-level look that Stock Carracing was a comedown compared to running moonshine, and not onlybecause of the legal threat. "I had some purty fast race cars, but Inever run anything as fast as the fastest cars I had on the highway,"Johnson says. "The cars we ran on the road, you could modify 'em to thetip. Plus, they were supercharged and turbocharged. We could just doanything we wanted to 'em. There was never a time we could do anythingwe wanted to the race cars, even the Modifieds. NASCAR wouldn't let 'emrun turbochargers or superchargers or anything like that. A superchargeror turbocharger just packs so much power in that motor, it'sunbelievable. And we had no limitations on cubic inches. We could boreand stroke 'em all we wanted. We'd run 500 cubic inches a lot of thetime."

Clay Call never competed in the first Stock Car race, but one day in theearly '60s, he took his supercharged '55 Ford out onto the track atNorth Wilkesboro Speedway, where Fred Lorenzen, the Golden Boy ofNASCAR's early years, was practicing. Call says he outran Lorenzen lapafter lap.

"We didn't back down in doing whatever we could do to make 'em faster,"Johnson says. "You didn't have no top end on 'em with a supercharger.That thing would just keep gettin' up. It had the power to take it wherethe road was so narrow, you couldn't imagine how fast that thing wasa-runnin'."

The cars driven by treasury agents and other law enforcement officerswere no match for the moonshiners' cars. "I called the cars thegovernment gave us 'mechanical miscarriages,'" says former federalAlcohol Tax Unit (ATU) agent Joe Carter, the guy who captured Johnson onfoot at his father's still in 1956. "But then, we lacked anothercomponent they had--the drivers. Those guys could drive a car like youwouldn't believe. By the time they got to be 14 years old, they couldoutrun any officer I knew of. They learned how to drive and they knewevery curve, though some of 'em got killed doin' it."

Despite his fame as a Stock Car racer and team owner, Johnson neverconsidered himself better than the other moonshine drivers. "Most allthe guys who hauled whiskey were good drivers," Johnson says. "A lot ofguys were as good as I was on the highway. But when it got to racing,and the car is set up to just go left, you can almost double your speedgoing off into the corner." That took a special skill that Johnsonexcelled at.

Fellow moonshiner Thurmond Brown explained some years back about howterrifying it was to ride with Junior when he was going full song on thehighways of North Carolina. "Junior and me was comin' back throughWinston-Salem once at about 3 o'clock in the morning after unloading aload, and hell, he was just drivin' sideways. And them little oldmailboxes and newspaper boxes, well, Junior was justa clippin' by thosethings right beside my face. I said, Junior, you're gonna have the lawon you. And it made him about half-mad, I believe. He said, 'If we can'toutrun 'em empty, what the hell are we a-doin' down here loaded?'

"I knew we could outrun 'em, loaded or empty, but I was dreadin' thatride. Junior whipped a car. The car was scared of him. He manhandled it.But settin' over there on the other side--it was hard on me. He'd passanother car on the right side of the road, and the air would be full ofdirt and grass, and that ol' rear quarter-panel would be way up there inthe damn woods and honeysuckle and such. Junior would say, 'Ah, c'mon.It'll be there when we get there."

The old '40 Fords, with their flathead V-8 engines, dominated themoonshine scene until the '50s. The most frequent modification themoonshiners made was to replace the flathead V-8 with the biggestCadillac engine they could find, which happened to be in the carmaker'sambulances. Johnson and Call would haunt auctions for Cadillacambulances, yank the engine, bore and stroke it to get all possiblecubic inches, and slap a supercharger on it. As they say in WilkesCounty, that old Ford would go on. http://www.hotrod.com/thehistoryof/113_0510_moonshine_runners_cars_history/drivers.html

Why cant we have a class like this? Thats the rules right there . two teams Runners and Chasers? Runners Black cars Chases Blue cars