Joe Weatherly: NASCAR's First Triple Champion...Almost—Pt. 2

As the 1956 NASCAR season approached, Joe Weatherly for the first time in his budding career had a full-time ride in a national touring NASCAR series.  

In 1955 when Ford Motor Co. decided to enter stock car racing, they set up an outside corporation to run the effort. Pete DePaolo, winner of the 1925 Indianapolis 500, agreed to head the organization.

(Photo above: Pete DePaolo stands beside a 1956 Ford Sedan with Joe Weatherly in the driver's seat. Despite the plain-Jane appearance, notice the "Thunderbird engine" logo on the front fender above the front bumper tip. No plain vanilla two door, this car had a 312 under the hood.)

DePaolo Engineering Inc. was the organization set up to run the racing efforts. However, there were several flaws in the effort.

While Chevrolet had leaders and engineers who liked racing and put changes of the cars into production line vehicles in the interest of improving their racing, Ford was not doing this.

Ford leaders and engineers did not know about the strange world of stock car racing, and changes to the production line products would not be put into effect until years into the future.

In the planning of the racing efforts and the work of liaison between Ford and the racers, the new DePaolo organization was less than the best as well.

The area that the Ford teams were ahead of everyone else was in the team of drivers. In those days, a good driver could make a lesser car run up front and even take wins.

Shortly after the DePaolo team was formed, Ford factory-built cars dropped out of races with minor problems that could have been corrected by the experienced racers if DePaolo had let them, instead of listening to the Ford engineers.

Part of the problem was that DePaolo’s headquarters was in California, near the Bill Stroppe team that had prepared the Lincolns in the Mexican road race and built stock car racers for Mercury.

DePaolo needed someone to run the Eastern operations and Red Vogt was brought in to help. After two sedans and two convertibles were built for 1956, the team was short a driver.

You're currently logged into Facebook

Do you want to share your Bleacher Report activity on Facebook?