The common misperception about Smokey Yunick and the NASCAR Hall of Fame is that, like Groucho Marx, he’d refuse to join any club that would have him as a member. Instead, as his daughter Trish notes, he supported tradition and respected the people who came before him and would indeed accept the recognition.
“To say that (he would refuse entry into the NASCAR Hall of Fame) is so counter to who he was,” she said. “He deeply wanted to be recognized for his contributions to the sport.”
For that reason, earlier this year she started the Smokey Belongs campaign in an effort to persuade the hall’s electors to give him a chance, despite everything he said in public about the members of the France family.
Since its inaugural class in 2010, the NASCAR Hall of Fame in Charlotte, North Carolina, has inducted 61 people, all of them men, and the majority of them drivers and/or owners, with a handful of crew chiefs, broadcasters, and promoters among them. Yunick, who did drive in one race, according to his official record (in November 1952 at Palm Beach in Herb Thomas’s No. 9 Hudson – he bowed after seven laps with an ignition issue), has certainly been eligible for the hall that entire time. Non-drivers need only have been involved in NASCAR racing for 10 years, and Yunick’s career as an owner, crew chief, and mechanic in NASCAR spanned 19 years, from 1951 through 1970.
For those who argue that participation doesn’t necessarily merit recognition, Yunick won the NASCAR Mechanic of the Year award twice, saw his teams to more than 50 NASCAR race wins, and worked on teams that won two NASCAR championships. He’s since been inducted in the International Motorsports Hall of Fame, the Motorsports Hall of Fame, the SEMA Hall of Fame, and about 10 other halls of fame. He even holds several patents, most of them related to his work building engines. He’s even been portrayed (as a Hudson pickup) in one of Pixar’s Cars movies.
All that is why, according to Trish Yunick, the NASCAR Hall of Fame gets so much flak from commenters every time it announces a new class or even a new group of nominees without her father’s name on it. “When I look at any site, any forum, they start off by saying they won’t be going to the hall until Smokey is enshrined or that the people at the hall are too stupid to recognize Smokey,” she said. “They complain about how some people got into the hall before Smokey and say that’s not right.”
Of course, it’s not hard to imagine why Yunick has been excluded from the NASCAR Hall of Fame so far. If Yunick’s known for anything these days, it’s his liberal interpretations of the rulebook that often labeled him a cheater and that regularly put him in opposition with track inspectors.
On that count, Smokey Belongs supporter Tony Cassata said that Yunick “absolutely was not a cheater – he read between the lines of the rulebook, and if the rules would say you couldn’t do it, he didn’t do it.”
More perilous for Yunick’s chances to join the hall was his contentious relationship with NASCAR founder Bill France and with the France family in general, which still owns NASCAR and which continues to have a presence on the NASCAR Hall of Fame nominating committee. Yunick and France differed on a number of things, but according to Trish Yunick, her father increasingly felt very cut out as Bill France “exercised his authority over the sport in a finite and harsh way,” and their “fundamental” disagreements on safety – particularly in the wake of Fireball Roberts’s death in 1964 – led Yunick to leave NASCAR for good around 1970.
Afterward, and especially in his autobiography, “Best Damn Garage in Town,” Yunick let loose on the Frances. Perhaps most infamously, Yunick wrote that Bill France Jr. was “too stupid to pour piss out of a boot if the instructions were on the heel.”
“He had no problem telling people ‘this is stupid’ or ‘this is not fair,'” Trish Yunick said. “There’s some liberty in plain speaking, but there’s also a cost to it.”
A spokesperson from the NASCAR Hall of Fame did not respond to comment for this story.
Photo via Trish Yunick
While it might feel tempting for Yunick fans to criticize the hall and its nominating committee for excluding Smokey Yunick to date, Trish Yunick and her supporters in the Smokey Belongs campaign say that such antagonism in defending her father is counterproductive. “I just want to get people to stop talking bad about a place where people are honored,” she said. “(Talking poorly of the hall) won’t do anything positive for his cause. Of course I want him in there, but it should be a dignified effort to get him in the hall, one that doest take away from anybody already in there.”
For that reason, she started the Smokey Belongs campaign “to give people something tangible to do” to advocate on behalf of her father. To spread the word about the campaign, she prints up stickers and sends them out – for free – to anybody who emails her requesting one. All she asks in return is that the recipient sends back a photo of the sticker and shares it to social media. To date, she’s sent out about 1,100 stickers with about 200 responses from every state except Nebraska and from as far away as South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand.
Cassata, one of the forces behind the recent installation of a memorial stone near the former site of Yunick’s garage in Daytona Beach, Florida, said that the goal of the campaign isn’t to directly lobby the NASCAR Hall of Fame or its nominating committee, rather to provide a platform “to change the perception” of Smokey’s relationship to the NASCAR Hall of Fame.
“At the very least, we’d love to see Smokey’s name on the ballot,” he said. “We just think it’s time.”
Image via Trish Yunick
Trish Yunick said the goal of the campaign isn’t necessarily to force the nominating committee to put her father on the ballot. “His accomplishments speak for themselves,” she said. “I have always felt Smokey will get there eventually. I just hope this makes people realize how silly it is that he’s not in the hall and the longer it goes without him in the hall, the sillier it looks.”
Trish Yunick said she hopes to see her father appear on the nomination list for the NASCAR Hall of Fame within a coupe of years.
For more information on the campaign or to request a sticker, email Trish Yunick at trish@smokeyyunick.com.