- 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.”
His cars won the Grand National championships in each of the two years he competed and an amazing 52 races, including one streak of 16 straight. Then he left as abruptly as he had arrived.
An engineering genius, Wisconsinite Kiekhaefer didn’t invent outboard motors, but his invention of the reed valve revolutionized two-cycle outboard motors in the 1940s and his Kiekhaefer Aeromarine company thrived. He helped persuade Walter P. Chrysler to build a powerful car featuring a hemi engine and first arrived on the sands of Daytona with a C-300 for the 1955 race. 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.
Flock went on to win a record 19 poles and his second Grand National championship driving the C-300, which soon had standard transmissions for racing. The following year, Kiekhaefer hired Buck Baker, the former bus-driving and occasional bootlegger from Charlotte. “If you are as tough an s.o.b. as I hear, I want you to drive for me,” he told Baker, who won the 1956 championship while driving Chrysler and Dodge entries.
Kiekhaefer went racing as a research and development exercise in anticipation of installing V-8 engines inboard on boats with the propeller at the rear, to be called sterndrives. No money was spared in the process and he brought a new level of professionalism to NASCAR. He was the first to bring his multi-car entries to the track in haulers and the first to outfit his drivers in custom driving suits (made in Italy). He was the first to bring a corporate sponsor, his own Mercury brand of outboards. Charlie Scott became the first black driver to compete in Grand National on board a Kiekhaefer Chrysler at Daytona.
Baker said factory involvement began to “really mushroom” once Kiekhaefer arrived. “That gave (NASCAR founder) Bill France an opportunity to razz the other factories because they couldn’t beat him. He used the situation to spur the factories on.”
Among Kiekhaefer’s more than 200 patents was the invention of the paper filament air filter for carburetors, which resulted from competing on NASCAR’s dirt tracks. The hard-driving Kiekhaefer spared no one, including himself, in pursuit of victories. After working during the day at his factory in Fond du Lac, Kiekhaefer flew to Charlotte to oversee car preparations at night. Bobby Allison, who started working for Kiekhaefer by testing outboards on Lake Winnebago, recalled him as a demanding boss. “One time he told a guy, ‘You’re fired, but you can’t leave until the car is ready.’” Flock quit driving for Kiekhaefer in 1956 after developing ulcers, which he blamed on the team owner.
Kiekhaefer eventually gave France fits by constantly shutting other manufacturers out of Victory Lane. When France changed the rules, Kiekhaefer responded by bringing Fords among his fleet of entries. Once he quit racing to return his focus to building sterndrives, Kiekhaefer eventually bought 60,000 engines a year not from Chrysler or Ford, but Chevrolet!
