Denny Hamlin won stock car racing’s biggest race, the Daytona 500, in February for the second time. Among the sport’s most versatile drivers, he has won major NASCAR events on short tracks, superspeedways and twisting road courses.
But he has never won on his hometown bullring racetrack, Southside Speedway.
A 1/3-mile track on Genito Road in Midlothian, Southside is within 5 miles of Hamlin’s alma mater, Manchester High School. The track, celebrating its 60th anniversary this year, is the scene of some of Hamlin’s earliest memories.
Hamlin, 38, is one of many Southside regulars whose fame has extended far beyond the track’s white wooden fence. Eddie Crouse and Tommy Ellis won national championships in two of NASCAR’s secondary series. Four Southside competitors won the NASCAR Cup Series’ Rookie of the Year title — Bill Dennis, Lennie Pond, Jimmy Hensley and Hamlin. Ray Hendrick and Sonny Hutchins battled each other at Southside and won hundreds of races at tracks up and down the East Coast.
I showed up at Southside Speedway in the spring of 1972, a rookie sports writer for The Richmond News Leader. I had been handed the auto-racing beat because nobody else much wanted to be pulled away from college and country-club sports. I was mesmerized by the daredevil racing and larger-than-life personalities at Southside. I treated my reporting as letters to friends, letting them know what I was seeing on Friday nights.
By the time I got there, J.M. Wilkinson, a taciturn, square-jawed businessman in dark-rimmed glasses, had been running the track for 13 years. In 1958, he and three partners had bought land that included a dormant quarter-mile dirt track known as Royall Speedway. Wilkinson planned to turn the land into a residential subdivision.
But Apple Orchards didn’t happen. Clements says local drivers persuaded her father to give racing a go. Richmond racing historian Joe Kelly says one of Wilkinson’s friends bet him that he couldn’t make a success of the race track.
“Mr. Wilkinson enjoyed winning a bet,” Kelly says.
Wilkinson bought out his partners, secured a NASCAR sanction and opened the track as Southside Speedway 60 years ago this month on April 15, 1959.
Eventually, her responsibilities expanded to include typing news releases, helping out at concession stands and even calming unhappy drivers. When her father died in 1990, Clements was ready to run the business along with her sister, Patsy Stargardt, who still owns half the 44-acre parcel where the track sits.
More than once, the land has attracted the attention of developers who would do away with the track, and there’s no guarantee that won’t happen someday. But a third generation of family leadership is in place: Clements’ daughter, Jennifer Mullis.
Sharing the track’s management duties with her mother, Mullis says, is something she relishes for the sake of her three daughters — college sophomore Genevra, high school senior Linda May, and soon-to-be-7-year-old Naomi.
“I’m grateful my daughters get to see what it’s like to have a woman in charge,” Mullis says.
On a hot August night in 1977, 45-year-old Ted Hairfield came out of semi-retirement to drive for car builder Jimmy Scott in the year’s longest race at Southside, the season-ending Virginia 300.
Remember, this is a track that has thwarted, among others, a two-time Daytona 500 winner. Driving a late model Sportsman racer around it for 300 laps was hard work. The lanky Hairfield had been one of the track’s great drivers in his prime, but that had been a while. He hadn’t raced all year. When the green flag waved, it was no surprise that Hairfield didn’t match the pace of the leaders.
As the race progressed, some of the faster drivers were sidelined by mechanical failures or crashes. Hairfield advanced to second place. But it was a distant second — a full seven laps adrift of favorite Sonny Hutchins.
With 18 laps to go, Hutchins’ sky-blue Chevrolet pulled into the pits with a mechanical problem. Hairfield’s red Chevy kept rolling. He made up the seven-lap deficit, then soldiered on to take the checkered flag.
The second-place finisher, Eddie Falk, was 17 years old.
As it happened, that night was also the peak of the annual Perseid meteor shower. After the race, before I drove back to downtown Richmond, I found a dark side road and took time to watch.
Every few seconds, a shooting star drew its path across half the dome of heaven, a display that had long been taken by humans as a sign of something extraordinary. As much as anything else, that seemed to make sense of Hairfield’s victory.
Randy Hallman, whose newspaper-publishing grandma introduced him to stock-car racing at an early age, has written about the sport for nearly 50 years, including current columns for the Richmond Times-Dispatch and RacingVirginia.com.