Every winter for half a century, a narrow strip of shoreline 60 miles northeast of Orlando is transformed into an automotive mecca where thousands flock to worship at the altar of speed. With the 50th running of the Daytona 500 this February 17, the city of Daytona Beach will play host to 230,000, a riot of rowdy and fiercely loyal fans cheering on the 43 drivers competing for a $19 million purse and the title of champion of the Great American Race.

More than even the Super Bowl or the World Series, the Daytona 500 transcends sports. It’s a clash of industrial titans (Chevy, Ford, Dodge, and now Toyota). It’s about technical advancement and iconoclastic athletes risking their necks for the checkered flag. It’s about family legacies and feuds, glory and death, and the never-ending quest for the almighty dollar. But in the beginning—before the multimillion-dollar TV deals, before NASCAR founder “Big” Bill France dreamed of building a titanic speedway by the sea—there was nothing but a hard-packed strip of beach and some rolling waves. And it was on that beach that a handful of cars gathered in the early days of the automobile to give birth to American motor racing.

Dale Earnhardt Jr.
2004 Daytona 500 Cham­­pi­on
When you drive around Daytona, there aren’t any signs saying this is where racing started. After all these years, you’d assume that every sign in town would have a racecar on it. But you don’t really feel like this is history, that it’s a big fucking deal, until you’re on the speedway property—then, bam!

Buz McKim
Historian with the NASCAR Hall of Fame
It goes all the way back to the turn of the century, when rich folks would come [to the Daytona Beach area] for what they called the winter season. The automobile was fairly new, and these folks would bring their newfangled cars down on the train so they could show them off. At the time there was less than 150 miles of paved road in the entire country, and most of that was in metropolitan areas. So these guys had their cars and no place to run them, and they darn sure couldn’t run them at full speed. The beach was a God-given gift. It was rock hard.

Junior Johnson
1960 Daytona 500 Champion
The sand was basically like asphalt, and the closer you got to the water, the faster the car would run because the ground was so hard. So they’d race when the tide went out.

McKim
The first match race, in 1902, was between Ransom Olds, of Oldsmobile, and Alexander Winton, who was the biggest name in the automotive industry at the time. Before long,  worldwide attention was focused on the Daytona Beach area.

Mario Andretti
1967 Daytona 500 Champion
Because of the nature of the beach, you had a very long stretch where you could get a good run in an open area. So they set many land-speed records there. Then the obvious thing happened: Devel­opment came. After that so the drivers trying to set world speed records moved to the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah.

McKim
The land-speed era lasted on the sands from 1903 to 1935. There was so much development on the beachfront that it was really getting impossible to run 275 mph down the beach, because you’re basically in people’s backyard. In 1936 the city said, “Hey, we’ve got to keep this racing tradition going.” So they ran the first stock car race. It was a financial disaster. The city lost $20,000, and they said, “Guess what, we’re out of the racing business.”

Junior Johnson
The old course was [a loop made up of] the beach and Highway A1A. Coming off the pavement, you had to slow down before you hit the beach or you’d go off into the trees and bushes. Sometimes as many as 25 or 30 cars would be piled up there.

Jimmie Johnson
2006 Daytona 500 Champion
When­-ever I see those old videos, I smile and think of how much fun it must have been to race on that combined course. Well…I’m not sure I’d want to race a car with just a shady lap belt and a leather cap for a helmet, but it does look fun.

Cale Yarborough
1968, 1977, 1983, 1984 Daytona 500 Champion
Big Bill [France] used to run a filling station in Daytona. He started off as a racecar driver and went from driving to promoting. He was determined to make this sport go.

McKim
The guru of all race promoters was a fellow named Ralph Hankinson. Bill France said, “Jeez, if I can get the old man to promote a race, we know it’s going to be a success.” But Bill didn’t have the 25 cents to make the call, so he called collect. Hankinson didn’t know who this Bill France guy was, so he refused the call. Bill complained to a friend who had some money. The friend told Bill, “Let’s go in partners. I’ll put the money up, and you do the footwork.” They ended up splitting a $200 profit, and Bill said, “Hey, this is pretty cool.” He realized how big racing could be, and came up with the idea for NASCAR. So if you look at NASCAR and what it’s become, it all came about because of a 25¢ phone call that wasn’t accepted in 1938.

A Speedway Is Born
On December 14, 1947, after nine years of promoting races in and around Daytona Beach, Bill France Sr. gathered a group of racing aficionados in a smoke-filled room at the Streamline Hotel and officially formed the National Association for Stock Car Racing. Always a masterful marketer and promoter, France recognized the fundamental appeal of his sport to its audience: the ability to identify with the good ol’ boys on the racetrack. The fans drove the same model cars, and they came from the same small southeastern towns. Unlike all other sports, stock car racing was a torture test of consumer products in front of a live audience. If fans saw a Chevy winning on the track, they showed up at Chevy dealerships. The big Detroit companies started flooding NASCAR with money, upping the quality of the cars, the speeds, the purses. As NASCAR’s audience grew over the next decade, its signature Daytona races along Highway A1A and the beach became increasingly crowded and hard to control. In 1952 the race had to be shortened by 10 laps to get everybody out before high tide. The situation was becoming unmanageable. By the mid-1950s, Big Bill had decided to risk his financial future on replacing the beach course with an imposing superspeedway that would attempt to outshine even the country’s most well-known track: Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

Andretti
Indianapolis had been established since the beginning of the century, and it was  really the center for racing in America. The France family thought they needed a marquee event to represent stock cars, so they decided to build a track even faster than Indy. Stock cars are obviously not as fast as open-wheeled cars, so he had to build the banking to get the speeds up. Indy has no banking. Daytona was a different animal from the start.

Robin Braig
President of Daytona International Speedway
Bill France took all kinds of risks. The turns have 31-degree banking. The technology is just now here today to actually pave that kind of banking. Any modern engineer is always amazed that Big Bill was somehow able to do it 50 years ago.

Jim Hunter
NASCAR vice president of corporate communications
Even in the industry, nobody took France seriously. He was some nut down in Florida building this two-and-a-half-mile track. Money was a huge problem. At one point he needed $30,000 to complete the track and had exhausted all his sources. He got the money from Pepsi in return for giving them the soda-pouring rights at the track. That was the beginning of corporate involvement in motorsports.

Junior Johnson
The first time I drove in there, I really thought Bill France had lost his mind. I didn’t know how he was going to get cars to run long enough to last 500 miles. Back then our cars just didn’t last like they do now.

Dale Jarrett
1993, 1996, 2000 Daytona 500 Cham­pion
Daytona was bigger than life. I can remember standing on the back of our car in the infield as a seven-year-old kid watching my father [two-time NASCAR champion Ned Jarrett]. There was nothing in my life that seemed bigger than there.

Jimmie Johnson
The first time [someone] took me to the Daytona speedway, I couldn’t believe how big and fast that place was. I was hanging on the fence, and before I knew it 43 cars had gone by me in the blink of an eye. I was like, “This is serious.”

McKim
No one had ever seen anything that big before. The driver Jimmy Thompson said, “There have been other tracks that separated the men from the boys. This is the track that will separate the brave from the weak after the boys are gone.”

McKim
What was amazing about the first Daytona 500 [held in 1959] was that it turned out to be a photo finish. Bill France saw Johnny Beauchamp and Lee Petty running neck and neck. They didn’t have a finish-line camera set up, so he went down to watch the cars come across. But Joe Weatherly was a lap down and on the outside, and he blocked France’s view. There was no way to know who won. Beauchamp was flagged the winner, but Petty protested. They put a hold on everything, and France put out an APB for anyone who had photographs or movies of the finish. Everybody in the racing world was sitting there with bated breath, and after three days of looking at every picture and studying every film, they finally determined that Lee Petty had won. After that they put a camera at the finish line.

Marvin Panch
1961 Daytona 500 Champion
They ran convertibles in 1959, because Bill wanted to get a convertibles circuit going. When you were in a convertible, the fans could see you working the car, watch your arms and everything. So Bill came by and offered me $1,000 to cut the top off my car. I did, and it was the biggest mistake I ever made. The convertibles were so much slower, it almost felt like you were being sucked out of the car. That was the only time they ran convertibles in the 500.

Junior Johnson
I found out about drafting in 1960. I was out trying to get my car faster [in practice sessions before the 500], and Cotton Owens came by. I knew his car was a lot faster than mine was, so as he went by I ducked in behind him. Going down the backstretch, shucks, I was sitting there running only half-throttle, and I started thinking to myself, Why in the world am I keeping up with him? I finally figured it out, but I didn’t say nothing about it. I just waited till the race started and began grabbing those fast cars and drafting them. As they dropped out, I’d get the next one that came along. I drafted myself all the way to Victory Lane. I won $19,500. Oh, Lord, $19,500 was like you were rich.

Kevin Harvick
2007 Daytona 500 Champion
I don’t know the exact number, but the prize when I won was about $1.5 million [out of an $18 million purse]. But to be able to see your name on the trophy with the greats, that was probably the best part.