Only Yesterday: Tim Flock & His Magical 1955 Season

This column is the first in a series that will chronicle one of the greatest stories rarely told in NASCAR’s history.

This year marks 60 years since the departure from NASCAR of Carl Kiekhaefer, the car owner 60 years ahead of his time in many aspects. He is easily the most successful car owner to not even be nominated for the NASCAR Hall of Fame, but at the same point, there are plenty of good reasons as to why that is.

As we go through Kiekhaefer’s story and the context required to fully appreciate all of the twists and turns of it, keep that Hall snub in mind. Should the Hall seriously consider a Kiekhaefer nomination? Or are they correct not to have done so in the 17 ballots taken so far in the Hall’s history?

That’s up to you to decide as this yarn is spun.

---

Tim Flock was done with NASCAR.

It was 1954. The 1952 Grand National Series (which will be referred to henceforth as the NASCAR Cup Series for clarity) champion didn’t have a ride to start the year after team owner Ted Chester decided to leave the series.

New car owner Ernest Woods had hired Flock to compete in the annual Daytona Beach and Road Course race near the start of the season. Flock, showing he hadn’t lost a step, won the race in convincing fashion in what would have been the first win in a car with a two-way radio.

But NASCAR would then disqualify Flock. Why? Because he had illegal carburetor screws.

Flock got fed up with NASCAR. “They changed the rules whenever they wanted,” Flock would reportedly say. He wasn’t going to fully retire from racing, but instead was only going to pick-and-choose what he’d run instead from then on.

Like his older brother Bob Flock, Tim Flock was going to spend his days running a service station in his native Georgia. It was a good business in the early days of the automobile.

In September, Flock decided to dip his toe back in the water after seven months away. He ran four Cup races, with the highlight being a pole and leading 180 laps to a second-place finish in Macon, Ga. But he wasn’t planning on doing much more, and he would attend the 1955 Daytona Beach races simply as a fan.

Carl Kiekhaefer came to Daytona Beach that year to win.

Kiekhaefer was a proud native of Wisconsin, and specialized in building outboard motors. He had seemingly unlimited funds from his Kiekhaefer Mercury company, and also seemed to have the racing bug, having entered four cars in the 1953 Carrera Panamericana.

Kiekhaefer would move from Mexican sports car rally to stock cars in the summer of 1954 six months later, entering and winning three races in the AAA Stock Car Series on the Milwaukee Mile. Tony Bettenhausen won for Kiekhafer on July 11, while Frank Mundy would win a double header on Aug. 22 and Aug. 26.

For 1955, Kiekhaefer decided to go south and race in what was by then the biggest stock car series in the country: NASCAR.

It’s unclear who wanted who to do what, but what we know for sure is that Tim Flock would end up qualifying on the pole in Kiekhafer’s Chrysler.

Flock finished second to Fireball Roberts in the race. But controversy flared up again, for the second straight year on the beach. Roberts was disqualified from the race due to altered push rods, handing Flock and Kiekhaefer their first win from the pole together.

Flock decided to stay with Kiekhaefer for the remainder of the season, and the results were magical. Not only did Flock cruise to a second championship, he did it by winning 18 races in 39 starts.

If we ignore Richard Petty‘s 1967 season, in which he won 27 races in just 48 starts, Flock’s season was the most dominant in the history of NASCAR. His 18 wins will forever rank as the second most in a season.

Flock had an average finish of 4.6. This is the third best for any full-time driver in the history of Cup, with only Petty’s 1971 (4.2) and Cale Yarborough‘s 1977 (4.5) being ahead of him.

Of his 18 wins, Flock led every single lap in eight of them. I am fairly certain this is the all-time record, as even Petty’s 1967 season only featured this occurrence twice.

“[Tim Flock] was what I’d have shown you in 1955 if you were from outer Mongolia and had never seen a car race and said, ‘Smokey, what is a NASCAR race driver?” the always colorful Smokey Yunick would eventually write in his memoirs.

Flock was always a standout driver and a champion even before this. But what put him over the edge was the team Kiekhaefer had built.

Red Vogt is probably best known today as the guy who came up with the name “NASCAR,” but in reality Vogt was the best mechanic in the early days of stock car racing.

Vogt actually knew Bill France longer than just about anybody in racing. Growing up in the Washington D.C. area, the Vogt family was friendly with the France family.

In fact, when Vogt was only four years old, Vogt once noticed that Mrs. France was visibly pregnant. Vogt was told that she had swallowed a watermelon seed.

Like most people from that pre-NASCAR era, Vogt eventually had a falling out with the man he’d call “Melon Head” and left the series over it.

Kiekhaefer was able to lure Vogt back to work exclusively on his own racecars. The money was simply too good to pass up.

Raymond Parks built the first stock car dynasty in part due to Vogt’s skill in getting more out of Ford V8 than any of the other mechanics of the early days.

Why? Vogt’s secret to success was order, detail and cleanliness. He had his workers in the shop dress clean, the shop floor was kept swept, and any chance of just a hint of dirt or grime getting into a V8 block was severely reduced.

Kiekhafer’s success was built on this, but supercharged to the extreme. Vogt’s philosphy around racing boiled down to his saying “Money equals speed,” a saying that is still true today. The money Kiekhaefer poured into racing made Parks’ investments in it look like chump change.

The mechanics at the track would be in professionally dressed uniforms. They would take samples of the dirt tracks that made up the bulk of the schedule and analyze it to find any sort of an edge. They’d take account of the weather and specifically the air and track tempuratures.

All of this meant a lot of money spent. But it also meant a lot of speed.

Flock would stay with the team following the season. But like with his relationship with NASCAR, his relationship with Kiekhaefer could only last but so long with how the other side treated him.

Kiekhaefer was demanding and wore a lot of people on his team thin. The wins were nice, but after winning three of the first 10 races of the 1956 season, Flock just couldn’t deal with Kiekhafer anymore.

He’d quit the team, citing stomach ulcers, but the ulcers didn’t stop him from hopping into a Yunick car and finishing third in a Cup race two weeks later.

Flock spent most of 1956 away from NASCAR again after that. He watched Kiekhaefer win most of the races again. Good for him. It’s not like anybody could really compete against that speed.

But Flock did have a measure of revenge in mind. He wouldn’t have to wait long to execute it.