The last resting place of Glenn “Fireball” Roberts is so close to Daytona Beach International Airport that the planes look like you could almost reach up and touch them as they head for a landing. At his gravesite in Daytona Memorial Park, you can hear their engines, too — a reminder of roaring race cars Roberts drove at the famed speedway. The airport and track are about two miles away.
Roberts died in 1964 when he was just 35, but in 1959 when NASCAR founder William “Bill” France Sr. opened Daytona International Speedway, Roberts was a local hero on his way to becoming NASCAR’s first superstar driver.
On July 4, 1959, Roberts won the inaugural 250-mile Independence Day race that would become the Daytona Firecracker 400. Sadly, only five years later, on July 5, 1964, he was laid to rest in the cemetery not far from the speedway. Roberts died on July 2 after being critically burned on May 24 in a crash during a race in Charlotte, North Carolina. Friends later said he had been on the brink of retiring.
It’s harrowing to read about Roberts’ injuries. “Drivers had no fireproof suits in those days,” Sentinel writer Roger Roy wrote in 2001. Some drivers would soak their racing suits in Boraxo powder to help make them fire-resistant, but Roberts was allergic to the stuff. He had no protection other than his cotton racing suit.
Roberts had quite a career, winning 33 races from 1950 until 1964, Godwin Kelly notes in his 2005 book, “Fireball: Legends Don’t Fall from the Sky,” and is considered by many to be “the best driver never to win a NASCAR championship.” In 1957, he was voted NASCAR’s most popular driver. Today, though, drivers like Roberts from the early years of NASCAR are not well remembered, Kelly wrote.
When the Sentinel profiled Roberts in February 1959, though, plenty of Central Florida folks knew his name. He was a native of Tavares, brought up in Apopka and then called Daytona Beach home, he told the Sentinel’s Henry Balch.
He picked up his nickname, “Fireball,” as a baseball pitcher in high school and American Legion baseball, Roberts told Balch, and the name naturally followed him to the track. Later, high school friends recalled his ready smile and hearty laugh, the kind that would radiate from his belly when he made a joke. They also recalled an affinity for speed far more than any baseball skills.
Roberts’ father, Glenn Sr., was a superintendent for sawmills owned by the family of late Apopka mayor John Land. The elder Roberts encouraged his son’s love of racing, and eventually U.S. Highway 441 from Apopka to Mount Dora became the scene of duels between Roberts in a 1937 Chevy powered by a Cadillac engine and his buddy Curt Haygood in a Ford.
After high school, Roberts headed to the University of Florida and a possible career designing auto engines. But his mind was never far from racing, and after a year of college, he left to take up the sport full time.
Fans familiar only with NASCAR’s modern era may not know a couple of important elements from Roberts’ heyday, Roy noted in 2001. First, through the early 1960s, except for steel roll bars, stock cars in racing were almost exactly that — nearly indistinguishable from street models.
Second, these cars could reach astonishing speeds on the big new banked superspeedways such as Daytona. In 1961 at the Daytona 500, Roberts hit a speed of 155.7 mph in a Pontiac that he could have driven home that day, as Roy noted, and his qualifying pace was 10 mph faster than the winner’s qualifying speed at that year’s Indianapolis 500.
Many racers from the sport’s early days…
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