1,000 Greatest Drivers: Fonty Flock
The driver NASCAR forgot (or intentionally snubbed?)
Probably the best driver who will never be inducted to the NASCAR Hall of Fame, Fonty was not as dominant as his brother Tim Flock in the Cup Series, but he was probably only barely worse when evaluating his whole career. While Fonty never had a year quite as dominant as Tim’s 18-win 1955 when they were teammates, his 1951 was the most dominant NASCAR Cup season to date with 8 wins, 13 poles, and over 2,000 laps led, and he at one time was tied with Curtis Turner for the most wins ever. However, the problem is that a lot of his best performances came in 1947 in the National Championship Stock Car Circuit, where he won the title before Bill France replaced the NCSCC with NASCAR the next year, so technically that doesn’t count, and the 1948 NASCAR Modified division where he won the most races when that was the premier series championship (although he lost the title to Red Byron), then he won the 1949 Modified title when that was roughly equivalent to Byron’s Cup Series title in importance. For a driver with only 154 starts, 19 wins and 33 poles is pretty massive, and if you include all his other wins (against the same drivers he’d compete against in Cup), he actually has 60 wins, more than Tim’s 56. (Even their other brother Bob Flock is not far behind with 34 wins, even if only 4 of his came at the Cup Series level.) Tim is slightly ahead of him in my model, but they’re both really close and really high-rated with Tim ranking 3rd all-time in my model and Fonty 5th, yet his career’s been totally erased and I try to explain why here.
I found all sorts of interesting anecdotes as I trawled newspapers.com for information. While I didn’t think any of these things were important enough to include in the profile, he apparently patented a coffee maker, was commissioned by NASCAR to start a series of fan clubs, and he stopped one race on the opening lap in front of the grandstand until the band played “Dixie”. I’d almost wonder if that was the reason why he never made the 50 Greatest Drivers list or the Hall of Fame, because that’s probably the reason why people would want to snub him today. But that can’t be it, since it’s not like his contemporaries like Buck Baker were excluded from these honors for being racist. (It’s not like Bill France himself was excluded from the Hall of Fame for being racist.) It’s weird that one of the first three drivers to be inducted into NMPA’s admittedly extremely NASCAR-heavy Hall of Fame never got into NASCAR’s official one and never will. I think it’s because he feuded with Bill France after being screwed out of a business deal, but read on.
