1,000 Greatest Drivers: Jim Reed
The best NASCAR driver you've never heard of.
You might wonder why I have given so many elite seasons to a driver who even most of the serious NASCAR historians don’t mention. He didn’t make the 50 Greatest Drivers list, he didn’t make the 75 Greatest Drivers list, and he’ll never make the Hall of Fame. These are all mistakes. I don’t blame you for not realizing Reed was actually one of the best NASCAR drivers from the ‘50s, because I have never seen anyone in any NASCAR context ever, ever mention him in any narratives whatsoever except for the 40 Years of Stock Car Racing books by Greg Fielden, which I own. The issue is that the Short Track Division, which Reed utterly dominated from 1951-1959, has weirdly been erased from history. Even the NASCAR historians who you’d assume would know about this series just don’t. It’s not like NASCAR has only recognized Cup Series drivers on its lists. Bob Welborn mostly made the 50 Greatest Drivers list I think on the basis of his three straight titles in the Convertible Series more than his Cup Series wins. Tiny Lund probably made it because of his dominance in the Grand American division rather than his paltrier Cup Series results. Reed had two fewer Cup wins than Welborn and two more than Lund but he was way, way, way more dominant in his secondary division than they were in theirs, and Reed was an owner-driver throughout his whole career while they were not. He even won a Southern 500 when neither of them did! Seriously, what gives? I don’t get it, but here I commemorate the 100th birthday of NASCAR’s most obscure great by making a case for him as one of the best NASCAR drivers of the ‘50s, which nobody else besides me seems to have ever recognized.
Even if you look him up, you won’t find much. His Wikipedia page is a disaster. At least, unlike Dany Snobeck, Jean-Pierre Malcher, and Tyler Courtney, he has one, but maybe it would be better if he didn’t. I understand why it’s such a short page because almost nobody has written about him ever, but somehow the page neglects to mention his five NASCAR Short Track titles and his two NASCAR Eastern Late Model titles, probably because nobody even knows those championships existed anymore. (And admittedly, none of the other Short Track champions’ titles are listed either, except for oddly, Pappy Hough’s). But the Reed page in particular is an editorial disaster.
“Reed has raced 16,335 laps” - who cares? Laps completed is one of the least relevant statistics ever conceived.
“the equivalent of 14,017.3 miles (22,558.7 km)” - thank you for sharing. Even I am not autistic enough to care about this.
“His total career earnings are $16,299 ($171,405.24 when adjusted for inflation).” - Most other drivers’ pages don’t mention career winnings for a reason (NASCAR itself doesn’t even report them anymore). It should only be mentioned if you do something historic (if you wanted to list Fred Lorenzen being the first driver to win $100,000 in a season or Bill Elliott being the first to win $1,000,000 in a season, I’d get that, but not this).
“and the lowest in 1963 being 139th place overall for the year.” - Again, the worst points finish you achieve in your career (because you only started a race or two or whatever) does not matter.
“Reed performed the best at short tracks and restrictor plate tracks; finishing 11th on average while finishing in 34th on average while driving on tri-oval intermediate tracks.” - “Restrictor plate tracks” did not exist when he was racing, and while career average finishes on track types aren’t quite as meaningless as things like laps/miles completed, inflation-adjusted winnings, or worst points finish, they still shouldn’t be mentioned in narrative encyclopedia entries. The broken vertebra is about the only useful thing in that entire paragraph, while these utterly meaningless statistics make up a solid half of it! Somebody edit this for me and actually include more relevant information about him? kthxbai (Maybe some decade I’ll do it.)
This still might not be the worst Wikipedia page I’ve seen. Speaking as a competitive typing historian, the Speed typing contest might have been even worse, especially when I was writing my book five years ago. The latter link from 2020 spends most of its time discussing contests on touchscreen keyboards (which one could argue isn’t even “typing”) and an obscure Malaysian typing contest that isn’t important, while failing to mention all the typing contests that actually had historical importance (the McGurrin/Traub contest of 1888, the regularly held contest from 1906-1946, Intersteno, and even the Ultimate Typing Championship, not to toot my own horn or anything). Almost the only sentence remaining from that “These contests have been common in North America since the 1930s and were used to test the relative efficiency of typing with the Dvorak and QWERTY keyboard layouts.” is still wrong. American typing contests started in the 1880s, peaked in the 1920s, and were actually in decline in the 1930s (duh, the Depression), and they were about testing the typewriters, not testing the keyboard layouts. Typists on QWERTY keyboards won basically every single professional typing contest for over 100 years, and people using alternative layouts didn’t really break ground in formalized competition until the Internet era, maybe even the last decade. I figured I was a little too biased for anyone to take my edits seriously, so maybe I’ll just let both of these things be even though the Reed page focuses on trivial garbage and the speed typing contests page did too (and much of what’s left is still wrong anyway). If you want a better summary of Reed’s career and why he is great, here you go.
I have noticed that a few of my previous Substack entries, as well as some of my race-database.com pages, have been cited by Grokipedia. Oh dear. For all the amateurism and inaccuracies you’ll often find on Wikipedia, and even though I do personally like AI more than I should (although I will never, ever, ever use it to write any of these entries for me), I still consider myself on the left and support projects that are communal in nature rather than inferior privatized versions of the same thing. So I find myself badly torn between appreciating that at least the Grokipedia citations of my Substack on its Fred Lorenzen, Jim Richards, and Greg Murphy articles are giving some of my articles traction while simultaneously cringing at feeding the Elon Musk Industrial Complex. But what can you do?
JIM REED……………………………..USA
Born: February 21, 1926
Died: June 29, 2019
Best year: 1958
Best drive: 1959 Southern 500 at Darlington Raceway
The most unjustly forgotten driver in NASCAR history, Reed was almost certainly one of the top ten NASCAR drivers of the ‘50s, but you wouldn’t know it from even most serious racing historians. Reed won a staggering 71 races and seven championships from 1951-61, including five consecutive NASCAR Short Track Division titles from 1953-1957 and seven Cup Series wins as an owner-driver, including the 1959 Southern 500. Why does literally no one talk about him?
Perhaps it’s because both series in which he won championships have gone into the dustbin of history. I think even NASCAR fans who know about the Convertible Series, Late Model Sportsman, and the pre-1985 Modified Series aren’t familiar with the Short Track Division, even though its competition was pretty solid. Lee Petty became the first driver to win two NASCAR championships in the same season when he won both the Cup Series and Short Track titles in 1958, but Petty wasn’t even close to Reed in the Short Track Division, which existed from 1951-1959. Although many race results are missing, Reed had 60 wins in 106 confirmed starts to Petty’s 15 in 60. Reed beat Petty 31-14 in the Short Track races with known results. Bear in mind that Petty had the second-most Cup Series wins with 46 in that timespan.
Although Reed never competed more than part-time in the Cup Series, his dominance extended there. Most of Reed’s Short Track wins only counted towards that series, but 11 also counted as proto-ARCA West wins, and 3 of them counted as Cup wins in 1958. He also had another 1958 Cup Series win that didn’t count towards the Short Track Division. Three of those four wins were flag-to-flag, and the other in Buffalo had the shortest ever race distance at 25 miles. The fields weren’t great, but Petty and Rex White started all of them. That year, he actually led more Cup Series laps than the champion Petty, even though Reed started 17 races to Petty’s 50! In 1959, he added three more Cup wins, including his only superspeedway win in the 1959 Southern 500 against a 50-car field. After the Short Track Division folded, Reed switched to the NASCAR Eastern Late Model Championship, winning back-to-back titles in 1960 and 1961 before retiring.
For anyone who’s done their research, Reed should’ve been both a 50 Greatest Driver and a Hall of Famer, yet nobody mentions him, and I doubt NASCAR will ever acknowledge him. At the very least, he should be regarded similarly to Bob Welborn, who won a similar number of Cup races and multiple championships in an ancillary NASCAR division. But I would favor Reed, because he was the most dominant Short Track driver, while Curtis Turner was substantially more dominant than Welborn in the Convertible Series. I’m not going to say Reed was better than Petty overall (Petty did beat Reed 62-30 in Cup races), but he was obviously close enough to still rank as one of the ‘50s’ best NASCAR drivers.
Stock car model: N/A
Teammate head-to-heads: 0-2 (0-1 vs. Curtis Turner, 0-1 vs. Joe Weatherly)
Year-by-year: 1951: C, 1952: C, 1953: E, 1954: E, 1955: E, 1956: E, 1957: E-, 1958: E, 1959: E-, 1960: C, 1961: C