Quantcast

Rex White, Hailed as One of NASCAR’s Greatest Drivers, Dies at 95

HE won 28 Grand National races in his career and finished in the top five 110 times ...

THE NEW YORK TIMES – Rex White, the oldest surviving NASCAR champion, who grew up in the rural Southeast where souped-up cars loaded with illegal moonshine were part of the stock-car racing circuit’s origin story, died on July 18 in Taylorsville, N.C. He was 95.

His niece Kay Baron said that he died in hospice care at her home, where he had been living for a few years.

White started competing in the Grand National Series (now the NASCAR Cup Series) in 1956 and won two races in the 1958 season. The next year, he won five more.

In 1960, he had six triumphs in his No. 4 Chevrolet. In one of them, at the Old Dominion 500 at Martinsville Speedway in Virginia, he was challenged in the last 30 laps by Joe Weatherly.

“We bumped and banged around the track, exchanging so much paint I thought my car’s gold color had changed,” White recalled in “Gold Thunder: Autobiography of a NASCAR Champion” (2005, with Anne B. Jones).

...article continued below
- Advertisement -

White accumulated enough points throughout the season to take the 1960 Grand National Series championship. He raced strongly and efficiently: In 35 of 40 races, he finished in the top 10, including 25 times in the top five.

“I may be short,” he wrote in “Gold Thunder,” “but I felt tall and I was sitting on top of the world.”

White stood only 5-foot-4, and his right leg had been shrunk by polio when he was a child, which left him with a limp. One newspaper called him a “five-foot-four-inch package of racing dynamite.”

When he was a teenager, a horse track official asked if he wanted to be a jockey and promised him $60 a week, with the possibility of much more if he succeeded.

“But I didn’t want to ride any horses,” he told The Sentinel of Winston-Salem, N.C., in 1959 …

...article continued below
- Advertisement -

READ MORE. 

- Advertisement -
- Advertisement -
- Advertisement -

TRENDING

- Advertisement -
- Advertisement -