Peanuts. Fried chicken. The number 13. And anything green. These are some of the things that drive superstitious drivers crazy. They believe their racing successes or failures are determined in large part by factors that nonsuperstitious people would quickly dismiss.
Take the taboo of eating peanuts in the pits, for example. That one may date back to the 1930s, says racing historian Greg Fielden. Some say it began with the death of a driver who ate peanuts and later crashed.
Driver Brent Prior of Colona, Ilinois, whose father Slim and uncle Larry Prior both raced, says his parents always told him to steer clear of peanuts, the color green, and the number 13. He remembers well the time his uncle drove up from Missouri to compete in a special event in East Moline, Illinois.
"He was sitting in the car eating peanuts, and my dad asked him if he was crazy," says Brent. "And Larry said, 'Oh, that won't hurt anything.' He totaled his car in the feature. So that really made my parents think there was something to that."
Prior says he's not as superstitious as some drivers. But he admits that "anytime I win, whatever I happen to be wearing or I had eaten that day, I do it the next time."
Former driver Dan Felsen, a Des Moines native, avoided the color green at the track. "Even underwear labels were meticulously inspected for a thread of green," admits Felsen.
Felsen is the son of the late Henry Gregor Felsen, who wrote books about racing and hot rods. When he was 9 or 10 years old, he would accompany his dad to the races every Saturday night.
"He would go to the pits, and I would hang with one of the drivers' sons, who was my age," Felsen says. "One night I had on these bright-green socks. Ed DeCarlo called me on it and, sure enough, his dad [Al DeCarlo, whose picture was on the back of the first printing of Fever Heat] wrecked badly that night and broke a couple of ribs."
Says Felsen: "That was proof enough for me. I won't even wear green to watch the Cup race on Sunday on TV."
Fielden says Fireball Roberts thought it was bad luck to pose for pictures prior to a race. Joe Weatherly was superstitious of everything, particularly the color green and the number 13. "They used to carry the car on the back of a flatbed trailer," Fielden relates. "Joe and team owner Bud Moore were eating inside a little mom-and-pop roadside restaurant when a green cab backed into the race car. So it put green paint on it.
"Bud said, 'We'll paint over it.' But Joe said, 'No, you're going to grind that out. If you paint over it, it's still there.'"
Fielden relates another Weatherly story: "One time at Darlington he had some brown socks that got wet, and they turned green." Weatherly raced without socks that day.
For some, like the Kosiski family from Omaha, fried chicken eaten on race day is a no-no. "We heard it from Billy Moyer back in about 1980," says Joe Kosiski, the senior of three racing brothers.
The Kosiskis and Moyer were chat-ting in Florida when Joe's sister, Kathy, suggested the group buy a bucket of chicken and take it to the races. This is how the conversation played out according to Joe: "Billy said, 'You never eat chicken on race day!' But my sister replied, 'Oh, don't worry about it.' After the races in Jacksonville that night, Billy was on his way back to Batesville to get a new race car."