Early Saturday evening, Dawson County Emergency Services in Dawson County, Georgia posted the following to their Facebook page:
“If you heard a siren in downtown Dawsonville this evening it was not a tornado warning. It means Chase Elliott just won the NASCAR Xfinity race at Daytona International Speedway.”
That’s because the tradition for Gordon Pirkle, a life-long Dawsonville, Ga. resident and racing aficionado, whenever a member of the racing Elliott family wins a race is to switch on the siren (pronounced “si-reen” by Pirkle) on the roof of his Dawsonville Pool Room situated right in the middle of downtown.
The tradition started in 1983 when NASCAR Hall of Famer Bill Elliott won his first career Sprint Cup series race at the now defunct Riverside International Raceway in California.
From then on, every time Elliott won a race – which, in the 1980s, was fairly frequently – Pirkle would switch on the siren to alert all of Dawson County that their favorite son had scored another victory.
On Saturday, the siren screamed the news of the next generation of Dawsonville racers, as Elliott’s son, Chase, scored his first NASCAR superspeedway victory at Daytona International Speedway in Daytona Beach, Fla.
While it’s a first for Chase, it’s not the first for Dawsonville. The sleepy little hamlet, located about 70 miles north of Atlanta, can boast a racing record that no other town has.
In the history of racing at Daytona Beach, five drivers – make this six, counting the 20-year-old Elliott – have scores major victories at Daytona, both on the big 2.5 mile speedway and on the original beach and road course.
Along with the Elliott’s wins on the big track, Lloyd Seay, Roy Hall, Bernard Long and Gober Sosebee all won races on the beach.
You’d be hard pressed to find another single small town that produced so many winners at such a major venue.
Add to that the name of Raymond Parks, a Dawsonville native whose cars won races on the beach with Seay and Hall, along with other non-Dawsonville drivers. Those wins include the first ever NASCAR sanctioned race in 1948 on Daytona Beach.
So, what is it about Dawsonville, which is also home to the Georgia Racing Hall of Fame, that has helped it produce so many good racers?
According to Pirkle, when you talk about the beach racing days, it wasn’t necessarily what was in the water in Dawsonville that made them so good, it was what the water could be turned into – namely moonshine whiskey, which all four hauled out of the mountains under the cover of darkness.
“This is the birthplace of stock car racing,” Pirkle said in a 2010 interview with Georgia Racing History.com. “A lot of people want to press me and ask ‘where’s your race track’? It was down here in the river bottoms before there was any organized stock car racing anywhere.
“On Sunday nights, a bunch of the liquor guys would meet down here in the river bottom and bet on who had the best drivers. The word leaked out and people started showing up to watch it on Sunday evenings.”
When Dawsonville native Frank Christian saw the number of people coming out to see the local rum runners compete in 1938, he saw dollar signs. He leased the old Lakewood Speedway in Atlanta for what was one of the first events for what would become modern stock car racing.
Within two years, the Dawsonville Gang began travelling south to Daytona Beach, where a young Bill France, Sr. was organizing races utilizing two miles of the hard packed sands going north and two miles of Florida State Road A1A going south.
After years of outrunning the law down Highway 9 between Dawsonville and Atlanta, the layout must have seemed a little tame.
In the decade of the 40s, out of 15 races run on the old beach and road course, 12 were won by Dawsonville drivers or car owners.
Pirkle said in 2010 that he had a good explanation for why those early Dawsonville racers were so good.
“If you come in second in a stock car race, you get paid for it. If you come in second running moonshine, you go to jail.”
Enter the 1980s and Bill Elliott’s rise to fame. In all, “Awesome Bill from Dawsonville” scored wins in 11 events at Daytona International Speedway between 1985 and 2000. That includes two Daytona 500 victories, two Firecracker 400 wins, two IROC wins, four Daytona 500 qualifying race victories and a class win in the Rolex 24 Hours of Daytona in 1987.
So on Saturday, when the siren atop the Dawsonville Pool Room sang out loud and proud for Chase Elliott, it really should have come to no surprise to the people of Dawson County.
And, with Chase set to lead the field to green in Sunday’s Daytona 500, maybe they should get ready to hear it a lot more in the future.
WDUN will have live MRN Radio coverage of Sunday's season opening Daytona 500 for the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series beginning at 12 pm on 102.9 FM and 1 pm on 550 AM.
http://accesswdun.com/article/2016/2/371671/daytona-winners-all-part-of-dawsonvilles-racing-heritage