Rex White

68
Rex White bigraphy, stories - American racing driver

Rex White : biography

17 August 1929 –

Rex White (born August 17, 1929) is a retired American auto racer and NASCAR champion. White was one of the drivers who competed for the original Chevrolet racing team. He began racing in 1956, grabbing fourteen top-ten finishes. After a part-time run in 1957, White won twice in 1958. His most notable year came in 1960, when he won six races, and the NASCAR Grand National (now Sprint Cup Series) championship. When he retired in 1964, he had acquired 28 career victories. Throughout most of White’s NASCAR career, he drove General Motors brand cars, typically painted gold and white, sporting the number "4" on the side. After he retired, White was inducted into the National Motorsports Press Association (NMPA) Hall of Fame in 1974, and was named one of NASCAR’s 50 Greatest Drivers in 1998.

Legacy

Standing only five feet, four inches (1.6m) and weighing 135 pounds, Rex White was the smallest man to ever capture the NASCAR championship. After 10 years and over 36,000 miles of racing in 233 races, White accumulated 28 wins, 110 top-5 finishes, and 163 top 10 finishes. White is considered by NASCAR as one of its top 50 drivers, a winner of the Living Legends of Auto Racing Pioneers awards, and the Smokey Yunick Pioneer award. White is also a member of the National Motorsports Press Association Hall of Fame at Darlington, and the Georgia Automobile Racing Hall of Fame.

White’s 163 top 10 finishes in 233 races, which calculates to about 70%, is unlikely to be topped due to the parity and longevity of today’s drivers. Only Tim Flock comes close to such record numbers.

White authored his autobiography titled Gold Thunder, and teamed with editor Ann Jones for a second book covering 58 memoirs of past and present NASCAR legends titled All Around The Track.

Personal life

White was born on August 17, 1929, and raised in Taylorsville, North Carolina. White said that at the age of eight, he was working on his family’s Model T. "I was unaware the car on which I labored represented hope to people around me, frustration to those trying to stop illegal moonshine. I saw automobiles as transportation, not the symbol of an upcoming billion-dollar sport." White was born during the Great Depression, and suffered from polio as a young boy The polio left one leg withered, but when speaking about it White said: "Most of the lessons I have learned have stayed with me all my life. The biggest one was how to conquer fear." Rex learned how to drive by piloting a neighbor’s truck in the fields where he lived when he was 6 years old, and often pretended to drive while sitting in the family Model T, imagining that he was on a race track. White’s looks have at times been compared to those of comedian George Gobel.

Racing career

In 1954 White got his first car when one of his wife’s relatives helped him scrape together the $600 he needed for an old 1937 Ford. Within a year he was making enough at the race-tracks to survive. White ran his first race in the Sportsman division at West Lanham Speedway in Maryland. He was forced to drop out of the race due to engine problems. By the time the season was over, White, as a rookie, had won the Sportsman championship at the 1/5-mile high-banked oval.

NASCAR

Rex White started racing in NASCAR in 1956, when the premier stock-car racing sport was known as the Grand National division. He started 24 races in 1956 and finished in the top 10 on 14 occasions, as well as finishing second in the final NASCAR Short Track standings, a lower division of the NASCAR Grand Nationals.

White competed in only 9 of 53 events in 1957; but finished in the top 10 in six of those events, with four of those finishes being in the top 5.

In 1958 White moved from Washington to Spartanburg in order to join forces with Louis Clements, his friend, partner, and chief mechanic. White and Clements proceeded to build their first late-model Chevy, and started competing together in the NASCAR circuit. They met a year or so earlier when both were working for Chevrolet’s factory racing team, an enterprise that retired from racing in June 1957, when Detroit and Chevy temporarily withdrew its financial backing to the industry. White competed a total of 22 times of the 55 races that year, winning his first NASCAR race at the season-opening event at the Champion Speedway in Fayetteville, NC.