‘Manmade Thunder’ a coffee-table book for race fans

With the Daytona 500 in the rearview mirror, NASCAR’s Sprint Cup season is racing into another high-octane season that is sure to bring lots of thrills and drama — and disappointment to some crash-prone drivers and their fans.

The third stop in the Cup’s season is coming to Las Vegas Motor Speedway, which is usually a sellout. A quick and fun way to explore the NASCAR world is by reading “Manmade Thunder” by Godwin Kelly.

Kelly is a former colleague of mine who has been the motorsports writer for the Daytona Beach (Fla.) News-Journal for nearly 30 years. The award-winning journalist was raised in Daytona Beach, where NASCAR was born in 1948. NASCAR itself grew out of the races that tore up the beaches in the previous decades. Then the races moved to Daytona International Speedway, where the first Daytona 500 was raced in 1959.

Kelly has witnessed some of the most prolific events in the sport’s history, including the 2001 Daytona 500, where legendary driver Dale Earnhardt lost his life in a crash on the last turn in the race’s last lap.

“Manmade Thunder,” first published in 2009, offers a colorful, encompassing view of NASCAR nation, from its early days to the big-dollar modern era. The coffee-table book features some unique photography, with a nice mix of black-and-white and color photographs, both big and small. About
two-thirds of the photos in the book have never been published before, thanks to contributions from the Don Hunter Collection and The Sharpe Image. One of the most chilling photos (Page 264) shows a dark column of smoke rising up from the crash of “Fireball” Roberts in 1964 at Charlotte Motor Speedway in North Carolina. He later died.

One of my favorite photos in the book is the shot of Clint Bowyer’s car on fire after getting into a crash on the last lap of the Daytona 500 in 2007 (Page 195). From the photo’s angle, it looks like Bowyer got incinerated but he escaped with no injuries.

Kelly’s narrative begins “It’s the damnedest sight in sports,” and he never lets his foot off the pedal. He focuses on the personalities that drive the sport, including past greats Richard Petty and Junior Johnson to current stars such as Jeff Gordon, Tony Stewart and Mark Martin. Kelly even spends a few pages writing about Earnhardt’s crash, which, in his words, “has become known simply as ‘Black Sunday.’ ”

It wouldn’t be NASCAR if there wasn’t some tragedy involved. Kelly does a fine job of balancing the highs and lows and the present and the past. He writes about how NASCAR started as a purely performance-based sport but later morphed into a sport dominated by big names, both young and old. Although not mentioned in the book, rookie Trevor Bayne may be one of those big names after recently winning the Daytona 500.

“Manmade Thunder” is a big book written by a big-time journalist with a big love for the sport. It’ll make a big impression on your bookshelf.