Bill France Jr. 1933--2007

BILL FRANCE JR. saw it all. He was there in the family Hupmobile, when his father, Big Bill France, drove the family south from Washington, D.C. , in 1934. They stopped in Daytona to see Sir Malcolm Campbell attempt to break the land speed record, and Big Bill was so captivated by the racing scene on the Atlantic coast that he opened up a gas station in town; before long he was promoting races on the side. An authoritative, visionary man, he soon founded a body that would organize and oversee stock car racing—a body Bill Jr. would ultimately take to heights that Big Bill could never have dreamed possible.

In 1947 France Sr. and several promoters and drivers formed NASCAR in a smoke-filled room at the Streamline Hotel. Bill Jr. was at the very first NASCAR race, at Daytona in 1948, doing whatever odd jobs needed doing, like sweeping out the office. He later did a little driving, then worked as a flagman, a scorer, a steward—anything to learn the ropes.

Bill Jr. took over as president when Big Bill stepped aside in 1972. Comparisons to his father were inevitable, and with his my-way-or-the-highway mentality, Bill Jr. was very much his father's son. "Senior was the kind of cat you could talk to until you were blue in the face, and he'd do what he'd figured on doing all along," Richard Petty once said. "Now Junior will listen, and you get the idea that he's considering what you're saying, but he makes up his mind all by himself."

Junior had the good fortune of taking over just when R.J. Reynolds began sponsoring stock car racing. With more money offered to the series winner, drivers didn't skip events and France could condense the schedule, making every race a big race. That allowed him to begin shopping races to television networks. Instead of just a few events being shown in edited form on Wide World of Sports, Junior, in 1979, got CBS to show the Daytona 500 from flag to flag. In the '80s ESPN came aboard, and before long stock car racing was no longer a regional sport. Tracks sprang up from New Hampshire to California , and attendance approached or topped six figures at many. France 's last TV deal, signed in 1999, was for six years and $2.4 billion. In his 31 years running the family business on his own terms, he left the spotlight to the drivers and systematically built NASCAR into a multibillion-dollar conglomerate with a fan base far beyond its Southern roots.

France spent all of his adult life doing whatever he could to help NASCAR grow—even if it meant making one of his children uncomfortable. In 2003 France was in the crowd with 300 writers in New York City watching his son Brian deliver a presentation about NASCAR 's future. Dissatisfied with an answer Brian was giving about reworking the schedule, Bill Jr. rose from his chair and answered the question the way he thought it needed to be answered, leaving his son befuddled on the dais. Tough love, maybe, but it worked; eight months later Bill Jr. was so certain that Brian was ready to run the operation that he stepped down.

"Part of leadership is having the guts to make a decision and then having the guts to stand by it and making it work," driver Jeff Burton said earlier this year, when speaking of France . "That's what he did on a lot of occasions. He did it in a way that let you know who the boss was and also did it in a way that you respected him. And I've said it all along, I think that is the cornerstone in our sport."