Humpy Wheeler, a racing promoter as colorful as his name, who ran the fabled Charlotte Motor Speedway in North Carolina for more than three decades and became known as the P.T. Barnum of motorsports for staging three-ring circuses and mock army battles before races while helping propel NASCAR into national phenomenon, died on Wednesday at his home in Charlotte. He was 86.
His death was announced in a statement by the speedway, which did not cite a cause.
A world-class pitchman and a raconteur in the Southern front-porch tradition (he provided the voice for Tex, the Cadillac Coupe de Ville, in the hit 2006 animated film “Cars”), Mr. Wheeler got his start in the business in the early 1960s, the heyday of his fellow North Carolinian Junior Johnson, the storied bootlegger turned stock-car pioneer.
Outside the red clay soil of the South, the sport in those days was generally dismissed as a gladiator battle on wheels for honky-tonk hooligans.
Even so, he came to believe that “racing must be the greatest sport in the world,” he once said, “because we’ve dusted people to death, we’ve given them terrible restrooms — they sit out in the rain, snow, sleet and hail; lousy parking; traffic jams” — and yet “they kept coming back, and they kept multiplying. What would ever happen if you ever did it right?”
He devoted his career to answering that question. Hired by the speedway’s founder, Bruton Smith, in 1975, he worked to make a visit to Charlotte a first-class experience, preaching the value of the “three T’s” — tickets, traffic and toilets.
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