Fireball Roberts | |||||||
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Born | Edward Glenn Roberts, Jr. January 20, 1929 Tavares, Florida |
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Died | July 2, 1964 Charlotte, North Carolina |
(aged 35)||||||
Cause of death | Complications due to racing crash on May 24, 1964, during the 1964 World 600 | ||||||
Achievements |
1962 Daytona 500 winner 1958, 1963 Southern 500 winner |
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Awards | 1957 Grand National Series Most Popular Driver Named one of NASCAR's 50 Greatest Drivers (1998) International Motorsports Hall of Fame inductee(1990) Motorsports Hall of Fame of America (1995) Florida Sports Hall of Fame inductee NASCAR Hall of Fame inductee(2014) |
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Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series career | |||||||
206 races run over 15 years | |||||||
Best finish | 2nd (1950) | ||||||
First race | 1950 (Daytona Beach) | ||||||
Last race | 1964 World 600 (Charlotte) | ||||||
First win | 1950 (Hillsboro) | ||||||
Last win | 1964 (Augusta) | ||||||
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Statistics current as of February 23, 2013. |
Edward Glenn "Fireball" Roberts, Jr. (January 20, 1929 – July 2, 1964) was one of the pioneering race car drivers of NASCAR.
Roberts was born in Tavares, Florida, and raised in Apopka, Florida, where he was interested in both auto racing and baseball. He was a pitcher for the Zellwood Mud Hens, an American Legion baseball team, where he earned the nickname, "Fireball" because of his fastball. He enlisted with the United States Army Air Corps in 1945, but was discharged after basic training because of his asthma.
He attended the University of Florida and raced on dirt tracks on weekends. In 1947, at the age of eighteen, he raced on the Daytona Beach Road Course at Daytona, for the first time. He won a 150-mile race at Daytona Beach the following year. Roberts also competed in local stock and races at Florida tracks such as Seminole Speedway.
"Fireball" Roberts continued to amass victories on the circuit, despite the changes in NASCAR, as it moved away from shorter dirt tracks to superspeedways in the 1950s and 1960s. In his 206 career NASCAR Grand National races, he won 33 times and had 32 poles. He finished in the top-five 45 percent of the time, and in the top-ten 59 percent of the time. He won both the Daytona 500 and Firecracker 250 events in 1962, driving a black and gold 1962 Pontiac built by car builder legend, Smokey Yunick.
In 1961, Roberts, temporary president of the Federation of Professional Athletes, was in dispute with NASCAR president, Bill France, over the Teamsters' Union affiliate - the FPA - which he and Curtis Turner had helped organize and which France was trying to disband. Unlike the banned Curtis Turner and Tim Flock, Roberts soon returned to the NASCAR fold.