FROM MOONSHININ' TO MARKETING.

You might say that International Speedway Corporation traces its roots all the way to George Washington, because the Father of Our Country was the first U.S. government official to chase Appalachian moonshiners up hills and down hollers in a race known to history as the Whiskey Rebellion. A century and a half later, federal revenue agents were still trying to put the cuffs on whiskey-running rebels, but they only caught the ones in the slow cars. Natural selection favored good ol' boys who knew how to stiffen suspensions, soup up engines and invent driving tricks that made cars do things they'd never been designed for, like take hairpin mountain curves at a hundred mph or so. Eventually, the good ol' boys started arguing with each other about who had the fastest cars, and racing each other to settle the point; at least, that's how the first recorded race - in the mid-1930s in Stockbridge, Georgia - got started.

A decade later, in 1947, a Daytona Beach auto mechanic, Bill France, founded Nascar, the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing. France was tough enough to impose a discipline and a rule-book on the outlaw sport. He was also savvy enough to found a company to build and run race tracks: International Speedway Corporation (ISC).

ISC's business boomed in the car-crazed '50s and the rebel-loving '60s. Outlaw was in. It didn't hurt racing's popularity at all that the champion driver on the circuit, North Carolina's Junior Johnson, was a bona fide, documented bootleg whiskey runner and ex-convict who had done time at Chillicothe.

Bill France's heirs inherited his business acumen and burnished the sport's image to suit the changing American mood. They turned it into a commercial bonanza, promoting drivers as "people persons," valuable additions to a corporate marketing effort. The shift in emphasis led to cars and uniforms covered with commercial logos and big money from ad time on TV racing shows, which of course means big payments by networks for racing broadcast rights. Revenue from broadcast rights, corporate hospitality suites, souvenirs and similar image-dependent sources accounted for the lion's share of ISC's $128-million income in the first half of 1999.