After his NASCAR Cup Series career earned him little stardom or recognition, Wendell Scott's racing legacy has come to be celebrated well after his time behind the wheel ended. The story of the longtime independent driver and car owner and the only Black driver to win a Cup Series race is now told far more than it was, and NASCAR will take an important step in honoring his legacy by making amends for something Scott was long denied.
In a post to their Facebook account, The Wendell Scott Foundation shared that NASCAR will formally present the Scott family with a trophy for Wendell Scott's 1963 Cup Series victory prior to the Coke Zero Sugar 400 at Daytona International Speedway later this month. The trophy will be the one that Scott would have received for winning at Speedway Park in Jacksonville, Florida in December of 1963.
NASCAR shared the news at a private event held Wednesday night to honor Scott, who was inducted into the NASCAR Hall of Fame in 2015. The Coke Zero Sugar 400 will take place one day before Scott's 100th birthday on August 29.
"We can't tell you what this means to us after all this time!" read a post by the Foundation.
An independent racer who competed in the Cup Series from 1961 to 1973, Scott won the third race of the 1964 Cup Series season at Jacksonville, but the satisfaction of victory was largely denied to him. Buck Baker was initially flagged the winner of the race, with a post-race scoring review after the fact determining that Scott had actually won by two laps.
Such scoring errors were common in that era, as each driver's times and laps were tracked manually prior to the introduction of electronic timing and scoring. However, the long-standing belief of Scott's advocates was that NASCAR and the track promoters waited for fans to leave before declaring him the winner due to the culture of the Segregated South at the time.
One of the alleged principal fears was over the idea of Scott kissing the track's trophy queen -- a white woman -- a notion which Scott took exception to.
"My father said that 'they thought I wanted to kiss that white beauty queen.' He said 'I've got a beautiful wife, and I can kiss my wife,'" Scott's son Frank said in a 2008 documentary. "He said 'I wanted my money and I wanted my recognition.' This joy was taken away from him because of racism."
Scott did end up getting the winner's check and statistical recognition as the winner, but he did not get a proper Victory Lane celebration nor an actual trophy. A June 2010 article in The Florida Times-Union stated that Scott received only a cheap replica with no unique engravings that has since fallen apart. The whereabouts of the actual trophy are unknown.
Although Scott never received an actual trophy in his lifetime -- he died of cancer in 1990 at the age of 69 -- the Scott family did receive a replica of the trophy at Golden Isles Speedway near Jacksonville in 2010. However, that presentation did not involve NASCAR, and the Scott family stated last year that they were still waiting for NASCAR to properly recognize Wendell's victory.
"We'd like for NASCAR to have an official ceremony for maybe 10 minutes next year and give us a trophy of their own. There's your easy fix right there; that would make it right," Frank Scott told Autoweek last August.
NASCAR President Steve Phelps went on record as being amendable to such an idea, saying in the Autoweek story that the sanctioning body had planned to discuss the matter with the Scott family.
Despite the adversity of life as an independent driver without great financial backing and resources, as well as institutionalized racism in many places he raced, Scott was able to enjoy a productive career that included one win, 20 Top 5s, 147 Top 10s, a pole position and a best finish of 6th in points in 1966.
Scott was inducted into the NASCAR Hall of Fame in 2015, but remains the only Black driver in Cup Series history to win a race. Scott had been the lone Black driver to win a race in any of NASCAR's national touring series until 2013, when Bubba Wallace earned the first of his six career victories in the NASCAR Camping World Truck Series.
