Humpy Wheeler: The Man Behind Dale Earnhardt’s Legacy & the Spectacle NASCAR Is Today

Every sport has had at least one individual who took it to new heights and levels. Major League Baseball had Bill Veeck. The NFL had Pete Rozelle. The NBA had David Stern.

And NASCAR had Howard Augustine Wheeler Jr., more commonly known as “Humpy,” arguably the greatest promoter stock car racing has ever seen. Say what you want about the impact Bill France Sr. and son Bill Jr. had upon NASCAR, but it was Wheeler who was a master at putting fans in the stands, oftentimes with outlandish promotions.

Having been in declining health in recent years, Wheeler passed away Wednesday at the age of 86. And with his passing, NASCAR lost its self-proclaimed P.T. Barnum, who would do anything within reason to get fans to buy tickets and plop their butts in seats.

In a sense, given everything he did in his promotional career, it might be easier to list the few things Wheeler didn’t do. He was a catalyst to bring Dale Earnhardt from a relatively unknown local short track driver to NASCAR. Wheeler made the annual Coca-Cola 600 a testimonial to military veterans, often having simulated “battles” and “invasions” on the Charlotte Motor Speedway frontstretch infield that featured cannons, helicopters, tanks and lots of smoke and noise that fans reveled in.

Oh yes, and he never, ever charged military members a penny to attend the Coke 600. That was his way of thanking them for their service.

Humpy Wheeler: A showman and a teacher

Wheeler also was a teacher in a sense. He inspired and mentored individuals who would follow in his footsteps such as the late Eddie Gossage, who was the main reason Texas Motor Speedway became what it was, or Ed Clark at Atlanta Motor Speedway. Wheeler also was a teacher who helped found and built the Motorsports Management Program at Belmont Abbey College in his hometown of Belmont, North Carolina, a suburb of Charlotte. Belmont Abbey’s program helped inspire a number of similar collegiate programs that helped teach and prepare students for careers in motorsports, most notably promotions and public/media relations, as well as other business-related roles.

After several years as PR director for Firestone Tires racing division in the 1960s, Wheeler was named president and general manager of Charlotte Motor Speedway in 1975. Bruton Smith, the chairman of CMS and eventually the founder of Speedway Motorsports Inc. (SMI), hired Wheeler, who he found to be the perfect business partner, and often comedic foil. They were like brothers for more than 30 years, sometimes squabbling like brothers will do, but oftentimes grabbing headlines for things that NASCAR officials wished they had done, something Smith and Wheeler took great glee in.

Humpy abruptly retired from SMI in 2008 after arguably the biggest disagreement he had ever had with Smith, but he never retired from racing. He went on to build a very successful business that built and sold popular Legends cars. He was an in-demand consultant not just in NASCAR, but also in other racing series such as IndyCar and NHRA drag racing.

Wheeler was a master not only of promotions, but also of public and media relations. He knew how to play the media like a fiddle. One story I vividly recall Wheeler telling me about 20 years ago was early on in his CMS tenure. He chuckled as he recalled how he had an idea for a promotion that one of the top media outlets in Charlotte didn’t seem interested in. He then told the outlet that its chief rival was going to be all over the idea and garner all types of publicity, ultimately leading to the original outlet to acquiesce and get on board as well.

But what that original outlet didn’t know was that Humpy gave the second outlet the same spiel that he did to the first, warning about how foolish the second outlet would look if it didn’t cover it. As it turned out, both outlets covered the event cover-to-cover, much to Wheeler’s pleasure. It would be the first of dozens of times where he’d good-naturedly pit media outlets against each other, even if it meant telling a little white lie to get their interest.

Just like the real P.T. Barnum did in promoting and publicizing his circus.

There might not have been a Dale Earnhardt without Humpy

While many NASCAR fans believe Richard Childress discovered Dale Earnhardt, Wheeler was actually instrumental in helping Earnhardt get his first break. Earnhardt had essentially been a roustabout racer who dreamed about racing in NASCAR but who didn’t have the money or an owner to support him. Wheeler saw something in Earnhardt that he just had a feeling would one day make a NASCAR star and sure enough, he was right. Wheeler tried to convince a number of team owners to give Earnhardt a chance, but few showed any interest, with the exception of California businessman Rod Osterlund.

After a one-race tryout in 1978, Earnhardt signed with Osterlund and finished a respectable seventh in the standings in 1979. But that was only the beginning, as Earnhardt in 1980, with a lot of promotion from Wheeler of course, coupled with a 19-year-old crew chief Doug Richert, went on to win his first of seven NASCAR Cup championships, tying him with Richard Petty and later, Jimmie Johnson.

Wheeler would help countless young drivers like Earnhardt over the years, either making introductions with potential team owners, coming up with ideas to “sell” those drivers to either owners or potential sponsors, and even gave a number of them money out of his pocket when they fell upon hard times.

Wheeler was a multi-sport athlete growing up, including being a prolific boxer (40-2 record as an amateur) and football player (it helped that his father was a football coach at Belmont Abbey). But auto racing and NASCAR in particular prompted Wheeler to eventually put his boxing gloves and football away.

Wheeler and Smith built Charlotte into a racing palace

It was not unusual for Smith to turn Wheeler loose not only to come up with off-the-wall promotions and stunts, but also to oversee Charlotte Motor Speedway’s continued expansion until it exceeded 170,000 seats by 1990. When Wheeler convinced Smith to build a large condominium tower behind Turn 1, critics laughed. But they didn’t laugh long as the entire bank of condos quickly sold out, eventually leading to more condos being built. Gossage would do the same thing, building condos in Texas.

Wheeler also played a pivotal role in expanding CMS’s racing footprint, adding a dirt track and radical four-lane drag racing facility directly across the street. Both have gone on to be premier facilities in their own right in their respective racing genres.

One thing that Wheeler, who was married to his beloved Patricia for 63 years at the time of his passing and was the father of three, never forgot was his roots, particularly racing. For as popular as CMS had become hosting NASCAR races, it also became one of the preeminent facilities to hold sportsman races including Legends, Bandoleros, go-karts, and other small racing series.

It’s hard to find an area of NASCAR today that Wheeler either didn’t have a hand in or influence over. Not coincidentally, the sport grew and reached its zenith in the 1990s until around the mid-2000s while Wheeler was also at his zenith as a promoter.

While he’ll always be remembered for some of his wild and ultra-successful promotions, Wheeler also had several promotional failures during his career, essentially trying to out-promote the promoter, so to speak. He readily accepted and took the blame for those failures.

But at the same time, Wheeler never let those rare failures stop him. He’d use them as motivation to start working on yet another promotional idea, which more often than not, would once again become another home run.

That was Humpy Wheeler, the P.T. Barnum of NASCAR. It’s unlikely the sport will ever see another individual like him. May he rest in peace.