Rev your engine at your own risk when you pull up at a stoplight next to 82-year-old Bobby Ward of Conway.
If he wanted to, he could take you.
When he’s behind the wheel of his Chevy, Ward may look like any other senior citizen, but he’s steered himself into two race-car halls of fame — the National Sprint Car Hall of Fame in Iowa and the Amarillo Motorsports Hall of Fame in Texas.
Ward retired in 1974 after a 19-year career that included 369 feature wins and track championships all over the country. He became known as the Arkansas Traveler.
He started out drag racing in 1954 in Bee Branch, where he grew up after his family moved there from Shirley when he was about 6. In 1956, he joined with a friend, W.A. Humphrey, who owned a body shop in Conway.
“There was nothing to do around [there] but drag-race your car. I mean, that was everything. We figured the cops wasn’t around,” Ward said, and he laughed.
Ward had a 1954 Chevrolet, and Humphrey had a Ford.
“The little Chevrolet would take off a little bit fast, but the Ford would pick up a little later on,” Ward said, so it was a tossup as to who would win on any given day. They sometimes went to Carlisle to an air strip to drag-race, which was free.
The friends soon bought a 1934 Ford coupe to rebuild for stock-car races.
“That was a Cadillac for racing,” Ward said. His racing was done on dirt tracks.
Heat races are 10 laps, feature races are 20 to 25 laps, and some special championships have 100 laps. How long does it take to run 100 laps?
“It depends on how many wrecks they have,” Ward said.
He said he had unique training for his racing career. Ward’s father had a milk route, and the teenage Ward drove a half-ton truck.
“I’d pick up all the milk and take it to Clinton; then I’d come back to school. On this milk route, you’ve got to move and move and move and get fast,” he said, so the milk was fresh when delivered. “That, I think, was my learning part of it — that you had to move on. I think that was the start of it.”
Ward was an auto mechanic by trade, which came in handy, too. He was his own crew chief.
His first stock-car-race win was at the Benton Speed Bowl before the interstate came through and took the property. The track was then moved to the county line. He won four Arkansas State Championships at the Benton Speed Bowl, and he quickly made a name for himself in the racing circuit.
He also won the first Arkansas State Championship ever run at Pine Bluff, which was in September 1957, and in 1965, he won feature races 27 times in 33 starts. In 1969, his reputation as a top-notch driver was solidified by his winning 36 feature events.
His protective gear was almost nonexistent in the beginning.
“You just wore your normal clothes, just blue jeans and stuff,” he said. Ward pointed out a photograph taken of him and his wife, Pat, standing by one of his stock cars.
Ward said he and other drivers got hand-me-down helmets from pilots at the Little Rock Air Force Base in Jacksonville, who sometimes would race. Ward also wore helmets made of aluminum, “and that’s not much protection,” he said.
He recalled one wreck that he escaped.
“I was going into the corner, and the right front spindle broke,” Ward said. “That’s things we had to learn about. It held the right front tire on. It fell off, and the axle stuck in the ground. When it stuck in the ground, I was on for the ride.”
Although he was going only about 50 mph, Ward’s car flipped.
“I turned over about three times,” he said.
“Thank goodness for Dennis Cantrell,” Ward said. Cantrell, a Conway pilot for whom the city’s airport is named, was friends with Humphrey, also a pilot. Cantrell knew about what kind of belts and shoulder harnesses the race drivers needed in their cars.
“The fastest I have gone has been 110 mph,” Ward said, which was on a track in Knoxville, Iowa.
Pat said she worried every time her husband climbed behind the wheel.
“I enjoyed the racing, but you always think something could happen,” she said. “I always said a little prayer before that it’d be all right.”
Ward was already into racing when the couple married.
“He said that was in the marriage license, that he got to race,” she said.
Pat and Bobby sat on folding chairs in a spare bedroom that has been turned into Ward’s trophy and race-car memorabilia room, as well as having pictures of their two grandchildren on display.
The Wards downsized from a home in Heber Springs, where they had an entire upstairs devoted to his racing paraphernalia. Bobby Ward said he had 100 trophies, but he got rid of 70 of them, ones that didn’t have his name on them or weren’t significant.
He picked up a trophy from his first major win, which was at the inaugural Arkansas State Championship in 1959 in Pine Bluff. Ward said he was confident because he’d been racing for a year at that point.
When he started racing in the modified and super-modified
races, he went to what was then Ward Body Works in Conway (the owner is no relation to him), which made buses. Ward asked a machine-shop man to “beef up” the rails and weld the frame on the car to modify it.
In 2015, he was the first driver to be inducted into the Amarillo Motorsports Hall of Fame because of his three Southwestern Super Modified titles in Amarillo: in 1963, 1964 and 1968.
“Then we got into sprints,” Ward said. “It’s one of those deals; you bring what you’ve got.”
One of his favorite memories is winning the New Mexico State Nationals.
“We had finished at Amarillo, Texas,” Ward said. “Two sprint-car drivers came around to me and said, ‘Bob, if you will go on to the Albuquerque, New Mexico, championship with us, we’ll get you a sponsorship, a motel room and everything.’”
Ward took them up on it and won. He set a new track record, too: 16.26 seconds.
“That was the first standing ovation I got,” he said.
Pat also recalled when her husband got a standing ovation when he won the 50-lap National Short Track Championship in Kansas City, Missouri, his second attempt to win that race, and it made her cry.
She went with him to out-
of-state races when she could.
The couple have two daughters, Bobbilue Thomas and Sheila Ward, both of Conway, who, when they were growing up, often traveled with their parents to their dad’s races. Bobby Ward said he had a truck with a camper
on the back to haul his race car. He took out the glass that separated the truck from the camper. The air conditioning could reach the back, and the girls could climb back and forth from the truck to the camper.
“You didn’t see these fancy things going down the road,” Ward said, referring to modern race-car trailers.
One of his daughters, Sheila, wrote the National Sprint Car Hall of Fame and listed her father’s accomplishments in a letter. It had to go through a 75-member committee, Ward said.
“It’s a long process,” Ward said. “It was very exciting. It means your accomplishments are rewarded.”
Some of his trophies, photographs and one of only two uniforms he had are in the Hall of Fame.
Ward said his biggest sponsor, Alamo Mobile Home in Amarillo, Texas, gave him $1,000 a year, which didn’t go very far when it came to buying gas and traveling. The prize money wasn’t much to brag about, either, he said.
Ward and his wife said the fans were great — sometimes too great, Pat said.
“One couple came up to me and said when they had a child, would we be godparents? We didn’t know them from Adam,” Pat said. She told them they’d have to “wait and see,” but they never heard from the couple.
Ward said he knew he was going to retire a few months before he did.
He said he was getting tired of the pace, and racing was becoming more commercial instead of focusing on the individual.
He and his wife were going to the races in Benton in May 1974, and he told her, “I’m going to quit whenever it’s over, this season. We didn’t tell anybody or anything.”
However, he got a call in July from Bobby Davis of Bobby Davis Electric in Memphis, Tennessee, who told Ward, “I hear you’re going to sell the race car.”
To this day, Ward said, he doesn’t know how Davis found out, but Ward did sell his car, Mee2, to Davis.
It wasn’t the speed that fueled Ward in his career.
“Each track, you had to set your car up differently, and it was always a challenge. When you got to the track — how much water did they put on the track? Was it what we called a dry slick or a wet slick? You might have to change tires,” he said.
Ward, who has had two strokes and a heart attack, is taking it a little easier these days. He is content to watch stock-car races on television on Saturdays, and he watches NASCAR, too.
When he pulls up to a stoplight, does he ever think about gunning it when the light turns green?
“I have passed that feeling,” he said.
But he could pass anyone if he wanted to.
Senior writer Tammy Keith can be reached at (501) 327-0370 or tkeith@arkansasonline.com.