The Baja Racing Hall of Fame Announces January '26 Induction Gala to be held in Orange County California LIVE ! ONLINE from Anaheim California, the Metal Hall of Fame venue will be 'Tested For Strength" - First 2026 Hall of Fame Inductee Announced Infamous Motorsports Personality Humpy Wheeler, to be inducted in 2026!
The Baja Racing Hall of Fame Announces January '26 Gala to be held in Orange County California
The hospitality of Anaheim California and the Metal Hall of Fame venue will be 'Tested For Strength", when for the first-time ever, the Hall of Fame is conducting its 2026 Induction Gala, away from the historic Gateway To Baja Mexico, its 'Celebration Of Motorsports' will be announced at the venue.
The '2026 Celebration', will go down at the announced June 2026 SAN DIEGO SPEED FESTIVAL in conjuction with the NASCAR SAN DIEGO event, announced in July 2025.
First 2026 Hall of Fame Inductee Announced
Infamous Motorsports Personality Humpy Wheeler, to be inducted in 2026 Gala!
Humpy Wheeler, NASCAR’s Greatest Showman, Dies at 86, August '25.
With fire-breathing robots and death-defying school-bus stunts, he brought spectacle to stock-car racing as the sport boomed in the 1970s and beyond.
Humpy Wheeler, a man with blond hair wearing a blue blazer and a tie, his arms at his sides, stands in front of a glass-and-steel stadium surrounded by flags. Humpy Wheeler at Charlotte Motor Speedway in 1989.
Hired by the speedway’s founder, Bruton Smith, in 1975, he ran it for more than three decades.
Humpy Wheeler, a racing promoter as colorful as his name, who ran the fabled Charlotte Motor Speedway in North Carolina for more than three decades and became known as the P.T. Barnum of motorsports for staging three-ring circuses and mock army battles before races while helping propel NASCAR into national phenomenon, died on Wednesday at his home in Charlotte. He was 86.
His death was announced in a statement by the speedway, which did not cite a cause. A world-class pitchman and a raconteur in the Southern front-porch tradition (he provided the voice for Tex, the Cadillac Coupe de Ville, in the hit 2006 animated film “Cars”), Mr. Wheeler got his start in the business in the early 1960s, the heyday of his fellow North Carolinian Junior Johnson, the storied bootlegger turned stock-car pioneer.
Outside the red clay soil of the South, the sport in those days was generally dismissed as a gladiator battle on wheels for honky-tonk hooligans. Even so, he came to believe that “racing must be the greatest sport in the world,” he once said, “because we’ve dusted people to death, we’ve given them terrible restrooms — they sit out in the rain, snow, sleet and hail; lousy parking; traffic jams” — and yet “they kept coming back, and they kept multiplying. What would ever happen if you ever did it right?” He devoted his career to answering that question.
Hired by the speedway’s founder, Bruton Smith, in 1975, he worked to make a visit to Charlotte a first-class experience, preaching the value of the “three T’s” — tickets, traffic and toilets. Often called the P.T. Barnum of motorsports, Mr. Wheeler transformed race day into a carnival.
Mr. Wheeler came to believe, he once said, that “racing must be the greatest sport in the world. More ambitiously, he transformed race day into a carnival. With his taste for Hollywood-level stunts, he might just as easily have been called the 'Cecil B. DeMille of motorsports'. The clowns, trapeze artists, elephants and tigers he brought in to perform in the speedway’s infield in 1980 were only a start. He once collaborated with the 82nd Airborne Division, garrisoned in Fort Bragg, N.C., to restage the U.S.-led 1983 invasion of the Caribbean nation of Grenada, complete with wood fortifications, troops and helicopters. “The mortars were blanks,” the sportswriter Tommy Tomlinson recalled in a recent post on Substack, “but the dynamite that blew up two houses placed on the infield was very real.” Another time he brought in a stunt driver, Jimmy Koufos, known as “the Flying Greek,” to leap a row of junked cars, Evel Knievel style, in a school bus. He nearly flipped the bus when he landed in a nosedive.
And then there was the Robosaurus, a 40-foot-tall, 31-ton mechanical Tyrannosaurus, used in a 1992 television pilot called “Steel Justice,” which entertained the Charlotte crowd by crushing a Buick in its massive claws while belching flames from its nostrils. Image The giant monster stands in the middle of the field, its claws extended, as the crowd looks on. The Robosaurus, a 40-foot-tall, 31-ton mechanical Tyrannosaurus, entertained the crowd at the speedway in 2005 by crushing a Buick in its massive claws while belching flames from its nostrils.
Flames, bombs, he loved them all. “People love to see things get blown up,” Mr. Wheeler was quoted as saying in a 2012 article for Sports Business Journal by Tripp Mickle, now a technology reporter for The New York Times. “It goes back to the kid in them.” Although he was shameless, Mr. Wheeler was no huckster. “We can blow stuff up and set off $175,000 worth of fireworks,” he said when he announced his retirement from the speedway at a news conference in 2008. But, he added, “we still have to have the product on the track.” In that capacity, he also pushed boundaries. In 1976, just his second year at Charlotte Motor Speedway, he and Mr. Smith helped finance a car and other necessities for the pioneering female driver Janet Guthrie so she could enter the annual World 600 (now the Coca-Cola 600), becoming the first woman to qualify for a NASCAR superspeedway race. Ms. Guthrie came in 15th. A year later, she became the first woman to race in the Indianapolis 500.
Mr. Wheeler helped finance a car and other necessities for the pioneering female driver Janet Guthrie so she could enter the World 600, becoming the first woman to qualify for a NASCAR superspeedway race.
“The reaction was generally good with the fans,” Mr. Wheeler recalled of Ms. Guthrie’s barrier-shattering debut in an interview last year with The Charlotte Observer. “It was something else for them to see. Part of a good show.” “But,” he added, “the reaction was horrible with the drivers. Some of them were like, ‘Why didn’t you buy me a car when I was a rookie?’ Or worse.” With Mr. Smith as the business visionary and Mr. Wheeler as the creative force, Charlotte Motor Speedway installed a first-of-its-kind lighting system, turning the 1992 all-star race known as the Winston — which Mr. Wheeler rechristened “One Hot Night” — into NASCAR’s first nighttime race, an innovation that eventually became standard. All along, the speedway kept expanding; it peaked at around 167,000 seats in the 1980s, up from 75,000. (It has since winnowed to 95,000.)
Image With his hands in has pockets, he stands high above the track and looks down. He wears a sports jacket and a blue shirt but no tie. Mr. Wheeler looked over Charlotte Motor Speedway during the Coca-Cola 600 race in 2008, the year he announced his retirement.
Some fans never had to leave the speedway. In the mid-1980s, Mr. Wheeler helped oversee the construction of 40 luxury condominiums overlooking Charlotte’s 1.5-mile oval track — a first for a NASCAR track. While the idea was widely mocked, these aeries for gearheads sold out in seven months, according to a 1995 article in The New York Times, despite the fact that “cars with 700-horsepower engines running at nearly 200 miles per hour produce a sound somewhere between a roar and a howl, sometimes until 11 o’clock at night.”
Howard Augustine Wheeler Jr. was born on Oct. 23, 1938, in Belmont, N.C. His mother, Kathleen (Dobbins) Wheeler, was active in local civic organizations, and his father was the football coach and athletic director at the local Belmont Abbey College. Howard Sr. was also Humpy Sr. He had earned his curious nickname playing college football, when a coach caught him smoking Camel cigarettes — Camels have humps, you see — at practice and forced him to run laps. “I was always tagging along with him,” Humpy Jr. recalled in a 2021 video interview with “The Scene Vault,” a NASCAR podcast. People, he added, “started calling me ‘Little Humpy,’ and it stuck.” By 13, he was already running — and breathlessly promoting — bicycle races around the neighborhood. He also learned to use his fists. In Belmont, a hardscrabble mill town, you had to. “That was about as rough a town as you could get,” he later said. Fighting became a formal pursuit as he veered into boxing, accumulating a 40-2 record as an amateur and winning a Golden Gloves light heavyweight title. He said he once fought on the same card as Cassius Clay (later, Muhammad Ali) and aspired to fight in the 1960 Summer Olympics. He considered turning professional.
In a tale perhaps as tall as a North Carolina pine, he claimed that a trip to New York City with his father and the Belmont Abbey basketball coach, Al McGuire, who would go on to win a national title at Marquette University, helped disabuse him of that notion. After a visit to the famous Stillman’s Gym, they drove through the Bowery, where they saw down-and-out alcoholics “everywhere,” Mr. Wheeler recalled in a 1979 interview with The Charlotte Observer. “Al kept pointing people out and calling names. ‘That guy used to be a good middleweight,’ he’d say. Or ‘That big feller there was a heckuva light heavyweight.’” He turned to football instead, and after graduating from Charlotte Catholic High School, he accepted a scholarship to play guard for the University of South Carolina. But a back injury derailed his gridiron dreams.
He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in journalism in 1961, and soon after caught the racing bug and borrowed money to lease Robinwood Speedway, a quarter-mile dirt track near his family’s home. He changed the format from “expensive racecars to real cheapos, kind of jalopies, and people loved it,” he told “The Scene Vault.” “It was a crash a minute.” He eventually abandoned that first foray into racing to take a job with the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company as the company’s liaison for stock-car racing. This, he later said, was where he got his “real racing education.” That education would turn graduate-level once he went to work for Mr. Smith in Charlotte.
Mr. Wheeler’s survivors include his wife, Pat; two daughters, Patti Wheeler and Tracy Hardy; a son, Trip; four grandchildren; and one great-grandchild. While the name Humpy will live on in NASCAR circles, it will not live on in his family. Two were enough, he told “The Scene Vault,” “so when Howard A. Wheeler III was born, my son, we immediately nicknamed him Trip, thus ending ‘Humpy.’”
Obit writer Alex Williams is a New York Times reporter.
