Tim Flock: The NASCAR Driver With a Monkey Copilot

In 1952, Flock won the only NASCAR race ever staged in South Bend.

BY AARON HELMAN // POSTED JULY 25, 2025

My wife and I began our walk in August of 2022, just a few weeks after a bout with Covid robbed me of the vitality that had taken me two years to regain, and at the exact spot where an affable Alabamian named Tim Flock sailed beneath a riffling checkered flag to claim the win in the only NASCAR race ever staged in South Bend, Indiana.

The half-mile dirt track is long gone, replaced once by a nine-hole golf course, and then by a parking lot beneath a complex of student apartments that are themselves fading into various states of disrepair. Like it does anywhere else, time marches on, in defiance or forgetfulness of every important thing that has ever happened. A fenced-off concrete grandstand is all that remains of the Playland Park Speedway, where in 1952, some 3,700 boisterous fans cheered Flock to victory.

Tim Flock's visit to South Bend came amidst the greatest streak of success in his entire career, a stretch that saw him win seven of eleven consecutive races and finish second three more times. The race in South Bend was marred by a wreck when a driver from nearby Muncie flipped his Studebaker. Able-bodied fans were recruited from the grandstands to help push the thing upright again, but luckily, no one was seriously injured and Flock's victory counted just the same.

By the end of the season, he would be crowned NASCAR's champion for the first time in his career. He won that title driving The Fabulous Hudson Hornet, perhaps the most storied and nostalgic race car of all time, one later remembered and returned to fame in the Pixar film, Cars. The Hudson Hornet in that movie is a crotchety old timer named Doc Hudson who lambastes the younger and cockier Lightning McQueen for his own insistence on egoism and showmanship.

Turns out, Doc Hudson might not have been a fan of Tim Flock either.

Flock's success in the 1952 season led him to some truly peculiar fame-seeking and celebrity-indulgent behaviors. In fact, by 1953, during actual sanctioned NASCAR races, Flock adopted the bizarre strategy of employing a co-pilot in his car, a rhesus monkey named Jocko Flocko. The monkey had his own goggles, helmet, and racing uniform; and in spring of 1953, Jocko Flocko would experience his greatest success.

Nearly a year after Tim Flock's performance at Playland Park, his primate passenger was present on pole position for a race in Hickory, North Carolina that the duo would win, another of Flock's 39 career victories. To this day, Jocko Flocko remains the only monkey winner of a NASCAR race.

However, things began to unravel a few weeks later on a racetrack in Raleigh when the bored monkey, to Flock's shock and horror, began pushing buttons and pulling levers inside the car. Jocko Flocko ended up costing his driver the win that day and was retired unceremoniously shortly thereafter.

It is with no small amount of disappointment that I relay to you that the monkey was not present with Flock during his victory in South Bend, a day that exists only as a hazy memory filled in by a blurry image discovered in a chilled microfilm room, one of the only remaining remnants of the high point of the Playland Park Speedway, the other being the concrete bleachers that are more reminiscent of a dystopian movie set than a place that was once a fine destination for tens of thousands of visitors every summer for the better part of a century.

Aaron Helman is an author, historian and adventurer from South Bend. You may have seen him around South Bend drinking coffee. Learn more about his work or check out his books at aaronhelman.com.