DirtonDirt exclusive
Historic images tell story of Allio's winding journey
By Todd Turner
DirtonDirt managing editor
David Allio at Pittsburgh Pennsylvania Motor Speedway. (heathlawsonphotos.com)
David Allio is never more at home than when he’s peering through his camera's viewfinder amid swirling dust with Dirt Late Models zipping past at 100 mph.
Motorsports photography is a career that has simply clicked with the 71-year-old Wise, Va., native who on Saturday hit a notable milestone of shooting images at his 1,000th racetrack at Pittsburgh Pennsylvania Motor Speedway on the Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series. | Slideshow
“Everybody's got a workplace, and the racetrack seemed to be my workplace,” Allio said in an interview prior to his PPMS visit. “And when I walk into a new one, the question I get from a lot of people is, what's your favorite racetrack? And my response has always been: the next one.
“Because it's a story that has not been told yet. It's a story I've not heard yet.”
Shooting his first dirt races as a teenager at the long-gone Appalachian Speedway near his southwestern Virginia hometown, Allio has told countless stories during a career stretching 55 years as one of the most accomplished motorsports photographers of the era. If you’ve been an auto racing fan over the last six decades, it’s impossible that you’ve never seen an award-winning David Allio image.
Allio’s photographs have graced the covers of Stock Car Racing magazine, Sports Illustrated, Motor Trend and the Sporting News while also appearing in an array of racing publications, books and newspapers, including The Washington Post.
He’s been the track photographer at 10 racetracks, including Bristol (Tenn.) Motor Speedway and Las Vegas (Nev.) Motor Speedway, where he held that role for 20 years, and has served as a series photographer for many racing tours, including the former Hav-A-Tampa Dirt Racing Series.
He spent 17 years in the first half of his career shooting images in a publicity and editorial role for RJR/Nabisco Sports Marketing Enterprises, embedding him among NASCAR’s movers and shakers yet keeping him connected to grassroots motorsports. He's among 30 sports photographers with work on permanent display at the Annenberg Space for Photographer in Los Angeles, Calif.
Besides his work in motorsports photography, Allio's resume is filled with numerous other accomplishments, many connected to academics. The Clinch Valley State grad holds a master's degree from the Vermont College of Fine Arts and he’s served as an artist-in-residence at Thomas University in Thomasville, Ga., along with working in environmental science research at Lincoln Memorial University in Harrogate, Tenn.
His various non-racing pursuits “kept me with a fresh mind on things that are outside the walls of a racetrack,” Allio said, adding that “my life’s not a straightforward storyline. … It’s a complex story, but it’s the story I’ve got.”
Drawn to racing as a young man and wanting to be involved, he initially got his first NASCAR license — the famed Big Bill France was among the signatories — but soon realized working on a pit crew wasn’t his particular calling.
"I was on pit road one night, changing a right-rear tire on somebody's car and Jack Ingram was in the pit stall behind us,” Allio recalled. “And he comes out and he runs close enough his exhaust blew up my T-shirt. And I was like, ‘Whoa, I'm just, this is just not for me.’ I'm way too close to the action.”
Producing his first published motorsports images at Bristol Motor Speedway in 1972, Allio evolved into a self-described visual motorsports historian of active and inactive racetracks nationally.
"I never came into this looking for fame and certainly didn't get into it for fortune. But I got into it because it was a professional sport in an area where I grew up that didn't have professional sports,” he said. “But the door was opened. And I did a timeline one time of the different people that if they hadn't come into my life at that particular point, I would not have made the next step in the process of what's become my career, and I've just been incredibly fortunate to do that.”
Dirt connections
While Allio has hundreds of thousands of images from many motorsports disciplines, he’s been fortunate to photograph many National Dirt Late Model Hall of Famers and some of the pioneers of the sport.
And shooting primarily as an editorial and contract photographer — he never hawked his images to drivers — earned a degree of trust in dirt track pit areas.
“You have to hang around drivers and teams for a while before they'll get comfortable with you,” Allio said. “And I was fortunate that in the late ‘90s and early 2000s, that dirt racers came to accept me as a face that was in the pits and somebody that didn't come running up to them every week wanting to sell them photographs.
“They knew that I was different from that perspective and they were more open to talk with me than they would be with a lot of the other people.”
Back when the legendary Buck Simmons was winning hundreds of races around the Southeast, Allio remembers enjoying a degree of intimacy with the driver and Hall of Fame chassis builder Barry Wright.
"Some of his pit stories were just general bench racing stuff,” Allio said, “but some of them got to be pretty serious, especially because Barry Wright would let me stick an ear in and listen to some of the things they were discussing and setting cars up and so forth.”
Allio shot images of Jeff Purvis at NASCAR tracks but also at many dirt tracks, and one of his favorite memories of the three-time World 100 winner was of a victory in Mineral Wells, W.Va.
"I remember being at West Virginia Motor Speedway when it was the big West Virginia Motor Speedway, and the cars were all lined up on the frontstretch,” Allio said. “And here comes Purvis's crew out with tires. And they changed tires during driver introduction and the whole place went ballistic and he — I don't know if he lapped the field or not — but he came damn close to it. Purvis ran away and hid in that show.”
Among Allio’s favorite dirt racers is Bob Pierce, and Allio’s career has stretched long enough that at Pittsburgh and other tracks, he’s also shot images of Pierce's son Bobby. Years ago, the elder Pierce gave Allio insights about developments at the track that helped him shoot better photos.
"Pierce was really open with me, giving me a lot of information and things to look for or how tracks would change,” said Allio, who used about 20 cameras, film and digital, through his career. “He would give me an idea of how tracks would change during the night, and what to watch for, and I always appreciated that because that's something that is significant in dirt racing. And so I've always admired Pierce for that.”
Allio also remembers covering Pierce at the 1-mile fairgrounds track in Indianapolis, Ind., where a short field had Pierce wanting to put someone in his backup car. Allio wasn’t exactly prepared for Pierce’s request.
"Bob came over to me and said, I got a second car here, and I need to start-and-park it. He said, ‘Would you do that?’ I said, ‘Well, Bob, I don't have a firesuit. I don't have a helmet. I don't have a license. And furthermore, if I were to get behind the wheel of your car, I would go down into turn one, and for sure the thing would not turn left for me.’ And he laughed.”
Pierce found a driver from another division to fill the role with Allio staying behind the camera instead of climbing in the driver’s seat.
"I said, of all the crazy things in the world and to do, that was just one of the craziest that I have ever heard,” Allio continued. “But he was serious. He was very serious because he wanted that start-and-park money and, out of generosity, I think, to let me have a different experience.”
While there are a number of dirt racers Allio remembers fondly, there was one driver early in his career he remembered for a different reason in his first time shooting at Volunteer Speedway in Bulls Gap, Tenn.
“I went down inside of turn two and had a pretty decent position. I thought I was pretty safe where I was,” Allio said. “I got up on a dirt mound and was shooting back into the corner and during the feature, this guy comes out of the corner and his car just keeps turning and he keeps turning, and there's an entrance to the infield about 50 feet in front of me. And he's sliding now, and he slides, and he slides up the the embankment. And just rolls over into the infield.”
Allio pulled out a notebook to jot the driver’s name down.
“I wanted to remember to avoid him,” he said.
Darkroom to digital
While dirt racing fans today can easily take photos of race cars with smartphones, it was only the skilled film photographers who could master racing photography at dimly-lit tracks before the modern era. Allio spent the first half of his career processing more than 1,000 rolls of film and spending significant time in the darkroom making prints.
Because of his work with RJR and other deadline-critical events, he even had a traveling version of his darkroom for far-flung races.
“Instead of packing the satchel with your computer and a couple of card readers, I had to pack a full chemical darkroom, which is something they would never let you fly with today,” Allio said. “But it had enlarger trays, chemicals, the whole shooting match in a suitcase.”
Allio still has a relic of his earliest days of learning how to make prints, a gift from his J.J. Kelley High School teacher Jack Turner.
“My high school chemistry teacher set up a darkroom in the chemistry lab, and I could come in after school and learn how to process,” Allio recalled. “And he was generous with me, to a fault. He would let me use his photo paper and his photo chemicals and all this, and, when I celebrated the 25th anniversary of the stuff I'd had published, he brought the original enlarger that I had worked with and it's actually sitting in the corner of my office right now.”
That 25-year mark was about the time Allio made the transition to digital imagery, but near the turn of the century, he wasn’t sure if he’d continue shooting.
"I was closing in on 25 years and I was ready to wind it down,” said Allio, who received encouragement from friends to give digital photography a try in 2001. “So I bought one camera, two lenses and a flash because I wasn't completely sold that this was gonna work, but as it happened it was one of the best years that I've had.”
At a 2001 dirt race, Allio remembers perching under the only track light at Cherokee Speedway in Gaffney, S.C., bright enough to shoot without a flash — shooting with what photographers call “available light” — to successfully get images with his new digital setup. He’d come a long way from keeping detailed notes of his aperture and shutter speed settings on his film cameras.
“That was part of the challenge, especially in film days because you couldn't push on the back of the camera and take a look at what you just taken,” said Allio, who shot Minolta cameras with film and primarily Nikons for digital. “You couldn't get all the data that you can get now. So I kept a log and I kept a written notebook of everything that I did at the track and how it came out and if I went back to the track, then I had a baseline to work from. And and that proved invaluable as I went through the process.”
The data digital cameras provide helped his transition, but “the basic structure of digital imaging, as far as exposure and so forth, was exactly the same as film,” said Allio, who typically shoots without the modern automatic settings.
“Even today, in my digital cameras, most of the work that I do, I shoot in manual, which defeats the purpose of having all that computer and electronics,” he said. “But if I know what the numbers are, and this is how I'm going to do the exposure and the part of the process of making your work look different or being able to capture an image at all, is to do the calculations and know what to expect when you get it in the end.”
Today he has more than 300,000 scanned negatives on his racingphotoarchives.com website — a project largely thanks to countless hours of dedication by wife Lin — and he’s got more than a half-million digital images as well.
Black and white images of early Dirt Late Model stars. Portraits of Hall of Famers. Stills of long forgotten tracks. And creative images like he shot at Pittsburgh on Saturday of fans huddled around an infield campfire with high-speed race cars as the backdrop.
Publications, publicists or folks searching for racing photos over the last 50 years keep Allio’s phone number handy.
“One of the Hall of Fames called and needed some photographs of a driver from the West Coast,” Allio recalled, “and they said, ‘We didn't even bother calling everybody else. We called you because if anybody's got it, you do.’ And I did.”
Lost tracks
While Allio has shot competitive races at hundreds of tracks, his list of now more than 1,000 tracks includes some facilities where he’s yet to see races, or sometimes at long-lost racetracks that haven’t hosted racing in years. It’s one way to preserve history and to tell stories of tracks that may never host races again.
“I’d have an assignment at a racetrack, and then I'd be driving to the next racetrack where I had an assignment and there'd be a track or two in between,” Allio said. “And I would sometimes drive by them or if it looked interesting and the gate was open. I'd go in and check it out to maybe come back later and, and get an assignment and work there.”
It’s a ritual he’d had the last 25 years or so.
“It was right in that window that I started really thinking about, well, you know, there's a lot of racetracks out there that I've driven by that I wish I'd have stopped for,” said Allio, who now lives in Indiana.
Some tracks he’s missed out on because there are no remnants at all. Others he's seen in their dying days, including one a few years ago.
"I got out of the vehicle and I heard dozers,” Allio said. “And I got out, put my drone up and took a look, and I got there just as they were pushing the last of the banking of the track into the infield. The grandstands were gone and everything else.”
All the tracks tell a story, and Allio remembers years ago seeing the vestiges of Hall County Speedway in Chestnut Mountain, Ga., a long-closed half-mile layout near Lanier (Ga.) National Speedway.
"I climbed up the hillside. I never knew the track was there. I'd been doing races, down in that area for quite a while, and I never knew it was there until they did a construction cut, and I could look up and see the what was the guardrail off of turn one where the track was,” Allio said. “So I climbed up the hill while the construction was going on and walked up in there and walked around and instead of having steel guardrails, it had 4-by-12 pine planks.
“That was their guardrail, and when you got on the inside, you could see the scuffs and marks and where cars had hit it and tried to go through it and everything else. And each one of those marks, there's a story that's being told about it by the driver or by the crew or by somebody, and those tracks, a lot of them, you sort of get them to speak to you.”
It’s the essence of Allio’s passion.
"I've been asked why I chose to focus on racetracks rather than people as such, and the racetracks have a lot of character to them,” Allio said. “Each one has a different story to tell, and it changes as it ages.”
A bucket list
Allio is eternally grateful for so much help from so many supporters during his “career path that sometimes is as straight as a drag strip or as twisting as a road course.”
His association with RJR, forced to abandon its sponsorship of the sport in 1992, provided him an avenue not only to build a successful career, but do so with a healthier travel budget than most racing photographers.
"It was a wonderful way to learn how to promote the sport because that's what they were doing,” Allio said. “They said if the sport grows, our name grows, so promote the sport. So that's the message I took to heart early and as I say, the most important thing to me is to document the history that I see.”
He’d like to document more history, and his list of tracks he plans on visiting include Lucas Oil Speedway in Wheatland, Mo., and Knoxville (Iowa) Raceway, a track he’d planned to visit last month before Lucas Oil Series action there rained out.
"I'm hoping that the history is not completed yet,” he said last week. “I'm hoping once I get to 1,000, I get to 1,001 and so forth until I'm through, and I've got a bucket list of tracks that I wanna go to.”
There are many images to come before Allio wraps up his legacy.
“As what I want to be known for — aside from being a good grandfather — that I've tried my best to promote the sport,” he said. “My job wasn't to promote me in any of this, it was to promote the sport.”
