Throwback Thursday: Checkered Flag Chaos
Larry Lawrence | October 26, 2017
In this week’s Throwback we travel back to Daytona Beach 1948. There Don Evans is coming home to the finish line getting ready to win the 100-Mile Amateur National on the old beach course, when he suddenly lost control of his Norton and slid off the edge of the track hitting flagman Jim Davis. The moment was amazingly captured by a Washington, DC photographer named C.W. Galbreath.
Davis was a legendary racer who survived through a lethal era of racing in the 1910s and ‘20s and later became the AMA’s official national starter. That Daytona finish-line incident sidelined Davis for a year. Ironically it was his only serious injury from racing.
Davis suffered no long-term effects. He recovered and went on to live to the ripe old age of 103!