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Even after the passage of 53 years, the touching tale involving Marvin Panch, Tiny Lund and the Wood Brothers remains among the greatest NASCAR stories ever told.

During Speed Weeks in February of 1963 at Daytona International Speedway, Panch was enticed to drive a high-powered Maserati in a test run on the track’s road course.

Entering a sharp turn, the Europen car veered out of control, flipped, landed on its roof and burst into flame. There seemed no hope for Panch, because the Maserati’s doors opened up toward the roof, not sideways. He was stuck in the burning machine.

Four men who had been watching from nearby rushed to try and rescue Panch. One of them was Dwayne “Tiny” Lund, at the time NASCAR’s largest driver who stood 6-6 and weighed about 275 pounds.

Lund, operator of a fishing camp/guide service on South Carolina’s Santee-Cooper Lakes, had gone to Daytona even though he didn’t have a ride during Speed Weeks.

At the risk of their own lives, Tiny and the others somehow righted the burning car and got a door open. Lund dove in, freed Panch from his safety belts, and pulled him out.

Panch was badly burned, but survived. His injuries, of course, forced him out of the Wood Brothers Ford he was scheduled to drive in the Daytona 500 on Feb. 24. Panch asked Glen and Leonard Wood to put Lund in their Ford in his place. The Woods complied and in storybook fashion Lund won the race for the biggest victory of his career.

Lund later was award the Carnegie Medal for Heroism.

Gentlemanly Marvin Panch, who ranked high among the best-liked men in motorsports for half a century, died of natural causes on Dec. 31 at his home near Daytona. He was 89.

A memorial service is planned at a date to be announced sometime during the upcoming Speed Weeks in February for the man who boosted NASCAR events and people throughout his life.

I started covering the sport in 1957 and during all the intervening years I’ve never heard anyone say a disparaging word about Marvin Panch.

Panch won 17 races and 21 poles in 216 starts at NASCAR’s top level. Among his victories are the 1961 Daytona 500, a sweep of Atlanta Motor Speedway’s two 500-milers in 1965 and the World 600 at Charlotte Motor Speedway in 1966. He is listed among NASCAR’s 50 greatest drivers.

Panch told a few friends of a near-death experience as the Maserati caught fire in ’63 at Daytona.

“Marvin said the strangest thing took place,” relates Buz McKim, curator at the NASCAR Hall of Fame in Charlotte. “He said as the fuel leaking from the carburetor blazed up about the windshield, everything bad that he had done in his life started flashing through his mind.”

McKim, noting Panch’s good nature and reputation, observed that “this couldn’t have been much.”

“Oh,” replied Panch in typical self-deprecating manner, “it went on for quite a while.”