Speed, Guts, and Glory

by Joe Garner

  By the 1992 season Kulwicki's team was running with the leaders on a weekly basis. In fact, with five races remaining on the schedule he was one of five drivers who still had a mathematical chance to catch points leader Bill Elliott and win the Cup championship. Of course, being underfunded and 191 points behind a veteran driver who had won the championship in 1988, it was decidedly a long shot.

  Over the next three races Elliott, his main challenger Davey Allison, and Kulwicki chased points and each other around the tracks at North Wilkesboro, Charlotte, and Rockingham, but Elliott still held comfortable leads over both his rivals. A second championship seemed within Elliott's grasp if everything followed form in the season's penultimate race a week later in Phoenix.

  But as so often it goes in sports, it turned out to be a big if. The breaks instead went against Elliott: a cracked cylinder head took him out early. Allison won and Kulwicki raced to a fourth-place finish. As the teams headed to Atlanta for the final race the standings had shifted dramatically: Allison led Kulwicki by 30, with Elliott in third just 10 points back.

  Alan Kulwicki holds up the Winston Cup trophy at Atlanta Raceway after winning the 1992 Championship.

  As the November race progressed, Davey was running well and appeared to be in control of his destiny; the sixth-place finish he needed to clinch the Cup title was well within his reach. But on Lap 256 Ernie Irvan blew a tire and took Allison out of the race and the championship chase. Kulwicki then made his chancy strategic move: he risked running out of gas by staying on the track when Elliott pitted for fuel; but by remaining out and leading one more lap than Elliott, Kulwicki earned five bonus points by leading the most laps in the contest. His “Underbird”—a Thunder-bird with the T and the H removed as a nod to their lack of funding—crossed the finish line in second, just behind Elliott. Kulwicki's 10-point cushion won him the 1992 NASCAR Cup Series championship—and the million dollars—by one of the narrowest margins in NASCAR history.

  1992 Winston: Davey Allison Spins Across the Finish Line

  “I remember the whole race Saturday night till I crossed the finish line, then the lights went out.”

  You'll have to forgive Davey Allison for using a metaphor that may have seemed slightly confusing to spectators thrilled out of their seats with the action during the 1992 Winston all-star race. Charlotte Motor Speedway general manager Humpy Wheeler had just ponied up $1.7 million for a lighting system, and the Saturday night crowd of 135,500 was at that time the largest to witness a nighttime sporting event.

  But it wasn't those lights Allison was talking about.

  The top drivers from the NASCAR Cup ranks were tested in individual segments of thirty, thirty, and ten laps. In a new twist to the all-star format, the fans were polled and voted by a two-to-one margin to invert the finish of that opening race for the start of the second thirty laps, and that's where the excitement began. First-segment front-runners Allison, Kyle Petty, and Rusty Wallace made electrifying charges back through the field to the front.

  But in the finest tradition of Saturday night racing, the drivers saved their best for the final ten-lap sprint. The Pontiac, Chevy, and Ford of Kyle Petty, Dale Earnhardt, and Davey Allison were battling for the lead—and the $200,000 winner's share—going into the final turn. “I saw Kyle and Dale Earnhardt go at it in Turn 3 the last lap, and I thought, ‘We'll win this race if I can miss the wreck,’” Allison would recall when the dust had finally settled. “Dale got sideways in Turn 4, Kyle had to lift a little, and that gave me a shot at him.”

  But Allison collided with Petty—or vice versa—and was sent spinning, at 170 mph and driver's side first, into the outside wall…but not before he had crossed the finish line. Car and driver drifted limply to the infield grass as the fans stood in silence. Allison was cut out of his mangled car and airlifted to a local hospital. The crash cost him a concussion (which momentarily knocked him senseless), bruised knees and shoulders, and a bruised lung. But it was Davey Allison's victory. And he was back behind the wheel a week later for the longest race of the Cup season, the Coca-Cola 600.

  “I know Kyle didn't do it on purpose,” Allison said. “We've stood around and laughed about it. There are no hard feelings. It was just close racing.”

  Davey Allison leads a pack of five cars on the final lap of the Winston 500 at the Talladega Superspeedway May 3, 1992. Behind Allison are Dale Earnhardt (middle left), Bill Elliott (middle right), Ernie Irvan, (back left) and Sterling Marlin. Allison went on to win the race.

  Carl Edwards, driver of the #99 Roush Racing Ford, performs a back flip as crew members look on after winning the NASCAR Nextel Cup Series Bass Pro Shops MBNA 500 on October 30, 2005 at Atlanta Motor Speedway in Hampton, Georgia.

  2005 Atlanta: Carl Edwards Flips for His Wins

  Moving full-time behind the wheel of a Roush Ford for the 2005 Nextel Cup season, an easygoing twenty-six-year-old second-generation rookie driver from Columbia, Missouri, named Carl Edwards immediately understood the harsh realities of racing: every driver at the top of the pyramid has a star-studded resume, with a list of accolades, awards, and championships longer than the backstretch at Martinsville.

  So…how do you distinguish yourself from the other big-name Cup drivers?

  For starters, a dizzying display of skill, pinpoint car control, and NASCAR etiquette, coupled with twelfth-place, fifth-place, and fourteenth-place finishes in the first three races of the season, had been a great induction for Edwards to the most exclusive enclave of racing. It showed fellow drivers and fans that he had to be considered “one of the guys.” But during a March weekend at Atlanta Motor Speedway for the fourth race of the 2005 season, Edwards added an entirely new flip to Cup racing and became one of the guys.

  This new spin began on Saturday in the Busch race. Edwards started on the pole and piloted his Charter Communications Ford to the checkered flag ahead of three acknowledged Cup Series superstars: former champions Tony Stewart and Matt Kenseth, and 2005 series points leader Jimmie Johnson. It was his first Busch Series win. But after an abbreviated Victory Lane celebration, it was back to the business of being a Cup driver on the eve of another big race.

  When the green flag fell for Sunday's Cup race at Atlanta Motor Speedway things got quickly out of hand. The forty-three cars were barely past the start-finish line when Casey Mears touched off a melee in Turn 2 that involved almost a quarter of the field, eliminating from contention two drivers who are always a threat to win at AMS: four-time series champion Jeff Gordon, and Bobby Labonte, who with six wins is the active driver with the most victories at that track.

  From there things settled down—into a 190 mph battle between the dominant cars and crews of Jimmie Johnson and Greg Biffle. Between them they led 307 of the 335 laps. Edwards ran near or in the top five all day but only managed to lead nine laps. Included in that nine, though, was the most important one.

  On the final circuit Edwards, in second, got a great run coming out of Turn 2 and pulled up on leader Johnson's back bumper. Johnson guided the Lowe's Chevy high through Turns 3 and 4, trying to block his challenger, but Edwards went even higher. He brushed the wall and the two cars touched just a few feet from the finish, but Edwards slipped by to win, after 500 miles of hard racing, by just 0.028 seconds.

  Edwards's charm, enthusiasm and neon smile illuminated the victory lane celebration, but the highlight came when he climbed to the window ledge of his green and white Ford and executed a spectacular backflip down to the track—and into the record book.

  Edwards's charm, enthusiasm, and neon smile illuminated the Victory Lane celebration, but the highlight came when he climbed to the window ledge of his green-and-white Ford and executed a spectacular backflip down to the track—and into the record book. With his second victory of the weekend, Carl Edwards became the only driver to win back-to-back Busch and Cup races at Atlanta and the only driver to do it in the same weekend.

  Chapter Two

  CINDERELLA MEN

  The Unlikeliest V
ictories

  Demonstrating the talent that made him a four-time NASCAR champ, Jeff Gordon steadily clawed his way back, passing every car on the track, once, twice, then three times.

  Derrike Cope's 1990 Daytona Surprise

  The 1990 Daytona 500 is one of the legendary NASCAR races, in large part because of Derrike Cope's incredibly unlikely win, but above all because it was a crushing loss for the race leader and odds-on favorite, Dale Earnhardt.

  In his previous fifteen years as a NASCAR driver, the Intimidator had won nearly every kind of competition run at Daytona International Speedway, be it a Busch Series race, an IROC race, a qualifying race, or an all-star race, twenty-nine victories in all. But the one that mattered—the Daytona 500—was coming to be known as Earnhardt's curse, and the events of the 1990 race cemented that superstition.

  On the other hand, Derrike Cope hadn't been in NASCAR long enough to develop a reputation, let alone a curse. This was just the third Daytona 500 for the thirty-one-year-old former college baseball player from little Spanaway, Washington, whose career was ended by a knee injury. Cope was so green he had yet to be included in NASCAR's media guide. But on February 18, 1990, the NASCAR world took notice of him.

  As the 1990 edition of the Great American Race wound down, it truly looked liked Dale Earnhardt's drought was finally over. His famous black number 3 GM Goodwrench Chevy dominated 155 of the race's 200 laps. At one point, Earnhardt led by 39 seconds, nearly three-quarters of a lap. But then, with eight laps to go, Geoff Bodine's spin brought out the day's third caution flag and bunched up the field for a five-lap dash to the checkered flag.

  Earnhardt hit the pits for left-side tires while Cope stayed out on the raceway. When the caution flag lifted, Cope had moved into first place, but Earnhardt quickly took it back. “Nobody was going to catch me until that caution came out,” Dale insisted after the race. “Even after that, I had no trouble driving by Derrike on the restart. The race was still mine.”

  With 50 laps to go, a reporter interviewed Rusty Wallace's engine builder, Harold Elliott, who told him “I think the only way anybody will beat Dale Earnhardt today is to shoot his tires out.”

  Derrike Cope would have been the first to agree. Though he had hung around the front-runners all day, it was enough of a battle keeping his car on the track. “I was really fighting to hold on to second place,” Cope remembers. “My car was very loose.”

  Going into the last lap, Earnhardt's crew and family were jubilant. With Dale less than a mile from the finish line, a CBS Sports TV camera caught his wife holding their daughter and listening intently to the scanner in the family's motor home. But the celebrating would prove to be premature.

  Thundering into the last turn of the last lap, a small piece of metal debris from Ricky Rudd's blown bell-housing chomped on Dale Earnhardt's right rear tire. “It went [flat] right in front of the chicken-bone grandstands on the backstretch,” Earnhardt said after the race. “I heard it hit the bottom of the car, and then it hit the tire and the tire went.” All Dale could do was steer the car to the top of the track and stay out of everyone's way. His twelfth trip to Daytona would not change his luck.

  Meanwhile, the unlikeliest and luckiest man in NASCAR zoomed into the lead. “When I saw what was happening to Dale, I just turned that baby left,” Cope said. “I saw a hole and had my foot on the floor. I knew at that point we had the thing won. I wasn't going to let anybody beat me, even if I had to block the track all the way to the checkers.”

  Cope was able to hold off Terry Labonte for the last third of a lap and registered one of the biggest upsets in the history of the 500.

  After the race, CBS cut back to the Earnhardts' motor home to find both his wife and daughter in tears. The number 3 crew was dazed by the bad luck.

  Cope told reporters: “I know you guys are stunned. So am I. Something like this usually comes just once in a lifetime.”

  Derrike Cope was right about that. In the many seasons since, he has only scored one more #1, a victory that same year at Dover. But until the end of time, he will be referred to as “Daytona 500 winner Derrike Cope.”

  Dale Earnhardt? After the race, he was emotionally drained, but stoic. “This has been the biggest buildup and biggest letdown I've ever had in racing,” he said. “There's nothing you can do about it, either. You can't kick the car and cry and pout and lay down and squall and bawl. You've got to take it and walk on.”

  Walk on Dale did—and eight years later he finally won the Daytona 500—on his twentieth try. The tire that cost him the race? Earnhardt and team owner Richard Childress took it back to North Carolina and nailed it over the door to the race shop, where it served as a reminder that in NASCAR, no race is truly over until you see the checkered flag.

  Kyle Petty: The First Third-Generation Cup Victory

  Despite being born into one of motor racing's premier dynasties, it was not Kyle Petty's intention to follow his grandfather, Lee, and his father, Richard, into the family trade. Growing up, Kyle excelled in sports. In fact, the six-foot-two athlete was offered college scholarships in both football and baseball. Some say he even sang well enough to have a pretty decent music career.

  But Kyle was a Petty; the fluid running through his veins was a fifty-fifty mix of blood and racing fuel. So in 1979, at just nineteen, Kyle entered his first major stock car race, a 200-mile ARCA event at Daytona International Speedway. The precocious teenager won and soon after became his father's Cup series teammate competing under the Petty Enterprises banner. That year, Richard won the series championship and Kyle collected his first top ten finish. The teaming lasted until 1985, when Kyle moved out from under the long shadow of King Richard to join the legendary Wood Brothers racing team. The change paid off royally a year later in Richmond, Virginia.

  Dale Earnhardt was clearly in charge that day, leading 299 laps of the 400-lap 1986 Miller 400. Darrell Waltrip stayed in contention and in fact bumped and banged Chevys around the three-quarter-mile oval all day, but with just three laps to go, it looked like Dale would be the one celebrating in Victory Lane.

  With the finish line just a couple of miles away, Waltrip managed to squeeze by Earnhardt in Turn 3. Dale quickly tried to take the lead back but ran out of room and clipped DW's rear quarter panel, sending the cars up into the guardrail, out of contention and of the race, and taking Geoff Bodine and Joe Ruttman, in third and fourth, with them. While the top four were busy rearranging each other's sheet metal, Kyle Petty dropped underneath, grabbed the lead and, a couple of laps later, his first NASCAR Cup checkered flag.

  Kyle gives much of the credit for the win to the hardworking Wood Brothers pit crew. “We had a top five car and we were there all day long. …[Earnhardt and Waltrip] got in the wreck and we dodged it, but…Eddie [Wood] and everybody in the pits put us in position. We'd come in running fourth or fifth and go out running second or third. I'd lose a couple of positions because of inexperience on the racetrack, but they kept…putting me in position to win and then when trouble broke loose we were in the right place at the right time.”

  That highly unexpected victory made Kyle Petty the first third-generation driver to win a Cup event.

  Bobby Labonte Snatches the Last Winston Cup

  The thirty-sixth and final race of the 2003 season, at Homestead-Miami Speedway, marked the end of an era. After thirty-three years NASCAR was changing sponsors from Winston to Nextel. As the France family moved from tobacco to telephones, they continued their goal of repositioning the sport for the twenty-first century.

  Homestead-Miami had also been spruced up for the new millennium. Never one of the drivers' favorite tracks, the formerly flat 1.5-mile oval had been resurfaced and given state-of-the-art “progressive” banking. At first the new configuration seemed to be a blessing as lap times climbed exponentially. Later it proved to be a curse, eating up right front tires and shredding right rears.

  NASCAR veteran Bill Elliott came into the race on a roll. That season he'd been “Mr. Consistenc
y,” competing in all but one race and finishing in the top ten eleven times. Just the week before he had won the Pop Secret 400, outracing points leaders Matt Kenseth and Jimmie Johnson. On the other hand, the 2000 Cup champion, Bobby Labonte, was not on a roll. He hadn't won since the fourth race of the season, a dry spell of eight long months.

  For 189 of the 267 laps Elliott and his dominant Dodge led a caution-riddled race. It seemed like a lock: Million-Dollar Bill would close out the 2003 season in the winner's circle. At the other end of the pack, Bobby Labonte started poorly but worked his way through the field. On Lap 265 he trailed Elliott in second but still held little hope. “With two [laps] to go, I said, ‘I want this win more than he does, maybe, but his car is really good right now.’ There's no way, unless something happened, that I was going to pass him.”

  With victory less than 1,000 yards away, Homestead nibbled on Bill Elliott's right rear tire and it began to lose pressure. To Labonte, it was like an early Christmas. “He [Elliott] just started wiggling,” Bobby remembers. “And I just started screaming on the radio. It was a gift. It was way cool for us to win a race. We've been a long time without it, since Atlanta, so we just had a good day…and we had a lot of fun.”

  For Bobby Labonte, and for NASCAR, it was an exciting way to end the 2003 Winston Cup season and ignite the Nextel Cup Series.