Speed, Guts, and Glory

by Joe Garner

  Waltrip slid sideways into the infield, a maneuver forever after known as the “Tide Slide.” Wallace won the race, but the battle had just begun. The fans and Waltrip were livid at Wallace's tactic. A fight broke out in the infield between the two drivers' crews as Darrell fumed, “It was an ugly, ugly win. I hope he chokes on the $200,000, that's all I can tell him.”

  In that split second at Charlotte, Darrell Waltrip became a good guy and Rusty Wallace earned a reputation. “Regardless of all the wins, top fives and top tens, the poles and the money,” Wallace says, “that win was probably the single most monumental event in my career.” That year, Rusty went on to win the Cup championship, and Darrell Waltrip won an honor that before had been practically unthinkable: he was voted by the fans as NASCAR's Most Popular Driver.

  Chapter Three

  THE DOMINATORS

  Over the next 35 years, Richard Petty would compile one of the most overwhelming records in stock car racing, while collecting seven Grand National/Cup titles, becoming the sport's most valuable and visible ambassador and earning his rightful title, The King.

  Richard Petty: Long Live the King (Richard Petty's Crowning Victory)

  In all of sports there are very few records that stand as unattainable—records that will almost certainly never be broken. Among them are amazing feats like Wilt Chamberlain's 100-point game, Nolan Ryan's seven career no-hitters, and Jerry Rice's 22,895 career receiving yards.

  When it comes to NASCAR, Richard Petty set two records that will never be touched. In 1967 he racked up an impossible twenty-seven Cup circuit wins (including a record ten in a row), and in 1984 he celebrated his 200th victory. To give this number some perspective, David Pearson has the second most wins at 105.

  Without doubt, part of the reason Petty was able to accumulate such a stunning number of victories was because back in NASCAR's early days, he would enter forty to sixty races a season. In 1967, the year he toted up those twenty-seven wins, he raced forty-eight times. Still, that's winning an astounding 56 percent of the time. And that is domination.

  Richard Petty came by his talent honestly—his father was stock car pioneer Lee Petty, and, like his son, is one of NASCAR's 50 Greatest Drivers. Petty Sr. raced from 1949 to 1964, winning fifty-four races and grabbing the Series title three times. Richard started out in his dad's pit crew, given the title of “crew chief” at twelve. Lee wouldn't let his son drive until he reached NASCAR's legal driving age of twenty-one. But the day after that birthday, he drove in his first event, a dirt-track race in South Carolina, and finished sixth.

  Lee Petty, center, 50-year-old head of the most successful family in stock car racing, and his sons, Maurice, left, 25, and Richard, 26, look into an empty engine well of a new race car on July 15, 1964.

  After posting DNFs in his next eight races, Richard finally earned his first checkered flag—or so he thought. While he proudly cruised to Victory Lane, another driver protested, complaining that the flag had dropped a lap too early. The irritated driver was judged to be right and the win was taken from Richard and given to the complainant…Lee Petty.

  Just a year later, at the end of the 1959 season, twenty-two-year-old Richard was NASCAR's Rookie of the Year. Over the next thirty-five years, he would compile one of the most overwhelming records in stock car racing, while collecting seven National titles, en route to becoming the sport's most valuable and visible ambassador and earning his rightful title, the King.

  Going into the Firecracker 400 on July 4, 1984, King Richard had compiled an untouchable 199 victories. It was a perfect day to put the icing on the cake, with Ronald Reagan flying to Daytona, the first sitting president ever to attend a NASCAR race.

  The fans had been expecting a battle royale and they weren't disappointed as the leaders, Petty and Cale Yarborough, pulled steadily away from the pack. With less than 4 laps to go, the 80,000 in attendance were on their feet, as Richard led Cale around the track at close to 200 mph.

  When the Independence Day event began, the president was in Air Force One just leaving Washington, D.C., but was still able to give the traditional “Gentlemen, start your engines” by radiotelephone. Later, at the track, the president even sat with race commentator Ned Jarrett and tried his hand at announcing.

  The fans had been expecting a battle royale and they weren't disappointed as the leaders, Petty and Cale Yarborough, pulled steadily away from the pack. With less than four laps to go, the 80,000 in attendance were on their feet as Richard led Cale around the track at close to 200 mph. Suddenly, everything changed. Up ahead, the two leaders saw Doug Heveron's Chevrolet flipping into the air and knew instantly that a caution flag would quickly follow. With so few laps left, they also knew the race would almost certainly finish under caution— the first car to the yellow flag would win. With that, any long-term strategy they had went out the window; now it was pedal to the metal.

  On the backstretch, Yarborough used his trademark slingshot maneuver to squeeze past Petty's number 43 STP Pontiac. But Richard fought back and managed to pull even with Cale's number 28 Chevy. As the cars careened around the last two turns, headed for the line, they bounced and banged each other. Petty thinks the last bump got him the 200th win. “The last bam squirted my car a little ahead,” he said at the time. “We touched a couple of times coming for the line; enough to affect the cars but not enough to upset them. From where I sat, I knew I had him. I didn't know if it was a foot or a yard or three yards or an inch. I just knew I had him. At that point, the margin didn't make no difference.”

  Richard Petty takes the checkered flag to win the 26th annual Firecracker 400 stock car race in Daytona Beach, Florida. This was the 200th NASCAR win for Petty, beating out Cale Yarborough.

  President Ronald Regan sits between Richard Petty and Bobby Allison during a lunch in the garage area prior to the Firecracker 400 at Daytona Speedway.

  Petty was first over the line, not more than a foot ahead of Yarborough. As the drivers had predicted, the race finished under caution and King Richard's historic victory was in the books. The crowd went crazy but no one was more ecstatic than Petty. “Probably the highlight of my whole career was winning the 200th race at Daytona on July Fourth in front of the president of the United States,” he has said. “Winning 200 anywhere would have been great. Doing it under those circumstances and beating Cale, who I had been racing with for years, it was fantastic. Basically, it still is. I don't think there's anything to match that in the annals of racing.”

  Richard Petty's 200th win at the Firecracker 400 was the crowning glory of one of the most dominating careers in the history of sports. It's an unattainable record that forever enthrones him as the King of NASCAR.

  Dale Earnhardt: The Man in Black

  For the better part of a decade, from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, there was no one more dominant in stock car racing than Dale Earnhardt. He rose to become a sport-defining legend on the level of basket-ball's Michael Jordan or hockey's Wayne Gretzky. Earnhardt had a will to win that was nearly unstoppable, and the sight of his black number 3 Monte Carlo darkening the rearview mirror was enough to turn the strongest competitor's knees to jelly.

  Dale, the only driver ever to win Rookie of the Year and the NASCAR Cup Series championship in consecutive years, once told a reporter, “Imagine you're leading the race on the last lap with me behind you. Would you want that? I would hate to have me behind me on the last lap.” No wonder he was called the Intimidator.

  One of the major keys to Earnhardt's success was that he always had his eyes on the prize. “I race to win,” he explained. “Yeah, the money is part of it but I couldn't tell you what the purse is here. …When you're a driver and you're racing, you want to win. That's about all.”

  Still, Dale's final Cup championship was not all about first-place finishes—it was just as much about consistency, the week-in, week-out battles that it takes to win the NASCAR points competition. In 1994, there were thirty-one races. Dale won just four of them, four less than Rus
ty Wallace, but he finished in the top five a mind-boggling twenty times. That's an amazing 64.5 percent of the time. In twenty-five of the races, he landed in the top ten—a career-high 80.6 percent record. That's the kind of domination that saps the will of the competition and makes an athlete seem more than mortal.

  One of Earnhardt's most effective weapons was his incredible focus. “When I sit down in a race car it's like the first day I ever done it,” he once said. “There's nothing else on my mind. I'm not sitting there while I'm racing pondering everything going on in my life. I'm focused on beating whoever is in front of me or behind me.”

  Dale Earnhardt looks off into the distance in Riverside, California, at the Winston Western 500 on November 15, 1986.

  By Rockingham, the twenty-ninth race of that 1994 season, Dale was focused on the championship. He was 341 points ahead of Rusty Wallace, and with a good finish could clinch the Cup. Plus, there was something even more momentous at stake—Richard Petty's seemingly unreachable record of seven Cup championships.

  Dale hadn't won a race for twenty weeks, since taking the checkered flag at Talladega in May. But on October 23, he locked up the Cup in style, edging Rick Mast at the line by 0.06 seconds to win his fourth race of the season. The victory and the Championship tied him with King Richard, and forever cemented Dale Earnhardt's reputation as one of NASCAR's greatest, and most dominant, drivers.

  Jeff Gordon: The First of NASCAR's New Breed

  Although it's unlikely anyone there suspected it, “NASCAR: The Next Generation” began on November 15, 1992, at the season finale at Atlanta. As Alan Kulwicki clinched the Championship, forty-five-year-old Richard Petty was competing in the last race of his illustrious career, and twenty-one-year-old mostly unknown Jeff Gordon was driving in his first Cup series race.

  “Jeff has been one of those people who changed what a race car driver is,” said driver Jeff Burton on ESPN. “Look at Richard Petty. Look at Dale Earnhardt. Look at Cale Yarborough. Then look at Jeff Gordon. That's not the same picture. Jeff helped bring mainstream young America into our sport.”

  Gordon took care of the “unknown” part at warp speed. Just twelve months later, he was NASCAR's Rookie of the Year. Two years after that, in 1995, he won his first championship, ending Dale Earnhardt's quest for a record eighth championship. Jeff repeated in 1997, this time over Dale Jarrett, but his 1998 championship run was the season that made him a superstar. It was dominance on a Richard Petty level.

  Jeff Gordon in action during the NASCAR Napa 500 at the Atlanta Motor Speedway in Hampton, Georgia.

  Gordon, who by 1998 had already been competing for over twenty years (he started as a six-year-old in quarter midgets), started out NASCAR's fiftieth anniversary season on a sour note. His motor dropped a cylinder at Daytona and he finished sixteenth. But the very next week, he came back and won Rockingham. There were a couple of races where he finished out of the top fifteen before Jeff, Hendrick Motorsports, and his pit crew got it together and picked up a second place at Darlington and a win at Bristol. That put him third in points. A disastrous outing at the Texas Motor Speedway dropped him to fifth, but the next week, at Martinsville, Gordon began a string of finishes that ranks him among NASCAR's greatest drivers.

  A win at Lowe's Motor Speedway put Jeff in first place. An accident at Richmond dropped him back to third, but three weeks later a road course victory at Sears Point boosted him back into first—a position he would rule for the rest of the season. Beginning at Pocono and continuing through Indianapolis (where he picked up $1.64 million, the biggest payday in auto racing history), Watkins Glen, and Michigan, Gordon rolled up a record-tying run of four wins in a row. There were victories at New Hampshire and Darlington, five more top fives, then the checker at Daytona.

  Even though Jeff locked up the championship at Rockingham, there was still something to shoot for: Richard Petty's modern-day record for wins in a season. Gordon answered that challenge at the Atlanta season finale by notching his thirteenth victory and tying the King's record.

  Though Jeff has unfailingly attributed his enormous success to having one of motor racing's all-time best pit crews, his former crew chief Ray Evernham says they also had the best driver. “I look back and see what Jeff and I had,” he insists. “And there is no doubt he was the greatest race driver I could have possibly had. In my mind, he is still the greatest race driver.”

  David Pearson: The Silver Fox

  Unlike the proverbial tortoise-and-the-hare competition, slow and steady does not always win a NASCAR race. But, as any David Pearson fan can tell you, fast and steady can win you a lot of races. What David Pearson lacked in flash, he more than made up for with consistency and cunning. His smooth, stealthy moves on the track and the prematurely gray hair on his head earned him the nickname “the Silver Fox.” And his rivalry with Richard Petty is one of the true legends of motor sports.

  The Pearson-Petty duels were great for both the fans and NASCAR and a prime factor for the sport's increasing popularity during the 1960s and 1970s. Whenever it was Pearson versus Petty, a great show was guaranteed. These were not slam-bangers like Cale Yarborough and Bobby Allison, these were finesse guys. So fans were more likely to see a fight all the way to the finish line, not a crash on Lap 42.

  Veteran driver and analyst Ned Jarrett says what made the pair so effective was their understanding of the machinery. “They knew how hard you could drive the car and expect it to be there at the end of the race.” But that's not to say that the two wouldn't trade paint with a win on the line.

  David Pearson's smooth and steady style made him NASCAR's dominant driver during the 1968 and 1969 seasons. He had a combined record of twenty-seven wins, seventy-eight top fives, and eighty-two top ten finishes in those two seasons, interrupting King Richard's reign, earning him the championship two years running and his place as one of NASCAR's 50 Greatest Drivers.

  David Pearson waits for his turn to qualify for the 1967 Daytona 500.

  While Pearson is second to Petty in wins, David actually has a better winning percentage. He won 105 out of 574 races, or 18.3 percent. Petty finished his career with 200 wins out of 1,185 starts for 16.9 percent. If Pearson had run as many races as Petty, there might have been a challenger to the King's throne.

  Cale Yarborough: The Timmonsville Flash

  Some people take several decades to discover their true calling in life. William Caleb “Cale” Yarborough found his at age eleven. That's when the kid from nearby Timmonsville, South Carolina, snuck under the fence at Darlington Raceway and watched the very first running of the Southern 500. That was 1950. Seven years later, when he was still seventeen, Cale drove in his first Southern 500 there.

  Cale Yarborough raced through four decades—the 1950s into the 1980s. In that time, the drivers went from backroads bootleggers to rock ‘n’ roll style superstars. Cale earned his eighty-three victories (fifth on the all-time list) in every one of those four decades, but the 1970s were truly the “Yarborough Years” when Cale and his Junior Johnson–prepared race cars were true dominators.

  One of the most aggressive drivers in NASCAR history, the “Timmonsville Flash” wasn't happy unless he was leading a race and pulling away. In fact, one of his most astonishing performances came at Bristol on March 7, 1973. That day, Yarborough led every single lap of the Southeastern 500. By Lap 100, he'd lapped the entire field. But even with that commanding lead, Cale would not let up. He pulled into Victory Lane with a two-lap lead over second-place Richard Petty and a five-lap lead over third place Bobby Allison.

  One of NASCAR's seminal moments came after some typical Yarborough aggressiveness. It happened at the Daytona 500 on February 18, 1979. Cale, who once said, “Drivin' a race car is like dancin' with a chainsaw!” tried to dance under Donnie Allison. Donnie dropped down to block him and the resulting crash took them both out. When the wrecked racers smoked to a stop, Yarborough and Donnie's brother Bobby jumped out and proceeded to wail on one another. That incredible, slam-bang
finish, and, no doubt, the brawl that followed, helped implant NASCAR deep into the American consciousness.

  Junior Johnson has a simple explanation for their incredible run in the 1970s—“Cale Yarborough is the best driver the sport has ever seen,” he's said. “When you strap Cale into the car, it's like adding 20 horsepower.”

  Cale's most amazing achievement was capped off at Rockingham, the twenty-eighth race of the 1978 season. By winning his tenth race there, he clinched a third consecutive NASCAR Cup Series championship—a feat that had never been done before, and hasn't been done since. While setting that record, Yarborough won twenty-eight out of ninety races. That is domination.

  Darrell Waltrip: A Force to Be Reckoned With

  Long before Darrell Waltrip scored gigs as a race commentator and TV pitchman, he ran his mouth for free. The only price paid was the patience of those within earshot. Climbing the NASCAR ladder, DW was so outspoken that Cale Yarborough nicknamed him “Jaws.” Though dismissed early on as a blowhard, in 1981 Waltrip proved his detractors wrong, demonstrating conclusively that his bite was even more fearsome that his bark.

  The 1981 season didn't start out that way. Even though Darrell won four of the first fourteen races in his number 11 Mountain Dew Regal, engine failure in four of those outings cost him serious points. By race fifteen of the thirty-one-race season, Waltrip was a whopping 341 points back of Bobby Allison. What followed was the biggest championship comeback in the history of NASCAR, and a show of driving dominance that has rarely been equaled.