by Joe Garner
Darrell started his historic run at Riverside Raceway— winning that race and beginning a phenomenal string of finishes. Darrell completed every single one of the sixteen remaining races in the top ten, and placed in the top three in nine of them. In race twenty-five, at Dover Downs, Waltrip finally drove past Allison for first place— pulling ahead by a scant two points. But then Darrell totally dominated, winning the next four races in a row, bringing his checkered-flag total for the year to a career-high twelve, and giving himself some breathing room.
Even after Waltrip's incredible run, Bobby Allison still had a mathematical chance to steal the championship from Waltrip in the season closer back at Riverside. And he tried mightily to do it. Allison won the race, but DW came in sixth, a high enough finish to secure the Cup championship by 53 points and earn him the distinction of achieving NASCAR's biggest comeback.
Darrell Waltrip driver, Junior Johnson car owner (left), and Tim Brewer crew chief (right), pose at the Winston Banquet in New York City honoring the 1981 Champions.
The 1981 championship was the first of three for Darrell Waltrip, during a twenty-nine-year career in which he piled up a staggering 96,550 Cup points. At the time of writing, that's the highest points total of any driver since the current NASCAR scoring system was installed in 1975.
All that time in the sport gives Darrell a great perspective—and a great appreciation—of the enormous strides NASCAR has made over the last three decades, both for him and the sport of stock car racing. “I have accomplished things beyond my wildest dreams,” he has said. “They made us superstars. We weren't just race car drivers anymore. We weren't rednecks anymore. We were bona fide superstars, and more so today than ever before.” And nowadays, when “Jaws” speaks, people really listen.
Rusty Wallace: One of the All-Time Greats
NASCAR's system of scoring championship points is complicated, and, some would argue, not completely fair. For example, missing a single race out of the season can cost a driver enough points to take him out of the Cup championship. Some have proposed a much simpler system—like having the driver with the most first-place finishes win the title.
It will almost certainly never happen, but if it did, it would make Russell William “Rusty” Wallace a very happy man. Rusty has one NASCAR championship in his trophy case; the 1989 Cup. But with that simpler system, he'd have three. That's because back in 1993 and 1994 Rusty Wallace and his Buddy Parrot-led team practically ruled NASCAR. Dale Earnhardt Sr. may have been the Intimidator, but for two years Rusty was the Dominator.
Rusty Wallace acknowledges the crowd after winning the Spitfire Spark Plug 500 at Dover Downs International Speedway, Sunday, September 19, 1993.
Both Wallace and Earnhardt started the 1993 season on a mission launched at the NASCAR awards banquet the year before. That night the Cup was presented to Alan Kulwicki and it really stuck in their craws. “I'll never forget in '92 when Earnhardt and I were sitting in the back room,” Rusty remembers. “He was twelfth and I was thirteenth [in the standings]. They started the banquet and he left. The very next year, we were so upset that I came out and won ten races and he won six.”
Though Earnhardt ended up with the trophy, Wallace outran him by a big margin. He won a career-high ten races, finished in the top five nineteen times, and led the most laps (2,860 out of 10,004). Wallace dominated early in the season, winning four of the first eight races. But over the next four weeks, an accident and mechanical misfortunes seriously crimped his championship chances. Despite slipping behind Earnhardt nearly 300 points, Wallace put on an amazing late-season charge.
With six races to go, Rusty was 181 points behind. A second at Martinsville combined with a bad finish by Earnhardt cut the lead to 82 points. Wallace won the next race at Rockingham and cut into the lead some more. But then, at Phoenix, Wallace was leading Earnhardt when his right front tire blew. Rusty ended up nineteenth, 126 points down, but he still wouldn't quit. He battled hard at Atlanta and won the last race of the year. Earnhardt finished tenth, a lap down, but collected enough points to finish 80 up on Wallace and win his sixth championship.
In 1994, Rusty once again had the most victories— eight to Dale's four—and led the most laps, only to have an accident at the spring Talladega, and a blown piston at summer Talladega, cripple his points drive. It added up to another dominating season for Wallace, but another Cup for Earnhardt.
Ned Jarrett: Gentleman Ned
You might say that Ned Jarrett's future was set in 1941, the year his dad let him drive the family car to church in little Newton, North Carolina. Even at nine years old, Ned took to it like a duck to water. It follows that his father really shouldn't have been surprised when his son turned down a career in the family lumber business to go race stock cars.
By 1960, twenty-three-year old Ned was winning Grand National races in a secondhand Ford he'd bought (on credit) from Junior Johnson for $2,000. Legend has it that he won just enough money that season to pay Junior off. However, the very next year he won the championship, finishing in the top five in twenty-two out of the forty-six races.
In 1965, the man nicknamed “Gentleman Ned” for his calm demeanor and polite nature had one of the most dominant seasons in NASCAR history, with an amazing string of victories and top finishes. Of the fifty-four Grand National races he started that year, Jarrett won thirteen and piled up an incredible forty-two top five finishes.
Of all those races, and indeed, in all of Ned's career, no win was more impressive than the annual Labor Day joust at Darlington. As usual, it was a steaming hot day. So hot that many of Jarrett's competitors were knocked out by overheating, blown engines and other heat-related mechanical problems. (Cale Yarborough was out after sailing over the guardrail and into the parking lot.) Ford had tried to help by supplying their racers with oversize aluminum radiators. But there was a problem—Darlington's asphalt shredded tires and the loose rubber clogged the radiators.
With 100 miles to go, Ned had built up an unprecedented fourteen-lap lead. But then he too started to overheat. His crew wanted him to pit and clean out the radiator. He certainly had enough of a lead. But Jarrett came up with a solution of his own.
“When I went into the turn, instead of backing off the accelerator,” he recalls, “I cut the switch off to let the raw gas run in there so it would have a cooling effect, and, sure enough, it did. …Every time I turned the switch back on and it cranked back up, the car would backfire. So the fans had a little action to cheer for because somebody sitting there with a fourteen-lap lead wasn't a very good race.”
When Ned crossed the finish line, he had virtually sewn up the Grand National championship for 1965, and he had scored one of the fifty victories that make him the all-time winningest Ford Driver in NASCAR history. Jarrett may have repeated his amazing run the following year, but after he got off to a flying start, Ford suddenly pulled out its factory support of NASCAR. Ned did likewise, quitting the sport in his prime, at just thirty-four years old. Even so, his amazing fourteen-lap lead in the 1965 Southern 500 remains the largest margin by which anyone has ever won a NASCAR race.
Bobby Allison: Raging Rebel
Every time Bobby Allison strapped into a race car, it was his intention to dominate the competition. One of the most aggressive drivers in motor racing, Allison always drove at 10/10ths, pushing his equipment, his opponents, and himself to the ragged edge. That's how, in an injury-shortened twenty-five-year career, he was able to amass 336 top five finishes, and win the Daytona 500 three times—the last time at age fifty.
Bobby was a founding member of the legendary “Alabama Gang,” made up of him, his brother Donnie, fellow drivers Red Farmer and Neil Bonnett, and eventually Bobby's son Davey. Based in their adopted home of Hueytown, Alabama, they terrorized regional tracks around the Southeast, and then graduated to the NASCAR circuit.
Though Allison won his sole championship in 1983, it was his monumental battles with Richard Petty, Cale Yarborough, and David Pearson that mak
e him one of NASCAR's dominators. Those fierce rivalries evolved into something more than racing; the ferocious nature of these competitors made beating each other something very personal.
In the early 1970s, slam-bang Allison-Petty duels were a fact of competition. So much so that each crew used to reinforce the cars' most vulnerable bodywork, knowing the two were going to beat on each other. At one point, NASCAR even put out a publicity picture of the two arm-wrestling. Though Allison won more races in 1972 (ten to Petty's eight), Petty took the championship on points.
Their intense rivalry reached its peak that year at the North Wilkesboro Speedway as Bobby and the King battled to the finish line. For the final five laps of the race, the two walloped each other repeatedly, with Petty finally taking the checkers a couple of car lengths ahead of Allison's battered and smoking racer.
Bobby Allison's car begins to smoke during the last laps of his epic 1972 duel with Richard Petty.
The King clears a path
For the final five laps of the race, the two walloped each other repeatedly, with Petty finally taking the checkers a couple of car lengths ahead of Allison's battered and smoking racer.
After the duel, both drivers were hopping mad. “He could have put me in the boondocks,” seethed Richard. “He's playing with my life out there and I don't like it.” Bobby shot back, “The other competitor had to wreck me to win, and that's what he did. I had so much smoke in my car I could hardly see.” To put an exclamation point on Allison's statement, one of his enraged fans charged out of the stands and jumped Petty. A quick-thinking Maurice Petty clonked the attacker over the head with his brother Richard's helmet as the police moved in to take the rabid fan away.
Although there may not be a specific year that Bobby Allison “dominated” NASCAR, his illustrious career certainly earns him that distinction. He's one of the sport's 50 Greatest Drivers, and with eighty-four Cup victories, he's tied with Darrell Waltrip for third most wins of all time.
Tim Flock: The Highest-Flying Flock
Nowadays, often the most colorful aspect of NASCAR's drivers is their sponsor-patch-laden Nomex driving suits. Back in the old days, it was the drivers themselves who provided the color. Nobody is more representative of that early outlaw spirit than Julius Timothy Flock.
Tim grew up in the “Flying Flocks,” nine brothers and sisters who were drawn to excitement. Family patriarch Carl Lee Flock, a former bicycle racer, died when Tim was just a year old, leaving the family to fend for themselves. To help out, oldest son Carl Jr. moved the family to Atlanta where he was bootlegging with their uncle, Peachtree Williams. Tim's older brothers Fonty and Bob delivered moonshine in cars they'd hopped up themselves, roaring down the backroads of Georgia outrunning the police and federal agents.
Around Atlanta and in many other southeastern cities and towns, the bootleggers would argue about who had the fastest car, and they'd settle the squabbles with impromptu races. At ten, Tim saw his first race, a go-round in a Georgia pasture where his brothers raced other local “whiskey trippers,” knocking fenders and flinging mud. He was hooked. As Tim grew older, Fonty and Bob tried to get their youngest brother to “go straight” and finish school, but they couldn't keep him out of the driver's seat.
All three brothers (and sister Ethel) raced in the nascent racing league, but Tim was the highest-flying Flock, winning his first NASCAR championship in 1952. Three years later, in 1955, he hooked up with multimillionaire Carl Kiekhaefer, the inventor of the Mercury outboard motor, and their Chrysler 300s absolutely dominated stock car racing. Of the forty-five races held that year, Tim started on the pole in nineteen (still a NASCAR record), and he won eighteen (a record he held until Richard Petty broke it in 1967). Tim still has the highest percentage of races won (21.2 percent—40 victories in 189 starts) in Cup history, and that same year, 1952, he drove a 300SL Mercedes Gullwing Coupe to a win in NASCAR's first and only sports car race.
Despite Tim Flock's amazing driving record, he probably is more famous for his copilot during the 1953 season—a rhesus monkey Tim named Jocko Flocko. Jocko had his own special seat and driver's uniform and rode beside Tim when he won a Grand National race at Hickory, North Carolina. Jocko's ride ended during his eighth race. Tim explained, “Back then the cars had a trapdoor that we could pull open with a chain to check our tire wear. Well, during the Raleigh 300, Jocko got loose from his seat and stuck his head through the trapdoor, and he went berserk! I had to come into the pits to put him out and ended up third. The pit stop cost me second place and a $600 difference in my paycheck. Jocko was retired immediately.”
Tim Flock, one of the most successful and colorful drivers in stock-car racing history, in 1960.
Chapter Four
“THEY ACTUALLY WALKED AWAY?!”
“You certainly go into the race with the mindset of ‘Let's miss the big wreck.’ You have to think the big wreck is coming, and if you don't think the big wreck is coming, you haven't been watching racing very much.”
2005 Talladega: The Biggest Big One
There's a tale the locals tell around Talladega. They contend that the first speed-related fatality in the area was not a NASCAR, BGN, or IRL driver. It was a Talladega Indian chief who died during a horse race back in the 1700s.
Perhaps that's the reason Talladega, born in 1969 as Alabama International Motor Speedway, has always been regarded by some as a track that is haunted or jinxed or both. After all, this was the place where in 1973 Cup champion Bobby Isaac, in contention for the lead, suddenly pulled off the track and parked his race car. For the rest of his days, Isaac swore he did it because a ghostly voice had threatened him with death, and that if he had driven another lap, it would have been his last.
For today's Cup drivers, the most frightening thing about Talladega is the “Big One,” a beast lurking in the shadows, poised to take out half the field in one metal-crunching, tire-screaming, smoke-choked megacrash.
For today's Cup drivers, the most frightening thing about Talladega is the “Big One,” a beast lurking in the shadows, poised to take out half the field in one metal-crunching, tire-screaming, smoke-choked megacrash. The Big One, the drivers say, is brought out by restrictor-plate racing. With more or less equal horsepower, no one car has a sizable advantage. So they inevitably end up in packs of twenty or more, running nose to tail, two or three abreast, inches apart at 190 mph.
Because Talladega is a points race, finishing is vital. Crashing can take a driver right out of the Cup championship competition. Driver Jeff Burton says that the primary objective at Talladega isn't necessarily winning—it's simply surviving. “You certainly go into the race with the mind-set of ‘Let's miss the big wreck,’” he says. “You have to think the big wreck is coming, and if you don't think the big wreck is coming, you haven't been watching racing very much. …You cannot finish forty-third in this race…and still win the championship.”
To gain an advantage, drivers “bump draft,” giving the car ahead a shove, which speeds up the front car and drags along the car that bumped it. All at three miles a minute. Veteran driver Geoff Bodine flat out doesn't like restrictor-plate racing at Talladega. “I think it's the most awful, dirtiest, nastiest, most dangerous racing in the whole wide world.”
After 350 miles of the Aaron's 499 and four brief cautions, it looked like the Spring 2005 edition of Talladega might be Big One–free. But then, on Lap 133, the Big One bit. Hard.
Although accounts vary, it's widely believed that Dale Earnhardt Jr., in the number 8 Budweiser Monte Carlo, was bump-drafting Mike Wallace's number 4 trying to get past Jimmie Johnson in the number 48, who was running inside Wallace. Johnson wasn't about to let Wallace get by and drifted up to block him. With nowhere to go, Wallace ran into Johnson, smashed into the wall, and then all hell broke loose. The three Chevys careened off one another, setting off a spectacular chain reaction of spinning, banging cars and smoking, shrieking tires. Before the cloud of burnt rubber cleared, twenty-eight of the cars were caught up, the bigg
est crash in NASCAR history.
(Overleaf): Talladega superspeedway rescue personnel look at the remains of some 22 cars that were involved in a wreck at Turn 1 during the Aaron's 499 race in Talladega, Alabama, Sunday, May 1, 2005. There was so much debris on the track officials red flagged the race for 45 minutes.(Right): NASCAR drivers Kevin Harvick (29) and Jeff Gordon (24) lead a pack of cars at the start of the race.
Some 22 cars were involved in the incident at Talladega Superspeedway, May 1, 2005. The race was won by Jeff Gordon.
NASCAR driver Jeff Gordon celebrates after winning the Aaron's 499 race.
Who was responsible? Dale Earnhardt Jr. blamed Jimmie Johnson, calling him an over-aggressive “idiot.” Johnson claimed it was all in a day's racing. “I think if you look at the overhead shot of it,” he insisted, “and you look at what the dynamics were of that, it's easy to see it. It's just guys racing two inches apart at 200 miles an hour. I mean, two inches isn't much. Once that's gone, you have a big wreck.”
Ten of the drivers went to the infirmary in the Talladega infield, and, amazingly, none were seriously injured. After a forty-three-minute delay to clean up the track and repair the safety barriers, the race resumed. Both Earnhardt and Johnson were able to rejoin the battle, but, unbelievably, the two were involved in another accident on Lap 187. After Jimmie lost control and hit the wall, he dropped down the track and ended up taking out both Dale Jr. and pole sitter Kevin Harvick.
The eventual race winner was Jeff Gordon, who'd started beside Harvick in the front row. Having won Talladega before, Gordon knew that starting at number two was just fine. In fact, starting on the pole could be part of the Talladega jinx—since 1985, only one pole sitter has won the race.