by Joe Garner
After the victory, Jeff attributed his success to staying out in front of the Big One, and to the knowledge he'd gained racing at Talladega over the years. “This is the type of racing where experience is really key,” Gordon said. “The more that I get used to watching my mirror, using the air, and having the kind of car I had today, I feel like I get better at restrictor-plate racing.”
As for the bump-drafting that caused the 2005 Big One, Cup contender Tony Stewart had a simple suggestion. “If they want us to stop bump-drafting, take the [restrictor] plates off.”
With the prospect of NASCAR taking the speed-robbing plates off practically nil, Talladega will remain one of the most exciting, and dangerous, races in the Cup Series, a haunted track where the Big One waits, looking to turn millions of dollars of machinery into steaming, smoking scrap metal.
1990 Bristol: Mikey's Miracle
While Michael Waltrip's 1990 spectacular car-shredding wallbanger at Bristol Motor Speedway wasn't the biggest wreck in NASCAR history, it was certainly one of the scariest and most violent. Both the fans and Michael's big brother Darrell, watching from the pits, couldn't help thinking, “It'll be a miracle if he walks away from that!”
Normally, this wouldn't have been much more than a typical Busch Series fender bender. Even as it was happening Waltrip was unworried. “We reached Lap 171 of the 250 laps in the race,” he said. “On the way to the front…I got on the outside of [Robert] Pressley. He didn't have a ton of experience, and…he moved over and hit my left front tire with his car and it shot me right into that wall. …When it hit, my mind was thinking, ‘This won't be any real big deal.’”
What Michael didn't see was a section of the retaining wall sticking out. It was just past an iron gate recessed into the wall that was used to allow ambulances to enter the track and infield traffic to exit. As Waltrip's passenger-side door hit the end of the concrete wall, the wall latched on to the car. In a few horrendous seconds, the number 30 Kool-Aid Pontiac practically exploded. It looked like it was made of tin foil and tissue paper as it disintegrated. The sheet metal peeling off, the roll cage tearing apart, the automotive debris pinwheeling in every direction, Michael slid down into the infield with nothing more to protect him than his driver's seat and a section of the roll cage.
After blacking out for a few seconds, he came to surrounded by extremely anxious people, including Darrell, who'd peeled what remained of the roof off his baby brother. For a moment, Michael didn't comprehend the commotion. “I remember as plain as day sitting there and a bunch of people messing with me. …I didn't understand why they were so tore up about the wreck. Later, I found out the biggest part of the car left intact was the seat I was sitting in. Where the motor was supposed to be, I saw I could slide right out. I slipped out the front and stood right up.” And, in fact, he raced the very next day.
How did Michael survive that horrifying crash? Certainly while he has NASCAR to thank for their stringent safety requirements, Waltrip believes it was a miracle. “There is no car built to withstand the crash that this thing had,” he insists. “There is no other way to answer how I could be fine, unless God was with me and His angels just didn't allow me to get hurt. I reaffirmed my faith in Jesus after that.”
Looking at the crash, it'd be hard to argue with Michael Waltrip's point of view. It is hard to figure out how anyone could walk away from a wreck as horrifying as his was without some kind of divine intervention.
Talladega 2003: Sadler's Flip-Flopping Ford
For over fifty years, one of the most appealing features of M&M's has been their “hard candy shell.” Well, some of that hard coating must have been applied to Elliott Sadler's number 38 M&M's Ford, because on September 29, 2003, Sadler walked away from one of NASCAR's nastiest-looking wrecks.
The EA Sports 500 couldn't have started better for Elliott. The second-generation racer from Emporia, Virginia, qualified on the pole at nearly 190 mph, ran in the top ten for 151 laps, and even led for 23 of them. But he wouldn't make it to the finish line.
On Lap 181 of the 188-lap race, Sadler was in third place holding his line in the middle of the track when Dale Earnhardt Jr. got a message on his radio. “I was on the outside line and they said protect the middle,” Dale recalls. “I turned down, I looked in the mirror and saw Elliott, and I turned back up. I think I might have spooked him into thinking I'm coming all the way down the middle lane.”
The car of Elliott Sadler (38) flies through the air down the backstretch of the Talladega Superspeedway in Talladega, Alabama, Sunday, September 28, 2003. Sadler was flown to a local hospital for observation.
It turns out Elliott was spooked by Earnhardt's maneuver. “I was coming down the back straightaway in the middle. …We had such a good run that I felt we could take the lead. I was looking at which line [race leader Michael Waltrip] was in, and all of a sudden, Junior just makes a hard left and I have to react to it, and then I cut across Kurt Busch's bumper.”
That was the end of the race for Elliott and the beginning of a horrifying accident. When he was forced in front of Busch, Kurt's number 97 Ford smashed into his left side and his car started flipping. Sadler remembers, “When it hit me I was like, ‘Oh my God,’ and then, ‘What's going to happen?’ And then all of a sudden it just gets real quiet and I'm looking at the dirt and the asphalt. The whole pirouette, or whatever I did, seemed in slow motion the whole time.”
As the horrified crowd watched, Sadler's car flipped violently end over end several times in the infield, finally coming to rest on its wheels. Miraculously, there was no Big One—all the other cars managed to avoid the flip-flopping Ford. Perhaps equally amazing was that, unlike a lot of previous crashes, the car did not spew sheet metal and tires all over the track. Crew members credited NASCAR's new tethering system, which ties the tires, hood, and trunk lid to the chassis.
As a testament to NASCAR's safety systems, two days after that horrible crash, Elliott Sadler was back in the driver's seat, testing replacement race cars in Kentucky.
Talladega 1998: Labonte Escapes a Big One to Take the Checkered Flag
There were 46 laps remaining in the 1998 DieHard 500 when an eerie, smoky silence drowned out the 34,000-horsepower roar at NASCAR's fastest and fiercest track. Talladega's 2.66 miles of high-banked asphalt had once again worked its black magic, and just three words of explanation were necessary: the big one.
Just a year earlier Mark Martin set an average speed record of 188.354 mph, completing a caution-free race at that same Alabama track in 2 hours, 39 minutes, and 18 seconds. Although the '98 edition had a couple of minor slowdowns—a yellow flag on Lap 109 for debris, and then again just 20 laps later to allow cleanup of oil from the blown engines of Johnny Benson and Kenny Irwin—another flat-out speed run to the finish was the story shaping up that day.
But with cars running inches apart at just a blink under 200 mph, it only takes a small wiggle in traffic to scramble the storyline.
The relative calm was shattered when Ward Burton tried to thread the needle near the front of the tightly bunched field. “I got my left front tires a few inches down on the apron and that got me loose,” the soft-spoken Virginia driver admitted afterwards. “I got out of the throttle but the car went up the track and hit the three.” That boot to Dale Earnhardt's left rear fender sent the black Monte Carlo zigzagging into Bill Elliott's Ford. Bobby Labonte, riding just ahead, watched in his rear-view mirror as things quickly went from bad to worse. “I saw the 94 car (Elliott) going the wrong way on the race track, and I knew it wasn't going to be good.”
Earnhardt, up on two wheels, and an upside-down Elliott slammed together into the wall and slid backwards at close to 150 mph toward the first turn. As eighteen more cars piled up behind them, flames sprayed from Elliott's engine into Earnhardt's driver's-side window. Elliott came away with a bruised sternum; Earnhardt, the last remaining Cup driver still wearing an open-face helmet, had second-degree burns to his face and neck. “It singed my hair and burned my must
ache a little bit. I'll have to grow some new ones,” Earnhardt told reporters after his post-crash medical checkup.
Bill Elliott #94 McDonald's Ford crashes on lap 141 as Bobby Labonte #18 Interstate Batteries Pontiac takes the lead, followed by Dale Jarrett #88 Quality Care/Ford Credit and Jeff Gordon #24 DuPont Chevrolet during the Diehard 500 on April 26, 1998 at the Talladega Superspeedway in Talladega, Alabama. Labonte finished first.
A red flag brought the Talladega track to a stand-still while crews cleared away the twisted wreckage. When the DieHard 500 went green nearly 30 minutes later, Bobby Labonte pulled off a delicate pass on older brother Terry with two laps remaining to take a hard-earned checked flag, and then told the assembled Victory Lane media contingent, “To finish a restrictor-plate race is a bonus, and to win one is even more of a bonus.”
Talladega 1993: Rusty Wallace's Flying Finish
For Rusty Wallace, 1993 was a year of extremes. On the one hand, he was a serious contender for the championship—he'd win ten races that year and finished in the top ten in twenty-one of the thirty-races. On the other hand, he suffered through the two worst crashes of his career—the most spectacular and the most serious.
Rusty started the year on a bum note. On Lap 169 of the opening race at Daytona, Derrike Cope and Michael Waltrip collided and together shoved Wallace into the backstretch grass. Rusty's number 2 Miller Pontiac barrel-rolled twice, flipped end over end, then twisted in the air eighteen more times. It looked terrifying, and when it was over, the car was utterly destroyed. Amazingly, Wallace escaped with a few stitches for cuts on his chin. “The one in Daytona, I had like twenty flips end over end and it wasn't real bad,” he remembered. “But the one at Talladega…just knocked my lights right out.”
That Talladega race was eight weeks after Daytona and Rusty had come back like a champ. He'd won four races, the last three consecutively. He was hell-bent on collecting every point he could, and when the race, delayed by a spring shower, came down to a two-lap dash, the competition was fearsome. It took the first lap of the restart to get the cars up to speed, and when the flag dropped it became a 190 mph demolition derby.
There was all kinds of bumping and banging, and when Mark Martin tried to pass him on the outside, Wallace put him into the wall. While they traded paint, Ernie Irvan and Dale Earnhardt were doing likewise and Irvan took the lead, forcing Earnhardt to drop back. In the next half-lap, Wallace managed to rear-end Jimmy Spencer, then sideswipe Dale Jarrett. Then, as they charged down the frontstretch toward the finish line, Earnhardt tried to pass Wallace and Wallace slid down to block him. With nowhere to go, Earnhardt smashed into Wallace's trunk and sent the number 2 car airborne. What followed was a horrific automotive ballet—with Rusty's car flipping and flapping and flying.
Unbelievably, the car did not stop until it had passed the finish line – airborne! It earned Wallace 6th place, an 8-inch pin in his wrist, and the blame for the accident, which he readily acknowledged.
Rusty remembers, “I went twenty-three times end over end and I woke up in a helicopter on the way to a hospital. I was pretty much alert through all the flipping. I just kept on saying to myself, ‘When is the damned car gonna come to rest?’”
Unbelievably, the car did not stop until it had passed the finish line—airborne! It earned Wallace sixth place, an eight-inch pin in his wrist, and the blame for the accident, which he readily acknowledged. “When I moved over to block Dale, he was going four or five miles per hour faster than I was,” he has said. “If it was anyone's fault, it was mine.”
Rusty Wallace raced the next week, but blew up his transmission when the brace he had to wear got caught on the shifter. In all, he figures that bad move at Talladega cost him two or three hundred points. He lost the Cup chase in 1993 by eighty points—to, wouldn't you know it, Dale Earnhardt!
Daytona 1988: The King's Worst Crash
In stock car racing, crashes are equal-opportunity catastrophes—even the King of NASCAR wasn't immune to the forces of high-speed physics and bad fortune. In the late 1980s, race cars at the Daytona International Speedway were regularly breaking the 200 mph barrier. In 1987 Bill Elliott won the pole and set the all-time qualifying record at that track, with an unimaginable 210.364 mph. These were cars racing at aircraft takeoff speeds, low-flying missiles with deadly disaster just a cut tire or steering bobble away.
Richard Petty begins to flip in his Pontiac after coming into contact with Phil Barkdoll's Ford, shown right. The car flipped 7 times down the race-way during the Daytona 500 auto race on February 14, 1988. Petty reportedly was in good condition at a local hospital with a possible broken ankle.
So in 1988, NASCAR decided to slow the cars down and instituted restrictor-plate racing at Daytona and Talladega. Restrictor plates are simple aluminum plates with holes in them that mount beneath the carburetor and cut down the amount of air that gets to the engine. Less air, less horsepower. It works. To a point.
It did lower the speeds—in '88 the pole position at Daytona went to Ken Schrader at 193.823, almost 17 mph slower than Elliott the year before. Average race speeds dropped from the 170s to the 150s and lower. The problem is, at that speed, the drivers can run nose to tail, three abreast, just scant inches apart—a triple-track freight train where the tiniest mistake can mean derailment and instant tragedy.
That's how Richard Petty suffered what he considers the worst accident of his long career. Heading down the frontstretch on Lap 104, Petty was tapped in the rear by Phil Barkdoll's Ford and the number 43 STP Pontiac got sideways. Before Richard could collect it, Barkdoll tagged him again, hard.
With nowhere to go, A. J. Foyt smacked into Richard's front fender. Up went the rear end of the Petty car, which pirouetted on its nose before slamming back to the concrete on its roof. Then it bounced and barrel-rolled along the catch fence in front of the grandstands with sheet metal and parts flying everywhere and fans ducking for cover. The car rolled four times, flipped, then came down right side up, only to be smashed into by Brett Bodine, spinning it four more times.
It was a truly horrifying sight, but Richard saw none of it. “I closed my eyes, held my breath, and then everything went black,” he remembers. “I guess I blacked out. …The next thing I remember was this guy stuck his head in the window and says, ‘How you doing?’ But I went blind. My eyes were open, but I couldn't see anything. I said, ‘I'm all right, but I can't see anything.’ He said, “Don't worry about it. It'll come back in three or four minutes.'”
Richard was rushed to the hospital, but unbelievably, before the race was over he was up and around, his eyesight and his love of racing nearly back to normal. He watched Bobby Allison win the 1988 Daytona 500 not from a hospital bed, but standing trackside.
Talladega 1987: Bobby Allison Flies Toward the Grandstands
Accidents are nothing out of the ordinary in NASCAR racing—they're as common as injury timeouts in football. But there are some accidents that have been so serious, so scary, that they have forced the France family to redefine the rules of racing. Bobby Allison's high-flying act during the May edition of the 1987 Talladega 500 was one of them.
Another reason had to do with pure speed. Bill Elliott set a now untouchable NASCAR qualifying-lap record of 212.809 miles per hour, and during that run he hit a top speed of over 230 mph, nearly four miles per minute!
With the whole field wailing around the track at over 200 mph, the fans were guaranteed an event to remember. They didn't have long to wait. On Lap 21, Bobby Allison's number 22 Miller Buick was flying down the frontstretch at around 205 mph when his engine blew. A piece of debris skipped under the car and punctured his left rear tire. The car slewed sideways, got backwards, then launched itself off the concrete heading for the grandstands.
Airborne at close to 200 mph, the car flew into the twenty-foot-tall safety barrier, ripping a hundred feet of the steel fencing off its posts and spewing high-priced shrapnel onto the track and into the crowd before coming in for a hard landing. Another few
inches higher and that 3,400-pound race car would have flown over the fence and into the stands where it almost certainly would have killed dozens and hurt hundreds. As it was, there were numerous injuries and one unfortunate race fan lost her eye.
Unbelievably, Bobby Allison was shaken up but not seriously hurt and was able to walk away from his demolished car. Since the cut tire turned the car backwards then airborne, he had been one of the few folks at Talladega who hadn't seen the accident. “It wasn't scary to me in the car,” Allison said. “But I knew it was a bad wreck going on. I was really hoping that I wouldn't get hurt or hurt anybody else.”
Allison's fence climb scared the Frances and their insurers. After reviewing the tapes, their provider insisted that NASCAR find a way to reduce the cars' speed to under 200 mph and protect the spectators or lose their coverage. Thus restrictor-plate racing was born, which did what it promised—it kept the speeds under 200. But it has also been one of the most hotly debated aspects of the sport ever since.
In spite of some drivers' objections to the horse-power-robbing plates, Bobby Allison prefers to err on the side of caution. “My opinion is that the restrictor plate is the best, most fair thing that NASCAR ever did,” he said. “If we left the engines unrestricted, we'd have cars going 240 mph and they'd be landing forty rows into the grandstands.”
Daytona 1984: Ricky Rudd's Crash at the Clash
In baseball, the title “Iron Man” belongs to Cal Ripken Jr., who played in an astonishing 2,632 consecutive games. It's a record that will likely never be broken. Likewise the incredible NASCAR Cup record of 752 consecutive starts. That unreachable streak belongs to NASCAR iron man Ricky Rudd. But at the 1984 Busch Clash at Daytona that streak very nearly came to an early and tragic end.