by Joe Garner
Perhaps it shouldn't be surprising that he broke the record at the same time that other racers were shunning him; after all, he had spent a lifetime over-coming adversity and obstacles. Isaac was the second youngest of nine kids and lost both parents while still young—his father died when he was six, his mother when he was sixteen. He dropped out of school at thirteen and spent much of his youth bouncing from one unsatisfying job to the next (working in a sawmill, then on an ice truck, in a pool hall, and a cotton mill). Even when he discovered racing, Isaac continued struggling—despite winning races against the likes of Ned Jarrett, David Pearson, and Ralph Earnhardt in 1958, he had a tough time gaining traction. Several times his career got shoved to the side of the road for an array of reasons—mechanical problems, crashes, disputes with his backers, and feuds between NASCAR, his backers, and car companies.
In 1966, Isaac hit a new low, as a man without a car or team. His career seemed finished. But the next year he hooked up with K&K Insurance and his life shifted into high gear. He finished fourteenth in points in 1967 but jumped to second in 1968, actually leading the chase for much of the year.
Finally he'd proven himself as a driver, but that didn't mean he was one of the boys. Even in the macho, be-your-own-man world of Southern racing, Isaac was considered independent…too much so, in fact. Fellow drivers like Richard Petty thought him aloof, and in 1969 when they formed the short-lived Professional Drivers Association to challenge some of NASCAR's practices only one top driver was left out: Bobby Isaac.
Isaac's feelings were hurt but he shrugged it off with his best performance to date. Although he finished just sixth in points (NASCAR based points on race distance and Isaac ran many short races), he won seventeen races, more than any driver that year, including his first superspeedway win in the Texas 500. He even won the National Motorsports Press Association's Most Popular Driver award, which must have been rewarding considering the drivers' union debacle. The following season, Isaac would produce his greatest success of all, winning the NASCAR Cup season with eleven more wins. But it was his twenty pole positions in 1969 that landed Isaac on the inside…of the NASCAR record book.
Bill Elliott: NASCAR's Fastest Driver
There was only one man who could drive faster than Bill Elliott and that was Elliott himself.
Elliott was always at the front of the pack pushing the boundaries at the intersection of speed and safety. When he took to the course in Talladega to qualify for the Winston 500 on April 30, 1987, no one had challenged the speed record of 212.229 mph he'd set in the qualifier on that very track the previous year.
And no one else would match that old mark. Bobby Allison's Buick LeSabre topped out at 211.797, and his son Davey Allison, who'd eventually win the race that Sunday, finished third on the Thursday qualifying round at 210.610.
But Elliott, a six-foot-one, 185-pounder from Dawsonville, Georgia, was not intimidated by his old mark. Supported by his father, George, Elliott and his brothers Ernie and Dan had pursued racing with unbridled ferocity. He'd entered his first NASCAR Cup race in 1976, earned his first pole position in 1981, and by the following year had the financial backing to race the entire circuit. He captured his first victory in 1983 and by 1985 was a speed demon to be reckoned with, racing to eleven pole positions and eleven victories that year, earning the nickname “Million-Dollar Bill” in reference to his prodigious winnings.
In his Ford Thunderbird, Elliott tore around the 2.66-mile high-banked oval in just 44.998 seconds. That averaged out to 212.809 mph and a new record.
The race that Sunday would ensure the endurance of Elliott's one-lap mark. With the drivers struggling to maintain control over their increasingly powerful machines, defending champion Bobby Allison endured one of the most terrifying crashes ever as his car lifted into the air, back end first, then smashed into a fence and sent parts into the stands where four people were injured. The race was delayed for two and a half hours.
In the aftermath of this accident NASCAR introduced carburetor restrictor plates.
Elliott would go on to make a career of setting speed records under various conditions and at assorted tracks, all while amassing forty-four victories and fifty-five pole positions, placing him in the all-time top twenty and top ten respectively. Equally impressive was that he remained an inherently good guy, winning the National Motorsports Press Association's Most Popular Driver award for a record sixteen straight years—stopping only when he felt compelled to take his name off the ballot so others might have a chance to win.
Bill Elliott in action at Talladega, 1987.
Richard Petty: The Babe Ruth of NASCAR
In 1967, NASCAR needed a leader. It got a King. Richard Petty had emerged as a star in 1962, but just three years later he'd left NASCAR for drag racing over a feud between NASCAR and Chrysler (which made his car) about engine size. He returned in 1966, winning his second Daytona 500, but NASCAR was again plagued by similar problems with Ford's drivers.
By 1967, order had been restored, but questions lingered about NASCAR's future. With its image damaged, with original stars like Lee Petty, Fireball Roberts, Ned Jarrett, and others done or nearly done, and with attendance falling, could the sport rebound and still command an audience? Even Richard Petty himself said, “If there is any glamour in the sport, I haven't found it.”
But then Petty climbed in his blue-and-red number 43 and began his heralded march of triumphs. In that season he won twenty-seven races, captivating race fans and bringing new ones into the stands. Sure, that record owes its existence to the fact that he raced forty-eight times that year but still, twenty-seven of forty-eight is a remarkable percentage. (He also had eleven other top five finishes.) Early in the season he broke his father Lee's NASCAR record of fifty-four career wins. But that would not even be the highlight of his season.
Petty's most remarkable accomplishment in 1967 was the one that had nothing to do with the length of the season: from August to October of that year, he won ten straight races.
By comparison, no driver in the post–1972 era has won even five straight—Petty and Bobby Allison each won five straight in 1971 and David Pearson won nine of ten that he entered in 1973, but he skipped numerous races in between. The hoopla these days when a driver wins four straight illuminates just how unimaginable winning ten straight is.
Petty won at Winston-Salem, Columbia, Savannah, Darlington, Hickory, Richmond, Beltsville, Hillsboro, Martinsville, and finally North Wilkesboro; he earned six pole positions along the way. Finally, at Charlotte Motor Speedway Petty fell and Buddy Baker won. The King had lost, but everyone in NASCAR was shouting, “Long live the King!”
He became national news. After the streak ended newspapers were noting that Petty had finished second in a race, not even bothering to mention the winner. And since his ability to charm the media equaled his ability to outrace rival drivers, he became the Babe Ruth of NASCAR, both for his larger-than-life statistics and for the way he helped revive the sport. With his cowboy hat and sunglass, Petty was definitely his own man with his own image. He became, quite simply, as his new nickname pronounced, the King.
Richard Petty in his blue and red #43, battling door to door during his amazing winning streak in 1967.
Andretti/Foyt: Daytona and Indy Champions
Mario Andretti and A. J. Foyt stopped speaking to each other decades ago for a variety of reasons, but they've always had plenty in common: they're two of the greatest drivers of all time, in terms of longevity and dominance. Yet when their names come up it's rarely about stock cars. So what are they doing in a chapter on NASCAR record breakers?
Mario Andretti and A. J. Foyt stopped speaking to each other decades ago for a variety of reasons but they've always had plenty in common: they're two of the greatest drivers of all time, in terms of longevity and dominance.
Well, that's another thing they have in common—they were also among the most versatile drivers of all time, succeeding behind the wheel of virtually every type of race car
imaginable. And that's why they are the only two drivers in history to win both of America's two most famous races, the Indy 500 and the Daytona 500.
Mario Andretti tries out the bubbly in Victory Lane after winning the 1967 Daytona 500.
Andretti is the more unlikely of the two to have pulled off the feat, yet he did it first. He gained his first Indy championship in 1966 and would win it three more times through the years. But he only won one Indianapolis 500, in 1969, his second championship year. That was actually two years after his crowning NASCAR moment in 1967 when he won the Daytona 500.
A. J. Foyt holds a flag and is kissed by two 76 girls after winning the Daytona 500 at the Daytona Speedway on February 14, 1971 in Daytona Beach, Florida.
Although it may be surprising that Andretti won only one Indy 500, it's more surprising that he won the Daytona race—that was at the start of a year in which one driver, Richard Petty, would rule NASCAR in an unprecedented manner, winning twenty-seven races. He had already won the season opener. Andretti, by contrast, would never again taste success in NASCAR Cup racing. He had raced in only four NASCAR events before that year and competed only fourteen times all told—in fact, outside of that huge win he'd never again finish in the top five.
Still, no one could deny his golden moment. While most of the biggest names were plagued by engine, clutch, and oil problems—Petty (eighth place), Bobby Isaac (nineteenth), David Pearson (twenty-fourth), Cale Yarborough (thirty-ninth), and Bobby Allison (fortieth)—Andretti led for 112 of the 200 laps enroute to victory.
Foyt finished just thirty-seventh that year, but 1967 would also mark his third year winning the Indy 500. And he'd shown he wasn't just a NASCAR dilettante—he'd already won two NASCAR races and had three other top fives. In fact, Foyt would post respectable overall Cup-level numbers, driving 128 races in his career and pulling in twenty-nine top fives, which included seven wins. His peak would be 1971 and 1972, when he drove thirteen races, won four, and had nine total top five finishes. His second-to-last of those wins would be at Daytona. On a day when Petty, Yarborough, and the other elite drivers struggled again with car problems, Foyt led for a whopping 167 laps and took the checkered flag a full lap ahead of second-place finisher Charlie Glotzbach.
Both men would go on to other big wins on other tracks—Andretti in Formula One, Foyt at Le Mans—but it would be their unique achievement at America's two premier races that would land them in the record book together, forever.
Dale Jr. Tames Talladega
Racing at Talladega—with its restrictor plates, emphasis on aerodynamics, and penchant for big wrecks—is supposed to be one of Cup racing's most formidable tasks. But in 2001 and 2002 Dale Earnhardt Jr. made it look easy, winning three straight times on the 2.66-mile track to tie the record Buddy Baker set back in 1976.
It was only when Junior tried breaking the record, in the April 2003 Aaron's 499, that he experienced the full depth of the challenges of winning at this Alabama superspeedway.
Earnhardt's day got off to a rocky start, which almost meant no start at all. First, several members of his crew forgot to change their clocks for daylight savings time and arrived an hour late. Then they discovered water in the oil tank and, worried about a leak, rushed through a last-minute engine change. As a result, Earnhardt, who'd qualified thirteenth, started his familiar number 8 Budweiser Chevrolet dead last among the forty-three cars.
Not a good beginning for a driver who'd begun the season in a rough patch, finishing just thirty-sixth in the Daytona 500, thirty-third in Rockingham, and sixteenth in Bristol—even his two second-place finishes felt frustrating because Earnhardt had thought he would win those drives.
For the first half of the race, Earnhardt felt his car was compromised, especially because there was plenty of gouging going on amongst the highly competitive front-runners—this race featured forty-three lead changes among sixteen drivers. “I don't think I've ever torn up a car like we did today at a [restrictor] plate track,” he said afterwards. “You had to really be tough or get knocked the hell out of the way.”
But it was about to get a lot messier. On just the fourth lap there was a doozy of a crash when Ryan Newman's front tire blew and Mark Martin slammed into him—all told twenty-seven cars were caught up in the wreck. Earnhardt did a fine job of navigating his red Monte Carlo through the wreckage, but took enough of a hit to the car's nose from debris that he required a whopping eleven pit stops in the first twenty laps.
Dale Earnhardt Jr. in the #8 Budweiser Chevrolet passes Matt Kenseth in the #17 Dewalt Ford for the lead during the NASCAR Winston Cup Aaron's 499 on April 6, 2003 at Talladega Superspeedway in Talladega, Alabama.
There was little doubt that Earnhardt was one of the tough ones. This was his chance to prove he could win not only as a front-runner but in come-from-behind fashion. It never got any easier for him and by the end Earnhardt was ensnared in a major controversy, but he had his record.
With three and a half laps remaining, Earnhardt made his move to the front, driving inside the dueling leaders Jimmie Johnson and Matt Kenseth on the backstretch. On the path, Earnhardt's tires went below the yellow line on the track's inside edge, which is against the rules in restrictor-plate races. When Earnhardt was not penalized, the other drivers howled long and loud in protest, with some claiming NASCAR favored the son of racing's favorite son. But NASCAR officials, who would not show the footage to the media, claimed Earnhardt was already past his two rivals when his left side tires touched the yellow line.
On the track, Earnhardt and Kenseth drove neck and neck for another lap before Earnhardt caught a big aerodynamic draft from Kevin Harvick and pulled away. After a grueling afternoon, Junior had the eighth win of his career and a record fourth straight at Talladega.
David Pearson at the Pole
David Pearson could never quite keep up reputation-wise with his main rival Richard Petty. The King overshadowed him, but Pearson, who often ran only the big-money races, not the whole season, still racked up an impressive list of accomplishments, including three Cup championships, the second most all-time wins with 105, and 113 poles. But there was one arena in which Pearson undeniably outshone Petty.
When it came to qualifying at the Charlotte Motor Speedway, Pearson was in a class by himself, piling up fourteen poles including an amazing eleven straight during a five-year span from October 1973 through October 1978.
Pearson's career began in 1960 but really took off in 1968 when he posted twenty-seven wins and thirty second-places in a two-year span. But he was no flash in the pan, winning forty-three races from 1973 through 1978. Driving the Wood Brothers number 21 Ford in that era, Pearson was primed for the kind of speed it took to grab the pole at Charlotte's 1.5-mile superspeedway.
“The Wood Brothers had the car set up on the edge,” he once said, explaining that they used many little tricks like adding special grease to the wheel bearings. “If something had happened and I had to hit the brakes, I wouldn't have had any. They were pushing everything to the limit.”
With Pearson making the pole his personal possession, fans started skipping the qualifiers since they knew the outcome. That rattled track president Humpy Wheeler, who became desperate to “Pearson proof” the process and give someone else a shot at winning. Wheeler changed the qualifying from two laps to three and then to four, hoping that somewhere in there Pearson would blow it. Finally, Wheeler tinkered with the track itself, taking the hump out of Turns 3 and 4.
Wheeler actually went so far as to tell Pearson, “I've got you now.” Except he didn't. Pearson won yet another pole and afterwards made sure to tell Wheeler (and the press), “Humpy, you fixed the wrong turn.”
In the end, there was nothing Wheeler could do to stop Pearson. It wasn't until he broke off with the Wood Brothers after the 1978 season that Pearson relinquished his record-breaking hold on the pole position in Charlotte.
David Pearson leads the way during action in the 1974 Charlotte World 600.
Kyle Busch,
driver of the #5 Hendrick Motorsports Kellogg's Chevrolet, celebrates after winning the NASCAR Nextel Cup Series Sony HD 500 on September 4, 2005 at California Speedway in Fontana, California.
Busch the Younger Is the Youngest
Kyle Busch has always set a fast pace. On September 4, 2005, his speedy arrival at the finish line landed him in the record books.
Kyle began driving Legend Cars at age thirteen and winning championships in Las Vegas soon after. At sixteen Kurt Busch's younger brother won ten late model races, but he was banned from another race because it was sponsored by Marlboro cigarettes, which he was too young to even purchase. Soon afterwards, NASCAR raised its major-series age minimum to eighteen, knocking Busch out of a Craftsman Truck race even though he'd been the fastest qualifier.
Busch, who graduated high school early to pursue racing, competed in the American Speed Association until he was old enough for NASCAR. He joined the Hendrick racing team, and in 2004, while his brother was winning the Cup championship, Kyle won five Busch Series races. In February 2005, Busch, averaging 188.245 mph in his number 5 Chevy, became the youngest driver ever to earn a Cup pole position in the Auto Club 500 at California Speedway—even though he was too young to drink a beer made by the company that sponsors the pole trophy, Budweiser. He was still nineteen; the previous youngest winners, Brian Vickers and Donald Thomas, had both been twenty.
But the best was still to come. On September 4, back at the California Speedway for the Sony HD 500, Busch, at twenty years, four months, and two days, broke Thomas's five-decade-old mark, becoming the youngest driver ever to win. (Thomas was four days older in 1952 at his first win.)