Speed, Guts, and Glory

by Joe Garner

  Brickhouse, himself a member of the PDA, had a tough decision. Chrysler had offered him a ride in a factory Dodge vacated by a striking racer—an invitation Brickhouse saw as a stepping-stone to sponsorship.

  “I got involved in racing solely for that chance,” he would say later. “It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for me.”

  He broke the boycott.

  On Sunday afternoon, Brickhouse, sitting ninth in a motley, thrown-together field of Grand National drivers, minor-league competitors, and rank amateurs, fired up his purple number 99 factory Dodge and hit the frontstretch. To preserve tires, speeds were kept to about 175 mph. But with eleven laps left Brickhouse couldn't restrain himself. He put the hammer down and blasted through the field, taking the checkered by a full seven seconds.

  Brickhouse was elated, Chrysler was happy, and Big Bill was positively ecstatic. France joined the beaming Brickhouse in the winner's circle, where he placed a wreath of roses around the newcomer's neck and declared bromidically, “Winners never quit, and quitters never win!”

  “I thought I was doing the right thing,” Brickhouse said later. “But running that race hurt my career.”

  In fact, it effectively ended it. When the PDA's top drivers returned to the fold weeks later, Chrysler welcomed them with open arms, and Brickhouse was left out in the cold. The victory that should have been a spring-board to a top-notch ride instead became a death knell.

  Having forever earned the enmity of NASCAR's best-known drivers, and lacking the cash and connections to stay competitive, Brickhouse would run only thirteen more times before retiring in 1982. He never won again.

  Ron Bouchard: A New England Yankee in a Southerners' Sport

  Ron Bouchard liked to think of himself as an anomaly, a New England Yankee in a Southerners' sport, but he had all the bona fides of any 'baccy-chomping, pedal-mashing good ol' boy from the Piedmont plateau.

  The son of a long-haul trucker, Bouchard grew up in the dingy Massachussetts mill town of Fitchburg, known more for cultivating football talent than road warriors. But he developed an early passion for speed, fed by his father, who sponsored a team on the local modified circuit.

  The story runs that with the elder Bouchard on the road and his ace driver laid low by the flu, fourteen-year-old Ron jumped behind the wheel and piloted the car to victory. From that point on he did little else, winning minor-league stock and modified championships throughout the 1970s.

  Bouchard joined the Cup Series ranks in 1981, and over his first ten races quickly established a boom-or-bust pattern—five times the hard-charger either wrecked or trashed engines, the other five he finished in the top ten.

  So it was anyone's guess where he'd wind up in the August 2 running of the Talladega 500 at Alabama's notoriously unpredictable superspeedway. Since opening, Talladega had had thirteen winners in thirteen years. Nine of them would be competing against the thirty-two-year-old Bouchard—including heavy hitters Bobby Allison, Darrell Waltrip, Richard Petty, and Neil Bonnett.

  Allison managed to put the race in a throttlehold for most of the afternoon, dominating 105 of the 168 laps before engine trouble dampened his fire with just six laps to go. Waltrip then charged to the lead, followed closely by Terry Labonte. Ron Bouchard was in third.

  Coming into the race's final turn, Labonte went high to the outside of Waltrip, pulling even. The New England freshman dove low. With 75,000 fans rising for the checkered, they came tearing down the frontstretch neck and neck, three-wide. Bouchard managed to give it just enough, and his number 47 Buick nosed out Waltrip by a foot, Labonte by two. It was one of the closest finishes in NASCAR history.

  “They told me it would be impossible to win here,” Bouchard said. “But I used positive thinking to keep myself up to believe I could win. It's the happiest day of my life.”

  Perhaps the gift of positive thinking had a short shelf life. Or maybe the racing gods were just feeling magnanimous that day. Whatever the case, Ron Bouchard would never win again. He would, however, finish in the top ten three more times that season (and 48 more over the next 149 races) and collect 1981 Rookie of the Year honors. His victory made him only the third man since 1957 to win a race as a rookie.

  Three months into the 1987 season, Bouchard hung it up, taking his career $1.3 million in earnings back to his native Fitchburg, where he opened a chain of car dealerships. In 1998 he was inducted into the New England Auto Racers Hall of Fame.

  Ron Bouchard (47) beats out Waltrip and Allison by a nose.

  Mark Donohue: Captain Nice

  Well into the 1970s NASCAR drivers were still a blue-collar, bluegrass bunch—tough customers from the mills and farms and factory towns of the rugged Southeast, self-taught and self-reliant. That is to say, most of them hadn't graduated from an Ivy League university with a degree in mechanical engineering.

  Mark Donohue wasn't most racers.

  They might have ribbed Donohue for his crew cut and egghead credentials—he was even tagged with the syrupy sobriquet “Captain Nice” for his mild manner—but when it came time to put the pedal down the Philadelphia-area native and Brown University alum was as hardnosed as anybody in the pomade-and-chaw crowd.

  Mark Donohue celebrates in victory lane after winning the 1973 Winston Western 500 at Riverside Raceway.

  “There was a lot of tiger in Mark,” said car designer Carroll Smith. “You know the old story about engineers don't make good race drivers because they don't want to hurt the machinery? Bullshit.”

  By the time Donohue threw his hat into the Cup Series ring in the early '70s, he was already a racing legend, having been named Indy 500 Rookie of the Year (1969) and having won the Indianapolis 500 (1972), the U.S. Road Racing Championship twice ('67 and '68), and the Trans-Am title three times ('68, '69, and '70).

  His versatility—he ran road courses and ovals in Camaros, Porsches, Ferraris, Javelins, and McLarens—and his engineering brilliance (“the unfair advantage,” one reporter called it) had made him one of the most feared competitors in motor sports. The innovative Donohue could take apart a high-performance machine and rebuild it with his eyes closed, tweaking it just enough to give him the winning edge.

  For Captain Nice, NASCAR was just one more mountain demanding to be scaled.

  It didn't take long to reach the top. In just his fifth race, at Riverside's 2.6-mile road course, he jumped out to an early lead on past course champions Bobby Allison, Richard Petty, and Ray Elder. Midway through the 191-lap race, Donohue's red, white, and blue number 16 American Motors Matador began to pull away for good.

  On January 21, 1973, after nearly five grueling hours of racing—twenty-four of the forty cars died early deaths—Donohue crossed the finish line to take the Winston Western 500, more than a full lap ahead of runner-up Allison and two ahead of third-place Elder. It was a dominating performance, one that signaled the arrival of a potent new force in NASCAR.

  But Donohue decided one was enough. After winning the Can-Am title later that year and running just one more Cup contest at Atlanta, he retired from racing. “I'm almost thirty-six and feel that I'm at the absolute top of my abilities,” he said. “Now is the time to stop.”

  Owner Roger Penske would coax him out of retirement a year later to take a run at Formula One racing, but it wasn't to be. While turning practice laps for the Austrian Grand Prix in August 1975, Donohue lost control of his car, flew off the track, and smashed into a utility pole. He never regained consciousness and died at the age of thirty-eight.

  Shorty Rollins: NASCAR's First Ever Rookie of the Year

  Lloyd “Shorty” Rollins's NASCAR career was as brief as his nickname might indicate, but the Texas speedballer didn't need a whole lot of time to make a big splash in the racing world.

  As a grocer in Corpus Christi in the late 1950s, Rollins had taken up racing for kicks, running Acapulco-to-El Paso rallies with his brother and mechanic, Dub, before turning his lead foot loose on the quarter-mile clays.

  By 1957 he had run cir
cles around the competition four years straight in the Southwest Late Model Series and decided that driving fast and turning left beat the heck out of hawking cucumbers for a living. In early 1958 he packed up the family and headed east for Fayetteville, North Carolina, to try to turn a few bucks on the wild and woolly NASCAR circuit.

  With dismal showings in his first three starts, Rollins wondered if maybe he should have stuck to minding the store. But top ten finishes in the next ten races convinced him, along with the rest of the NASCAR field, that he belonged with the big boys.

  On July 16, 1958, he would plunk down his calling card at tiny State Line Speedway in Busti, New York, beating out twenty-two others, including defending points champion Lee Petty, for his first Grand National victory.

  Rollins would finish the season fourth in points (close behind future Hall of Famers Petty and Buck Baker), with twelve top five finishes and twenty-two top tens, after running just twenty-nine of the year's fifty-one races. His muscular driving earned him more than $13,000, as well as NASCAR's first ever Rookie of the Year award.

  Rollins's 1958 win at Busti would be his last, at least in a points race. But he's perhaps better known for his February 10, 1959, non-points victory in a 100-mile convertible qualifier for the inaugural Daytona 500. After scrambling to drop a borrowed engine into his Ford, Shorty barely made it to the start line before the green flag dropped.

  Rollins, Glen Wood, Marvin Panch, and twenty-one-year-old rookie Richard Petty would pass the lead around five times over the last ten laps before Shorty bogarted it, edging out Wood and Petty by less than a car length. In doing so, he secured a place in the record books as the first driver to win at the now legendary track.

  Two days later, the twenty-nine-year-old rising star fried his motor halfway through the 500. Beset by mechanical problems, he would run only nine more races that year, and just four more the next, never regaining the magic of his debut season.

  In September 1960, Rollins bid goodbye to NASCAR for good, retiring with his family to Pensacola, Florida, where he ran a successful fence business until his death in 1998.

  Rollins, Glen Wood, Marvin Panch, and the rookie Richard Petty would pass the lead around five times over the last 10 laps before Shorty bogarted it, edging out Wood and Petty by less than a car-length. In doing so, he secured a place in the record books as the first driver to win at the now legendary track.

  “My wife and I decided it wasn't the kind of life we wanted,” Rollins said. “It was great for the single guys out there, but not for me.”

  Phil Parsons: Victim of the Talladega Curse

  Superstitions run deep in NASCAR. Over the years drivers have engaged in endless hand-wringing over the jinx potential of green cars, peanuts, women in the pits, and a host of other vexing agents of voodoo. By the late 1980s Talladega Superspeedway had joined that list, with a hexology all its own.

  Not only was the Alabama track notorious for its harrowing multicar pileups and deadly freak accidents off the oval, it also harbored a “kiss of death” for first-time winners. By 1987 all four drivers who had logged their first Cup victory at Talladega since 1969 had left the sport without winning again. Bobby Hillin Jr., who visited Victory Lane in 1986, would eventually suffer the same fate.

  Driver Phil Parsons was no stranger to the track's treacherousness. In 1983, his first year in Cup competition, he'd nearly given up the ghost when his Pontiac flipped and burst into flames, precipitating a massive eleven-car wreck. He escaped with a cracked shoulder blade. But five years later to the day he would come face-to-face with the curse.

  The Detroit native and younger brother of racer Benny Parsons was enjoying the best season of his career in 1988. He'd had one top five and four top ten showings in the first eight races and would eventually finish ninth in the points. What he didn't have was a win. Not in 1988, not ever. But he loved racing at Talladega, and with a powerful Leo Jackson Oldsmobile under him, he figured he had his best shot yet in May's Winston 500.

  His assumptions proved correct. Parsons would lead 37 laps early before dropping back to conserve energy for a late-race charge. Running second behind Geoff Bodine with 50 laps to go, he radioed his crew, asking cockily, “Should I blow his doors off now or should I wait?” He'd grant Bodine 15 further laps of daylight before leaving him in a cloud of dust, and would then hold off a final tail-whacking challenge from a game Bobby Allison (who collapsed in exhaustion after the race) to capture his first win by 0.21 seconds.

  “I've always loved this racetrack,” he told reporters afterwards. “I loved it before the accident in 1983 and I loved it before we won today. This is my favorite racetrack and always has been.”

  Had Parsons known what black fate Talladega had in store for him, he might have reconsidered his unbridled declarations of love. For, like the five unfortunate souls before him, Faithful Phil would find himself eternally iced out of the winner's circle, condemned to wallow in NASCAR's backfields for the remainder of his ninety-two races, until his retirement in 1997.

  Parsons would, however, continue to run in NASCAR's Busch Series, winning not once but twice in sixteen years of competition. He would eventually follow his more famous brother, Benny, into broadcasting, working as a television race analyst for NASCAR's Craftsman Truck Series.

  Talladega has not claimed another first-timer. Yet.

  Phil Parsons holds the winners trophy after taking the checkered flag in the Winston 500 at Talladega.

  Lake Speed: A Banner Day at Darlington

  NASCAR driver Lake Speed notched a few quirky “firsts” during his racing career. He was the first American to win a World Karting Championship, he was the first to pilot the campy Hormel-bankrolled Ford known as the SPAM-o-nator, and he was one of the first born-again Christian racers to openly engage in trackside proselytizing.

  And at Darlington Raceway on March 27, 1988, after nearly nine years of failed attempts, he collected his very first Cup Series win—a fact interesting only in that it would also be his last.

  Which isn't to say that this son of Jackson, Mississippi, didn't run close to the pack's alpha dogs. After all, when your last name is your profession, you'd better be good at what you do. Over a career spanning nineteen years and 402 races, Speed managed to log seventy-five top ten finishes—including a second-place nail-biter at the 1985 Daytona 500, where he lost by just 0.94 seconds—and earn more than $4.5 million.

  But he was also one of the sport's perpetual dark horses, a friendly aw-shucks gentleman who hit more than a few bad patches along the road and never complained.

  After being canned by the RahMoc race team in early 1986, the thirty-eight-year-old father of four marshaled all his assets and started his own operation. It was tough going. Speed sat out the remainder of '86 and raced only a limited schedule in '87. But by '88 he'd secured sponsorship and was back in the game.

  “It's been a long, tough struggle. It's never been easy,” he said. “Sometimes I began to wonder if I was ever going to make it.”

  But there he was, lined up at Darlington for the fifth race of the season, just three weeks after posting the second red-ribbon finish of his career, at Rockingham. Things were looking up.

  Speed, starting eighth, managed to avoid two nasty multicar wrecks in the TranSouth 500's early going and began methodically working his way to the front. He'd get there three times before falling back, but stayed cozy with the leaders as the point changed hands an additional fourteen times.

  By Lap 319 of 367, Speed was running second behind Sterling Marlin, who went in for tires. But a bungled pit held Marlin back, giving Speed plenty of breathing room with 49 laps to go. Alan Kulwicki took over second, but windshield visibility problems kept him from mounting a serious challenge.

  By Lap 319 of 367, Speed was running second behind Sterling Marlin, who went in for tires. But a bungled pit held Marlin back, giving Speed plenty of breathing room with 49 laps to go. Alan Kulwicki took over second, but windshield visibility problems kept him from mounti
ng a serious challenge. By the time Speed reached the finish, he'd put a full 19 seconds between himself and Kulwicki, and Davey Allison, Bill Elliott, and Marlin came in 3-4-5.

  “To win that first race is a tremendous relief,” Speed said afterwards. “I always knew I had the ability to do it.”

  On Monday, Speed's garage was bombarded with congratulatory calls from well-wishers. “It was good and great to get that first win, but it isn't anything real different,” he'd say after all the adulation. “My life's not going to change.”

  Buddy Shuman: A Legend in His Own Time

  Buddy Shuman was a true NASCAR character, a good-time Charlie whose diminutive stature was eclipsed by a larger-than-life personality and whose legend far outlasted his short career.

  Shuman lived hard and died young, but in his brief time he managed to rack up an impressive résumé. He was an ace mechanic, a successful driver, a car owner, a NASCAR inspection official, and an automotive design liaison to the Ford Motor Company, in addition to being a notorious carouser with a firm devotion to Canadian whiskey.

  Like many in NASCAR's pioneer class, Shuman made his early bread as a bootlegger, albeit one whose failure to outrun the law earned him a bullet through the neck and a free pass to a North Carolina chain gang.

  Upon his release, Shuman joined the ranks of Bruton Smith's fledgling National Stock Car Racing Association, under whose auspices he won dozens of modified races and nabbed the 1948 stock car championship. As his reputation grew, he was courted by Big Bill France, whose NASCAR organization, formed in 1947, was battling Smith's for control of the Southeastern tracks.

  A true NASCAR character, Shuman lived every day to the fullest.

  When Smith's operation folded in 1951, Shuman brought his considerable talent to NASCAR and in his debut Grand National season scored a perfect seven top ten finishes in seven races. He also quickly gained renown as an affable dipsomaniac and jaw-wagger, always good for a droll quote.