Twenty years ago – has it really been that long? Seems like it was just a week or maybe a year ago. Twenty years since we lost the biggest star in the history of the sport. Thankfully his death wasn’t in vain. The safety innovations that were brought to the sport in the months and …
1. 1985 Bill Elliott won plenty of races and money and even earned a couple really cool nicknames in 1985. But the big prize eluded the red-headed Georgia leadfoot that year. Elliott came into 1985 having won a total of four NASCAR Cup Series races during the previous two seasons, but proved to be almost …
Hey Boy Blue, can’t you hear all the noise? It’s for you, all the town’s waiting there. – Jeff Lynne It seems like ancient history now, but last week at Charlotte, Chase Elliott finally broke through with his first Cup win of 2020, shortly after edging out Kyle Busch for the Truck Series win at the same …
NASCAR’s last great rivalry couldn’t have been between two more different drivers. In one corner, there was Dale Earnhardt, the blue-collar Intimidator, who was flirting with Richard Petty’s all-time mark of seven championships in the early and mid-1990s. In the other, Wonderboy: Jeff Gordon, the polished and groomed youngster from California whose meteoric rise began …
NASCAR history can be measured in several ways, whether it be decades, the presence of certain drivers or various championship point formats. For myself and many others in the NASCAR industry, there is the way things were before 2001 and the way things were after it. It’s debatable, but I’d argue that no full season …
While the 1992 NASCAR season is seen as the most pivotal year in the modern era of NASCAR, what followed in 1993 set the stage for the next two decades of competition, thrusting the sport from burgeoning regional underground sport to one of national prominence. Key events, new tracks, personalities and accomplishments help define the …
NASCAR’s third level touring division, a.k.a. the Truck Series, came into being in 1995. It was a kinder, gentler era for the sanctioning body, when it seemed that they could do no wrong. It seemed if NASCAR had sanctioned a series for fat kids racing Marx Big Wheels around suburban supermarket parking lots, tickets to …
For a sport based on high speed and non-stop action, NASCAR racing can be incredibly frustrating sometimes. It is positively soul-sapping to watch two lines of race cars sitting tucked away under their covers in a heavy downpour, especially when it occurs just before the long-delayed start of our sport’s equivalent to the Super Bowl. …
I fear calling this time of year “late winter” might be overly optimistic when it comes to continued cold snaps and snow, but I have it on expert what remains of winter will be brief. If you can’t trust a groundhog, who can you trust? Let’s just say we’re in that brief period of time …
Indianapolis Motor Speedway has become a tough sell among NASCAR fans. Once considered a crown jewel on the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series tour, the Brickyard 400 – this year referred to as the “Crown Royal Presents the Jeff Kyle 400 at the Brickyard” – has become nothing more than another date on the schedule. The …
Editor’s Note: For Part One of Matt’s retrospective on Davey Allison, click “here.”:https://frontstretch.com/mmclaughlin/34578/
Robert Yates Racing and the team’s talented young driver Davey Allison made their official debut at the 1989 Daytona 500. Things got off to an inauspicious start. Davey was running well when Geoff Bodine got into his rear bumper and sent the No. 28 car spinning. The car rolled, but came down on all four wheels, and Allison limped off to the pits, where the crew was able to repair the car well enough to get him back out there for points. Allison finished 25th in that year’s race.
This weekend marks the 56th running of the Coca-Cola 600, or, for longtime fans of the sport, the World 600. The premise of the race when it first began was simple: pit man against machine. What would tire first: an overworked engine or a weary driver? 400 laps of exhausting wrestling of the steering wheel …
