The Title Weekend and Remembering NASCAR’s Most Beloved Race
The season finale has come and gone and the 2002 title chases in NASCAR’s
three big track divisions are over.
First blood went to Mike Bliss in Craftsman Trucks, finishing second in the
Miami 200 behind race-day teammate Ron Hornaday. The Hammer needed only a
top-five to win the title and never was he out of the top five all day. Rick
Crawford’s quest for the title was unrealistic with Bliss running as he was, but
Crawford hung tough behind race leader Ted Musgrave; it all ended when Crawford
pitted in the final 30 laps and Jon Wood brought out the first yellow of the
day.
Greg Biffle’s title chase was won at Phoenix, and in his double-header
weekend he timed fifth in the Petty Enterprises #44 behind Roush teammate Kurt
Busch; Biffle ran in the top ten most of the first half but fell back with a
souring engine.
Mark Martin, meanwhile, suffered the first blow of the weekend by timing only
34th while Tony Stewart timed sixth. The next blow came when the Roush appeal of
the point penalty at Rockingham was upheld, as if there was any reason to
rescind it.
Tony Stewart, meanwhile, got into yet another flap with a reporter, and given
the sheer frequency of such disputes one has to face that Stewart has a serious
maturity problem. I don’t care how good a racer he is, he’s proving himself a
lousy person and he needs to change – starting with admitting that he’s been a
bully in previous incidents; anger management isn’t enough.
It all made the race itself anticlimactic. About the only real excitement
came when Jimmy Spencer smashed the first turn wall and a racing photographer
suffered burns. Stewart’s run was abysmal, but he didn’t need more than a top-20
to win the title. Martin’s run was substantially better than Stewart’s, but it
was too little too late.
Roush may have lost the point penalty appeal but that doesn’t matter, a fact
he appears to be too pig-headed to realize. His racing organization won ten
races in Winston Cup and also won the Grand National title. Some have called his
team the most improved from 2001, and certainly the upsurge in wins – and most
importantly the genuine depth displayed – is striking. Roush Performance,
though, was never that far out in 2001, and their comeback really isn’t that
shocking.
What matters is that they have ten wins, something much more important than
the title. Winning the title may be the worst thing to happen to Stewart, as it
has proven to be for Bobby Labonte, but winning the most races in the season
does not add the kind of pressure the championship adds to its winner. So Jack
Roush ought to be happy with his season in any event.
The season saw eighteen different winners, a stunning number given how just
ten years ago the number of winners was nine. One should hope the parity era in
NASCAR keeps going strong in 2003. But NASCAR needs to tackle quite a few issues
regardless; NBC’s laundry list of issues as usual offered no believable
solutions, apparently since real solutions are not considered PC.
Widely remembered this weekend is the race that is considered NASCAR’s most
beloved, the 1992 Dixie 500 at Atlanta. The race is remembered for the
convergence of several paths in Winston Cup history, for being only the second
time in history that the point lead changed hands in the final race, and for the
tragic legacy it wound up leaving.
Bill Elliott summed up the day: "Huge. It was a big day."1
Tom Roberts, veteran PR man who worked with Alan Kulwicki at the time, notes,
"The way that day rolled off, all that we accomplished….I’ll hold that
near and dear to my heart forever."2
The 1992 Winston Cup season had been a twisty, streaky season. Bill Elliott,
driving Junior Johnson’s Ford after a lifetime with the #9 first owned by his
father George and then by Harry Melling, won four straight races after Davey
Allison’s win at the Daytona 500. But after that Elliott suffered through dismal
short track efforts and a mediocre run in the World 600 and the Michigan 400.
Allison crashed hard at Bristol, won North Wilkesboro, crashed at Martinsville,
won Talladega, then smashed the wall at the end of The Winston but gamely
finished fourth at the 600 and won Michigan.
Amid this, Alan Kulwicki won Bristol, then ran down Elliott to win the Pocono
500. On the return trip to Pocono Allison completely dominated, but got a cheap shot
by Darrell Waltrip off Two and tumbled violently down the north straight. He
nonetheless lost the point lead he had held all season despite a Herculean
relief effort by Bobby Hillin, Jr. at Talladega and relief efforts by road racer
Dorsey Schroeder at Watkins Glen.
And physical injuries are nothing compared to a broken heart. Davey Allison
suffered a broken heart many times in 1992, starting with the death of his
grandfather Edmund, followed by the death in a Michigan crash of his brother
Clifford. He looked beaten for the title after a mediocre run at Rockingham, but
a clutch win at Phoenix reignited his title hopes.
And there were three others within 100 points of the title as well. Kyle
Petty struggled the first third of the year, then dominated the World 600 before
faltering to third, and began a rally from deep in points to become a dark horse
contender for the title; Kyle bolted to victory at Watkins Glen, then
slaughtered the field at Rockingham from the pole. Harry Gant was Mr.
Consistency, winning at Dover and Michigan on fuel mileage, while Mark Martin
fell into a win at Martinsville, then ran down Kulwicki and Petty to win
Charlotte in October.
The point race appeared decided in Bill Elliott’s favor after the Delaware
500, but engine failures and a broken sway bar in three of the next five races,
on top of a poorly handling racecar in another, wiped out Elliott’s point lead
and put Allison 30 ahead entering the final race of the year. Alan Kulwicki,
after publicly declaring his team out of the point race after wrecking at Dover,
was second in points, and Elliott was third, ten behind Kulwicki.
Kulwicki’s championship effort was stunning. He’d formed his own team and
doggedly maintained it despite sponsorship trouble early in 1991. Holding a
degree in engineering, Kulwicki was able to exploit that degree with the change
to radial tires in 1990 and ’91, a change that many veteran NASCAR teams could
not adapt to.
The season finale had other implications as well. Richard Petty was running
his final race after 35 seasons, and his final season had drawn greater interest
in the sport all season; a goodbye concert at Atlanta’s Georgia Dome drew 50,000
the night before the race, and a statue of Petty autographing for a fan was
unveiled outside the track.
Ford, meanwhile, had won its first manufacturer title since 1969 and ended a
GM streak dating back to 1976; GM for its part looked like walking wounded by
the Dixie 500, with Pontiac cut back significantly and Oldsmobile running its
final NASCAR race. Olds grabbed a nice consolation prize as Rick Mast timed
Richard Jackson’s Cutlass on the pole.
With Army Apache attack choppers flying a ceremonial lap before the race, the
stage was set for the 1992 season finale, and it exploded after one lap with a
vicious six-car melee in One; Brett Bodine, who led Lap One, was T-boned
savagely by Hut Stricklin, and Davey Allison got a large crease in his back
bumper as a result. All Allison needed to win the title was a top-five, and that
seemed a mere formality as the day went on.
Bill Elliott went for the lead and got it after Michael Waltrip’s crash
during green flag stops put Dale Earnhardt, Ernie Irvan, and Kyle Petty a lap
down. Alan Kulwicki, meanwhile, had only high gear left in his Ford, but he
nonetheless clawed into the lead and after Mark Martin’s engine failure while
leading Kulwicki was in front with Elliott behind and Allison securely in the
top five.
The biggest wreck of the day exploded of Four and set Richard Petty’s Pontiac
afire – and also set into the audience’s mind momentary images of Glenn Roberts’
fiery death in his final race, in 1964. Petty barked for a fire extinguisher –
"Those cats must have wanted an autograph, because none of them came with a
fire hose," Petty cracked afterward – and waved to the crowd after the fire
was put out.
But Irvan, who’d made up his lap and was the only GM car with any chance of
beating the Fords, deflated a tire in Four, shot to the fourth turn apron, then
shot hard right into Allison. Allison waved to the crowd, then went to the
infield center to console his disconsolate wife.
Said Peter Jellen, Kulwicki’s gasman at the time, "After Davey had his
crash, and after our (gearbox problems), it’s like, ‘Oh boy, now what?’"3
"Now what" was Kulwicki’s calculations on bonus points – he figured he
could not win the race if final green flag stops occurred, but if he could lead
until Lap 311, he would clinch five extra bonus points for most laps led, and
thus finish second, earn 180 points, and tie Bill Elliott on race points, which
would earn Kulwicki the title by ten points.
Thus, when final stops took place, Kulwicki ran until Lap 311, then pitted,
the ten bonus points he needed secured. Kulwicki ran second behind Bill Elliott
and won the title by ten points, the closest margin in Winston Cup history and
only the second time ever that the point lead changed hands in the final race.
But the real legacy of that fateful race came the next season. GM went to
work and came out fighting from the start of ’93, but though Chevrolet would win
five additional manufacturer titles since ’92, the entire dynamic of the
manufacturer chase was permanently altered. Ford was permanently competitive for
this title, and has won five additional manufacturer crowns since that
breakthrough triumph in ’92. Alan Kulwicki, the owner-driver, died in a plane
crash on his way to Bristol on April Fool’s Day 1993. Davey Allison never
recovered from the defeat in 1992; he was generally uncompetitive in 1993 and
was killed in a helicopter crash at Talladega in mid-July 1993.
Many of the retrospectives note how the sport has changed since that fateful
race, and changes have been aplenty, though not always for the better. The sport
added venues at New Hampshire, Indianapolis, Fontana, Las Vegas, Miami, Kansas,
and Chicago. But its return to Texas came at a wrongful price – the forced
closing of one of its most famous short tracks. Kulwicki’s title prompted a
surge in owner-driver teams the next few seasons, but the crush of money,
factory backing or lack thereof, and restrictive testing rules led to the death
of the owner-driver.
And the character of drivers has changed enormously. Kulwicki’s personality
could be difficult to identify with at times, but it displayed a seriousness of
purpose too often lost in drivers; there was nothing forced about it, it was
Alan Kulwicki as he really was. Davey Allison’s "aw-shucks" humility
made him the sport’s ambassador in 1992 and his death had more public impact
than Kulwicki’s, not least because there has never been a driver since Davey who
had such humility; so many other drivers since display more of a personality
programmed into them by PR machinery.
The competitiveness of the racing suffered greatly in the change to radial
tires, and that deterioration has continued and actually accelerated. The cars
of 1992 already suffered from being overly aero-clean, a competitive detriment
that briefly abated with the switch to higher down force in 1995-6 only to
return, aggravating itself via aerodynamic tightness in dirty air.
And even with the increase in the number of winners in a season, driver
competitiveness has deteriorated as well. Kulwicki and Allison showed the fire
to win, but since their death that fire in the sport in general has become
generally weaker, as concern for points amid other issues has drained it from
the sport – can one imagine Davey Allison or Alan Kulwicki stroking it to where
they’d suddenly get lapped and pick up 4/10ths they hadn’t had before?
I suspect that part of the nostalgia in the retrospectives toward the 1992
Dixie 500 reflect a recognition that the sport has suffered since that fateful
race. Certainly the reasons listed above ought to make one think along those
lines.
NASCAR will limit teams to five tests in 2003, a change that won’t alter
anything and which doesn’t change that the whole policy limiting tests is a
complete failure. Teams should be able to test all they want; it is limiting
testing at all that is why multi-car teams have become so important.
Elsewhere, Ford will run a wind tunnel test on a proposed third roof flap, to
see if it can further help keep cars from getting airborne. It is difficult to
see how a third roof flap can possibly help, given the overall failure of roof
flaps to begin with.
There will also be some more testing at Talladega by Ford and Dodge teams;
presumably Dodge’s proposed new nose will get some action in these tests. With
the change to aero-matched GM bodies, Ford and Dodge may have an early aero edge
in 2003 as GM has to adapt.
The point system, though, will not be reviewed, which is too bad because 2002
held to the form-chart of a point race where there was no chance for the point
lead to change hands in the final races. So next year will be like previous
years, where drivers worry about points instead of wins.
But given the twists of 2002, one can hope that things will be better next
year.