Crash Course

Daytona’s Fiery Finish Was Another Lesson In How Far Nascar Has Fallen

- Mark Bechtel

FORTY YEARS before Sunday’s Daytona 500— or, to be precise, 39 years and 364 days before—NASCAR was a largely regional sport that got a fortuitous break. The 1979 edition of the Great American Race was the first nationally televised flag-to flag 500-mile stock car event. The weekend of Daytona, bad weather hit just about everywhere. (Four of the five Great Lakes froze over, an unprecedented occurrence. Atlantans were photographed skiing down Peachtree Street. It even snowed in the Sahara for the first time in recorded history.) In those precable days, that meant people were stuck inside with only a handful of channels to watch.

Viewers saw a battle that came down to the final lap. Cale Yarborough, the three-time defending NASCAR champ, and Donnie Allison, a leadfoot who never seemed to catch a break, pulled away from the field. As the two good ol’ boys, who had tangled earlier in the race, hurtled down the backstretch, their cars got together again. They banged doors before Yarborough hit Allison hard enough to take them both out. (“He crashed me so I crashed him back,” Cale explained later, providing me with the title of a book I wrote on the ’79 season.) That opened the door for Richard Petty to snatch the win.

But the real excitement came after the checkers flew. Allison’s brother Bobby, who finished 11th, stopped off on his cool-down lap to give Donnie a ride. Bobby and Yarborough exchanged words, and soon they exchanged punches in the infield—as CBS’s cameras rolled. It made for great theater, and it was a hell of an introduction to NASCAR for a lot of snowed-in sports fans, one widely credited with sending the circuit on an upward trajectory.