NASCAR's Greatest Race: The 1992 Hooters 500

By Rick Houston

With NASCAR’s Greatest Race: The 1992 Hooters 500, readers can relive the closest championship contest in NASCAR history to that point. All while learning new details on how the entire season culminated into a single lap to determine the title!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Car Tech
• Release date: Jul 13, 2016
• ISBN: 9781613253526

Rick Houston

Rick Houston planned to become a minister before he discovered journalists have delete keys at their disposal! In more than 20 years as a full-time writer, Rick has written five books and covered everything from NASCAR to NASA. He’s also a deacon in his church and regularly contributes to Stand Firm, a men's devotional magazine published by LifeWay. While writing a book on the space shuttle program, Rick interviewed Dr. Hilmers, and together they launched their own book project.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

In the span of just six short weeks, I went from having the worst and most desperate weekend of my life to covering one of the greatest races NASCAR has ever known.

I hit rock bottom in the media parking lot of North Wilkesboro Speedway on the evening of October 2, 1992. I’d moved to North Carolina a few weeks before, trying to find my way into the world of big-time automobile racing. I had no real job, no money, and very nearly no home. I was doing stringer work for the newspaper in Columbia, Tennessee, for no pay.

At Martinsville Speedway the week before, I wound up sneaking food out of the press box for dinner and sleeping in my car. The plan was to do the same the next weekend at North Wilkesboro, but when I arrived on Friday morning, it didn’t take long to figure out that meals wouldn’t be provided to the media until race day on Sunday. To this day, I can still remember the tantalizing aroma of the pizzas other reporters were able to purchase at the concession stands.

After practice and qualifying that day, I waited until every other media member had left the grassy parking lot behind the frontstretch grandstands. No way did I want them to see me setting up shop for the night, and in that crappy snot-green-and-rust-colored 1976 Chrysler Cordoba, in particular.

The next 12 hours or so were the longest (and emptiest) of my life. My meal that night consisted of a bag of potato chips and a Baby Ruth candy bar. I ate the chips slowly, one at a time. After they were gone, I chewed every bite of the candy bar until there was nothing left to chew.

I cried and tried to pray, but had no eloquent words. There weren’t even any complete thoughts. All I could manage was the same basic phrase, over and over again.

Oh, God …

I was scared and saw no way out of the fix I was in.

Oh, God …

Chips and a candy bar are no way to live.

Oh, God, please …

Sleep was next to impossible. As soon as day broke, I washed off, changed shirts, and walked to the garage. Afterward, I headed to the press box that overlooked the track. It was there that I found Jerry Lankford, an acquaintance who was about to alter the course of my life forever.

The family who owns the paper I work for owns another one not far from here, and they need a sports editor. Would you be interested?

Before I could stop myself, I bellowed, Yes!

I didn’t ask about the details because they didn’t matter at that point. I didn’t ask where The Alleghany News was located (it turned out to be in a little town in the mountains of North Carolina called Sparta) or how much it paid. All I cared about was that it was possibly a way to start climbing out of the hole in which I found myself.

The parent company also published the North Wilkesboro paper. As soon as Jerry discovered I was interested, one of the owners agreed to send me to Atlanta for the Hooters 500. I will never forget being handed a $300 check to cover my expenses. I was rich.

Better yet, I got to take a company truck. That meant I didn’t have to worry about whether or not my cantankerous car, which I’d nicknamed Bertha, would make the journey to and from Georgia. Honestly, the particulars of what was going to be taking place at the track did not fully register until the arrangements to actually be there had been made.

Richard Petty’s last race?

There was no bigger Richard Petty fan on the face of the Earth than my godmother, Sandi Estep, the mother of Joe Estep, my best friend from high school. She considered everyone at Petty Enterprises a member of her own family. She and Joe were going to be there, too, for her hero’s final race.

Petty won 27 races in 1967, the year of my birth. I made my grand entrance the day after he took the victory at Richmond, the sixth of an unprecedented ten straight wins. He had raced my entire life. What was it going to be like with The King on the sidelines? It was a question facing plenty of people in and around the sport, including Petty, his family, and race team.

This kid Gordon? He’s hit the jackpot. I wonder if he’ll ever actually amount to anything.

During the next couple of years, the NASCAR community came to fully understand that team owner Rick Hendrick had landed a supremely talented driver who would change the face of the sport. I remember the spring race weekend at Atlanta when Gordon scored his first Busch Series victory. After finishing his post-race interview, he sat quietly at the back of the room, keeping to himself almost as if he didn’t know what to do or where to head next.

Before long, Gordon had plenty of handlers to show him.

The youngster most definitely measured up, to the tune of four championships, 93 wins, and millions upon millions of dollars in winnings. Argue all the old-school versus new-school points you want, but Gordon’s face should be on a NASCAR version of Mount Rushmore.

Will the championship go to Davey, or Alan, or Bill? Harry, Kyle, and Mark have a shot, but those other three would have to wreck on the first lap. They’re out of it. Right? As crazy as this year has been, who knows?

After the year Davey Allison had endured, he and his Robert Yates Racing team had clawed their way back to the top of the standings going into the Hooters 500. Surely, he would be able to hang on to capture the crown. The way Bill Elliott had run for the last month or so, it seemed almost impossible to think that he was going to come back to win it all. And Alan Kulwicki? He was so quiet, it was sometimes hard to remember that he was even at the racetrack, much less in contention for the championship.

Working on this book has caused memories of the race weekend itself to come flooding back, and they’re very good ones, unlike those from Martinsville and North Wilkesboro just a few short weeks earlier.

Rick Mast, on the pole?

That was a shocker. I came to know Mast better in the following years, and he is to this day one of my favorite NASCAR personalities. Not only did we share first names, but we also had a shared interest in the Civil War. On pole day for the Hooters 500, this nice (if not a little crazy) guy didn’t finish last. He was right there at the top of the leaderboard.

Side note: I rode shotgun with Mast’s transport driver, Joe Lewis, to the 1991 season finale in Atlanta. Maybe my being a good-luck charm was retroactive. Then again, maybe it wasn’t. Rick’s day was ruined less than two full laps into the race. So much for that feel-good story.

Side note number two: It was Rick Mast who gave what was, is and always will be, my favorite quote from someone involved in NASCAR. And I can’t share it. Not here. Not in print. All I know is that I had to hang up the phone because I was laughing so hard. The world of NASCAR; no, forget that. The world, period, needs more Rick Masts.

The crowd around Richard Petty …

I was right there as Petty climbed into his car for the start of the race, and I began to get just a little bit nervous about the absolute crush of onlookers. It wasn’t so much jockeying for position to get a better view. Personal space wasn’t the concern, either. That kind of thing simply didn’t matter at that point. Although I have never had any particular fear of crowds or closed-in spaces, I was worried about breathing room.

After Petty was involved in a multicar accident during the race, he was surrounded again by a horde of reporters in his team’s garage stall. And this time, you’d better believe it was about jockeying for position. Although I was the new guy on the block, I resolved to stand my ground.

I got the quotes.

Later, I was just a few feet away when he got back into the car. I headed back up to pit road to watch as he took the checkered flag, and for a few post-race ceremonial circuits. As he came back in, Petty lowered his window net. The look in his eyes was at once one of overwhelming joy, relief, and, yes, maybe even a little bit of sadness.

In that moment, I knew exactly how he felt.

No, Davey. No.

From the outside looking in, it was hard to comprehend everything that Davey Allison had been through in 1992. His wrecks and the injuries he had sustained in those mishaps had been well documented. How could anybody even get into a car, much less race one, after all that? His brother Clifford had just lost his life in an accident during a Busch Series practice session at Michigan. That Davey competed on the very same track (and finished 5th, to boot) just three days later was nothing short of a stunning achievement.

When time came for the Hooters 500, Allison was back on top of the standings, thanks to a ferocious comeback and a load of wicked-bad luck that had suddenly stricken Bill Elliott and his Junior Johnson–owned team. It was going to be one heck of a story if Allison could somehow hang on and capture the sport’s biggest prize.

When Ernie Irvan lost control coming off Turn 4, it was all over.

The sight of Allison trying to get his car going (and its stead-fast refusal to do so) was like a kick in the gut. If he was going to lose out on the championship, let it happen with him still holding the throttle wide open and not like this. The gracious interviews he gave on television and radio after the accident are perhaps one of the best examples of good sportsmanship NASCAR has ever seen. Allison could have very well blasted Irvan; virtually everybody else had at one time or another over the course of the preceding year or two, but he did not.

With Davey out of the picture, is the championship going to come down to Bill or Alan?

Just the year before, Alan Kulwicki had gone to Atlanta’s spring race with a car completely barren of any sponsorship whatsoever, only to land the Hooters restaurant chain that was supposed to be just a one-and-done deal.

It wasn’t.

The relationship blossomed to the point where the company expanded its involvement in the sport with the sponsorship of the season finale. Kulwicki and Hooters were going up against one of the most successful NASCAR outfits of all time. Still, I thought there was simply no way they stood a chance against Bill Elliott and Junior Johnson. No way. Shows what I knew.

The 1992 Hooters 500 was a race that had every conceivable kind of storyline from the outset. If anybody anywhere can come up with an event that had more going for it at the time, more power to them. This was the very best the sport had to offer, and then some.

That’s just taking into account what actually took place during that weekend. The stories connected to that event did not end on that late afternoon in Atlanta. Given the fact that Kulwicki and Allison did not survive to see another season finale, the 1992 Hooters 500 took on even more emotional depth. It truly was their last chance to make it to the mountaintop.

Had Gordon’s career fizzled, it would not have mattered that this was his first race. He would be just another promising rookie who didn’t quite meet expectations. Yet he did reach dizzying heights, and his first Winston Cup race just so happened to be Richard Petty’s last. It is the one race in which it can truly be said that the sport’s past had met its future. With Gordon’s own retirement at the end of the 2015 season, he was the last full-time Cup driver who had ever run against Richard Petty.

The exhilarating conclusion to the 1992 Winston Cup championship battle might also be at least indirectly responsible (or to blame) for an entirely new point system that was implemented for the 2004 Nextel Cup season. The excitement that unfolded during the waning laps of the Hooters 500 was lightning in a bottle, and NASCAR would have done almost anything to replicate it.

That included implementing The Chase, a system in which the field was reset for the last ten races of the season. In all its iterations, The Chase has produced a six-time champion in Jimmie Johnson and a couple of seasons that could possibly compare to 1992. Tony Stewart and Carl Edwards tied for the most points at the end of the ten-race playoff in 2011. The championship went to Stewart on the basis of his five victories that season to Edwards’ one. Four years later, the top four drivers (Kevin Harvick, Ryan Newman, Denny Hamlin, and Joey Logano) were separated by just 15 points.

Old-school followers of the sport, however, point out that those results were manufactured and not quite indicative of a champion over the course of a full season. Prior to the start of the 2016 season, a Chase format was implemented for what are now known as the Xfinity and Camping World Truck Series tours.

Regardless, the 1992 Hooters 500 at Atlanta Motor Speedway remains a beautiful example of what motorsports can be. That race was also a launch pad for my own career. I returned two years later to the 1994 season finale at Atlanta for my first race as a staff writer for Winston Cup Scene. It was my dream gig.

All these years later, those two races remain the very best days of my professional life.

Chapter 1

THE SEASON OF ALL SEASONS: DAVEY ALLISON

As he stood in victory lane on that February afternoon, Davey Allison could not possibly have imagined the season he was about to experience.

Daytona 500

Only a couple hundred yards or so separated him from the Winston Cup garage at Daytona International Speedway, but it might as well have been a million miles. No other driver that day could enjoy the view that washed over Allison, who had just rolled his Ford Thunderbird onto some of the most coveted real estate in all of motorsports. Everybody else was either already on the way back home after falling out early or slowly climbing out of their cars in the garage.

The date was February 16, 1992, and the latest successful member of the Alabama Gang had just won the Daytona 500, the sport’s biggest race.

It was every driver’s goal to win the Daytona 500, and Allison’s in particular. He had been tagging along with his daddy, Bobby, to the eastern shore of northern Florida for as long as he could remember. Bobby won the 500 in 1978 and 1982 with Davey looking on as a spectator, but his third and final victory in 1988 was the best one of them all.

Davey was looking on during this one, too, but it was his vantage point that made the day so incredibly special to the family. Davey wasn’t on pit road or in the grandstands. He

Reviews for NASCAR's Greatest Race

[louisianareader · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Giving a book the title of NASCAR's Greatest Race" sets the bar pretty high. Rick Houston delivers. Rick Houston is a master story teller. The book is an easy read that is both engaging and informative. The pictures add to the story. I received the book through the Library Thing early reviewers program.

[hobbitprincess · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I eagerly awaited this book when I learned that I had snagged a copy through Early Reviewers. The Hooters 500 in 1992 was an iconic NASCAR race that signaled the end of a career, the beginning of a career, and a championship won by an unexpected driver. It also happens to be a race I attended, so I was thrilled to see that a book had been written about it. I like the way Rick Houston went about writing this book, using a specific driver to focus on each chapter. I learmed many interesting facts that I did not know, even though I was there. I also enjoyed the history abd background that was provided. The photographs definitely add to the text also. I think this is a book that any serious NASCAR fan would like to read, and it is one that will be on my bookshelf from now on. So much happened and so much was represented by this one race, and Houston has done a commendable job in chronicling the history and outcomes of the race.

[fuller0462 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This was an easy read, and I enjoyed it very much. The book captures the excitement of NASCAR in 1992, but also shows the tragedy the following year with the untimely deaths of two beloved drivers. It was nice to go back in time and relive this exciting race for the championship.

[tellen81 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is an exciting book for any race fan. It was a fun read about drivers of the past. The facts and the spirit of competition was shown throughout the book. The pictures were a blast from the past as well. The reporters side of the story made for a story in itself as well.

[jenniferlbean · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Great book for the NASCAR lover. It reads easily (plus larger print, which is a plus). It felt like I was on a race to the finish line at Hooters 500. The addition of photographs helped bring the story together. Great way to remember this great race.