Has NASCAR’s D.B. Cooper been found? Here, at the start of the week when a new NASCAR Hall of Fame class will be announced, a member of the sport’s Hall of Infamy has broken a four-decade silence.
“I said, ‘That straightaway is almost a mile long! How much can that car gain before you go into that turn?’ I said, ‘Lord, I’m down here, but I’m gonna need some help,’ and I didn’t tell nobody else that.”
On this very date 40 years ago, a man named L.W. Wright competed at stock car racing’s highest level on its fastest racetrack, starting 36th and finishing 39th in one of NASCAR’s crown jewel events, the Winston 500 at Talladega Superspeedway. Prior to the race, no one in the Cup Series garage had heard of Wright, but the sanctioning body had for some reason accepted his racing résumé on little more than the word of the Tennessee trucking businessman, and a public relations group that had pitched on his behalf.
As soon as the race ended, he reportedly abandoned the Chevy Monte Carlo he had purchased for the event and disappeared. He has spent the past four decades evading everyone from NASCAR officials to private investigators hired by the people he still owed for that race car to a lot of lawyers and a growing number of would-be amateur auto-racing sleuths, eager to meet the man who somehow conned his way onto a racetrack alongside the likes of Dale Earnhardt, Richard Petty and race winner Darrell Waltrip.
As Tennessee Sports Writers Hall of Fame member Larry Woody wrote later that summer: “If he could have driven as fast as he talked, L.W. Wright would be a NASCAR champion now.”
Over time, Wright’s story has become NASCAR legend, especially in the conspiracy-obsessed corners of the internet. Woody himself revisited the mystery in a story in The Anniston Star two weeks ago. But after years of efforts from journalists to find Wright, he was finally located by another longtime motor sports writer, Rick Houston, who worked at the legendary Grand National Scene and now…
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