Some careers start with a bang and end quietly with hardly a word. Some show great promise only to see it fizzle for some reason, whether it’s a lack of experience, a lack of funding, too steep a learning curve or more pressure than someone can handle.
For most drivers, though, it’s what happens in the middle that truly defines a career. Some show a glimpse of things to come from the start, but others struggle before finding a foothold. Some go out the way they came in and fill the middle with more of the same. Some spend years at the top of their game, only to one day find that something has passed them by. None of them know for sure when that last win will come.
What a driver does at the beginning or the end may not be what people remember. Surely it’s an incomplete story at best. Still, it’s worth noting what a driver did to bookend their career.
NASCAR’s 60-win club has 10 members today, with two of them still active at NASCAR’s highest level. To reach that level took years of excellence, but they all had to start — and end — somewhere.
Here’s a closer look at the first and last full-time seasons for those 10 drivers. Before the modern era, and even for the early part of it, it wasn’t uncommon for drivers to race partial seasons before running for a title — some rarely ran a full schedule. Many title contenders didn’t run every single race, though most ran the majority.
Listed here are the first years these drivers ran a full or nearly full slate of races, as well as their last full-time years. Some had multiple races under their belts, while others were raw rookies.
Richard Petty
Richard Petty won Rookie of the Year honors in 1959, running a 21-race partial schedule. He didn’t find victory lane, but in 1960, running 40 of a possible 44 races, The King carted home three wins and a whopping 30 top 10s on his way to a runner-up finish in points. It wasn’t uncommon at the time for only a handful of cars to finish on the lead lap, so it’s not unusual that Petty finished in the top five more often than he finished on the lead lap.
In Petty’s final season, 1992, the title contenders included Davey Allison, son of rival Bobby Allison, and Petty’s own son Kyle. His own numbers were a far cry from the intervening years, during which Petty won another 197 races and a record seven titles. Perhaps he hung on too long, but Petty was (and still is) the face of the sport. His departure was a long…
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