When I think of my favorite era of NASCAR, the one I wish I could have been around to see the most was the 1980s.
My bookshelf is littered with trading cards of the drivers purchased along with their matching diecasts. The old sheet metal, reminiscent of the same cars my grandfather and me used to scour junkyards for in hopes of spare parts, serves as a reminder of simpler times in the sport.
Pure, unadulterated speed met at its peak with the sheer will to be better than the driver in the car in front, behind or beside you. Boundaries were crossed that just 15 years before had been only dreams in the stock car racing world.
Those new speeds became the great equalizer, but they also came at a risk to the technology of the era, as several drivers found out on that February day in 1985. By the ’90s, the technology had well caught up with the speed of the car. When one think of the ’80s, one thinks of drivers living on the edge of speed and power. You had to be a wheel man, and a damn good one at that.
Bill Elliott was just that — a wheelman — but so was the late, wonderfully great and ever-tough Cale Yarborough, who had just come off of two straight Daytona 500 wins. Of course, you can’t mention greatness without mentioning Richard Petty, either. To that same end, you have to consider AJ Foyt, Darrell Waltrip, David Pearson, Dale Earnhardt, Rusty Wallace, Terry Labonte, Neil Bonnett and Bobby Allison.
Why do I mention all these names together? They were all on the same track, in the same race, chasing the same goals, trying to climb to the same mountaintop. The ’80s might have been when the sport was at its greatest — packed to the brim with limitless talent.
All of that talent meant that fans were sure to be treated to a back-and-forth affair, right?
Wrong. This became a two-car race by the time the green flag dropped. Elliott and Yarborough were the men to beat that day, and nobody was going to come close over the course of a long run.
Elliott clocked a then-record 205.114 mph, and almost lapped the field in his qualifying race (yes, qualifying was much different back then). Yarborough was hot on his tail and clocked in at 203.814 mph himself. They started the race on the front row and duked it out at the top of the leaderboard all the way up until the first pit window.
That was when Petty took the lead by staying out to try to gain an edge as he knew it’d be tough to get to chase down…
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