When We Last Saw a Hooters Car in Victory Lane

When Chase Elliott crossed the finish line at Texas Motor Speedway last weekend, he ended 32 years of futility for his primary sponsor in Hooters. The restaurant chain has adorned NASCAR Cup Series hoods and side panels off and on for over three decades but spent very little of that era in victory lane.

Hooters’ first foray into full-time sponsorship was in 1991 with owner/driver Alan Kulwicki. The company had existed for less than a decade but was growing exponentially. With Hooters on board, Kulwicki scored two wins at Bristol Motor Speedway, the first in August of that year and again in the spring of 1992. Then, in June, NASCAR thundered into Pocono Raceway for the Champion Spark Plug 500.

Races at Pocono were still 500 miles at this point and the long runs, while sustaining high RPMs, wreaked havoc on even the best engine builders. Only 25 of the 40 starters made it to the finish, with 14 of those 15 non-finishers being victimized by mechanical trouble.

NASCAR lost a great ambassador of the sport on April 1, 1993, when a plane carrying Kulwicki crashed near Bristol, TN. But NASCAR wasn’t the only entity affected. The plane was owned not by Kulwicki but by Bob Brooks, the chairman and co-founder of his sponsor Hooters. Brooks’ eldest son Mark was on the ill-fated flight, as was another Hooters executive.

In 1996, Brooks donated $250,000 to the construction of Alan Kulwicki Memorial Park in Greenfield, WI. Despite continuing in the sport as a full-time sponsor for another nine years, Brooks did not get to see Hooters return to victory lane, as he passed away in 2006.

Interestingly enough, the driver who wound up returning Hooters to victory lane is the son of the most recent driver who was passed by the Hooters car for the win. Some things just have a way of coming full circle.