What Would Bobby Allison Do?

Last weekend, NASCAR and the greater racing community at large lost one of its finest drivers.

Bobby Allison, on the surface, had an incredible NASCAR career. The 1983 NASCAR Cup Series champion won 85 Cup races, the fourth-most of all time. He found success with so many different car owners, winning with 13 of them, including himself. This is a mark no other driver has matched.

But with Allison, it’s what’s below the surface that is truly remarkable.

Every year, I write a NASCAR Hall of Fame column explaining who I would put on my ballot. While researching that, I’ve tripped into a new stat or story that makes Allison even more of a legend in my own eyes. And it happens just about every year.

This year was actually about the NASCAR Modified Series. The Mods are the oldest series in NASCAR, but there has historically been remarkably little turnaround for the stars of that series to become Cup drivers.

There have only been four Mod champions in series history to go find meaningful success to Cup racing. Red Byron and Fonty Flock won the first two titles and both found great success in the Cup Series in that era. The most recent of the four was Jimmy Spencer.

Who came in-between? It was Allison, winning championships in a car he and his brother Eddie built in Bobby’s backyard in 1964 and 1965.

Allison actually had a very clever start to Cup racing. After racing part time with a Ford his first two years, he built a Chevrolet in his backyard that was owned by Donald Brackins.

This was in a time period when Chevrolet had essentially no NASCAR presence. Ford and Chrysler were taking turns dominating the series, with both building bigger and bigger cars to go after each other in the horsepower department.

Allison’s idea was to enter the smaller and more nimble Chevrolet in 1966 and 1967 because it could go much quicker at a lot of the little short tracks on the Cup schedule. It was an idea that netted him both wins and a legion of fans; fans back then were very much aligned to car manufacturers, and Allison’s success was the only real accomplishment the bowtie had seen in years.

Allison himself won respect for both his underdog status and refusal to stand down. A race in August 1966 at Bowman-Gray Stadium devolved into a massive car brawl between Allison and the also-legendary Curtis Turner.

Turner was near the end of his career and spun out Allison to start the mess. Allison retaliated and spun Turner…