In the 75 years of the NASCAR Cup Series, there is just one race without an official winner.
Bobby Allison took the checkered flag first in the 1971 Myers Brothers 250 at Bowman Gray Stadium on Aug. 6, 1971. But the NASCAR Hall of Famer was never credited with the win.
If you look at Racing Reference’s page on Allison, he is credited with 84 career Cup wins. It says he had 10 wins in the 1971 season. But if you open up the page on that season, you can count 11 times he finished first that year.
On the race page for the 1971 Myers Brothers 250, it has Allison listed in first and Richard Petty second. Yet Allison still isn’t credited with the win.
So why doesn’t NASCAR count the race as a win for Allison? There was no scoring dispute despite them being quite common at the time. Allison was not black flagged, and his Ford Mustang passed post-race inspection. There have been cars that won races in way shadier conditions where the team got to keep the race win.
The problem started because NASCAR fielded a Grand American series from 1968-71, which was a circuit just for pony cars such as Allison’s Mustang. When the Cup field was on the light side, NASCAR would fill the field by having a combination race.
So while the Mustang usually wouldn’t be allowed in a Cup race, it was in these combination races, and this Bowman Gray race was one of them. Petty’s Plymouth was the first finisher of the Cup-allowed cars, so it would make sense to give him credit for the victory and set his career total at 201 wins. But that never happened either.
Plus giving Petty that win would open a whole other can of worms because of Tiny Lund. Lund won two of those combination races in a Chevrolet Camaro, another car used in the Grand American tour and not Cup. So if Petty were credited with the Bowman Gray win, two of Lund’s five career Cup wins should be taken away and given to the second-place finisher in those two combination races: Elmo Langley in a Ford at Hickory Speedway and Charlie Glotzbach in a Chevy at North Wilkesboro Speedway.
I can’t imagine NASCAR taking the…
Click Here to Read the Full Original Article at …