There were two drivers Dale Earnhardt never messed with, on or off the racetrack: Bobby Allison and Cale Yarborough. He knew better.
Maybe if his toughness-loving cult realized that, they’d heed those two regarding Jeff Gordon’s 77 wins and counting.
With Earnhardt’s 76 wins topped for sixth on the all-time NASCAR winners list, Yarborough’s mark, fifth with 83 wins, is next for Gordon.
Allison, tied for third with Darrell Waltrip with 84 wins, would follow. Allison actually claims 85, but more about that in a minute.
Either way, “the word is not ‘if.’ It’s ‘when,’ ” Allison said this week of Gordon passing his mark. “It’s when he gets there. Which is going to be pretty soon.”
“If he catches and passes me, more power to him,” Yarborough said.
So this is sure to be a more pleasant pursuit for Gordon than the last one.
Nobody has ever understood passion for NASCAR racing, and outrage over its outcomes, more than Allison and Yarborough — witness their notorious fight after the Daytona 500 of 1979.
Yet neither can understand what possessed the hooligans who met Gordon’s milestone with barrages of full beer cans last Sunday at Talladega, Ala.
“Childish imbeciles,” Allison called the culprits at the track where he and his late son Davey, in their time, were worshiped even more than Earnhardt.
“I’ve never seen anything like that in this sport,” Yarborough said.
Out of the Earnhardtian storm now, Gordon can move on into the clearing skies of NASCAR history, where the top five all-time winners, so long obscured by the foolishness over sixth, reside.
Gordon will never threaten the top two, he himself said last week. Richard Petty has 200 wins, and “I guarantee I won’t be passing David Pearson with 105,” Gordon said at Talladega. “I don’t plan on racing until I’m 45,” and he’ll turn 36 in August.
But Allison believes Gordon already would have passed Pearson, and be chasing Petty for the all-time lead right now, had Gordon and Ray Evernham, the crew chief who launched him, stayed together.
“He’d have 120 or 130 wins,” Allison said, if Evernham hadn’t left Hendrick Motorsports in 1999 to start his own team.
“He’s a tremendous race driver — one of the best there ever was,” Yarborough said of Gordon. “He’s won his share, and he’s going to win some more. But I just don’t understand why the fans get upset over that.”
The anti-Gordon silliness among fans “has stuck with him for a long time, and I really don’t know why, because he’s a good fellow,” Yarborough said. “I feel kind of sorry for him, really. Because he’s just doing his job.”
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“Here’s a man who hasn’t done anybody any wrong along the way,” Allison said. “Just giving his full effort to what he’s doing.”
Allison actually mentored the tough young Earnhardt on his way up, and knew him as well as anybody ever has, and “I think Dale would be very disappointed that somebody who was a Dale Earnhardt fan threw a piece of trash on the track because somebody caught him [in wins] fair and square,” Allison said.
“It’s great to have all this emotion with fans, because that’s part of what makes them come back and buy another $150 ticket the next week,” Allison continued. “A fan is entitled to dislike somebody who wins. But they’re not entitled to hate them.”
Gordon had gone winless this season, with three second-place finishes and a third, until the seven-day blitz with which he caught and passed Earnhardt at Phoenix and Talladega.
To catch Yarborough this year, Gordon would have to win six more races for a total of eight this season. That would be tough under today’s Nextel Cup conditions — nobody has won eight since Jimmie Johnson in 2004.
But “he’s on a roll now, I’m gonna tell you,” Yarborough said. “They’re really running good, and there’s a possibility.”
Next year, “more than likely,” is when Yarborough figures Gordon will pass him. “But when it happens, it happens. … It won’t bother me. I had a great career. I was very blessed. I won 83 races and if somebody wins more, go for it.”
Allison’s own personal mark of 85 stems from 1971, when he won a Cup race in a lighter Grand American car — perfectly legal at the time, to fill out a field. He has never been given official credit for the win.
“When he gets to 86 I’ll shake his hand, because then he will have passed me,” Allison said. “It may be a couple of years, but if they [Gordon and current crew chief Steve Letarte] get their act together, it may be sooner. And they’re looking good.”
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