NASCAR at Talladega: Bizarre, Unprecedented, and Unforgettable

Legend says Talladega Superspeedway was built atop sacred land taken from the Creek Nation in the 1830s. It also says a medicine man looked back and cursed the land for all time as his people were being force-marched from Alabama to Oklahoma. Considering everything that’s happened there since 1969, the “Talladega Curse” may have been more real than skeptics realized.

The massive facility that hosts the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series and NASCAR Cup Series teams this weekend has suffered more than its share of tragic, bizarre, unprecedented, and unforgettable moments.

When officials finally grew tired of the “cursed” talk, they summoned a Native-American shaman from the nearby Poarch Creek tribe to “restore balance” to the land. In 2009, Robert Thrower mixed four local plants, burned them, then lifted the ashes to the winds at the start-finish line and prayed, “Let this talk of a curse be no more.”

A History Lesson as We Cross Our Fingers This Weekend

• Upwards of a dozen stars refused to run the first race because they didn’t trust the Goodyear and Firestone tires at 200-plus mph speeds. When NASCAR president and track owner Bill France Sr. refused to reschedule until tougher tires could be developed, many of his drivers loaded up and left early. The show went on after he paid lesser-known drivers from Saturday’s support race to stay and race on Sunday. With enough well-timed cautions to ensure tire safety, the first Talladega 500 was competitive and relatively uneventful;

• While leading in August 1973, former champion Bobby Isaac pulled in and told owner Bud Moore he was done, that he’d heard voices telling him to quit. It was first thought Isaac was uncomfortable having to race past the Turn 1 site where fellow Catawba, N.C. driver Larry Smith had crashed and died on lap 13, but Patsy Isaac said that wasn’t a factor.

“I don’t know what that experience was,” she said years later. “I don’t know if he felt an intuition or if it was actually a verbal voice. I know it impacted him enough that he wasn’t going to stay in the car. He always said it wasn’t because someone had gotten killed and that person was from Catawba, and he knew him.”

Isaac didn’t race Cup again that year, but had 19 more starts scattered over the next two years. Ironically, the Hall of Famer died of a heart attack after a Late Model race at Hickory, N.C. in August of 1977, four years and two days after the Talladega incident;