Remembering a Legend: Bobby Allison Helped Drive American Racing’s Popularity

The passing of Bobby Allison on November 9 at the age of 86 marks a thinning of the herd.

Allison was one of the last of the surviving group of superstars who arrived in the 1960s at Indy and in NASCAR, carrying American motor racing to new heights of popularity. In my view, he is survived by Mario Andretti, A.J. Foyt and Richard Petty. Others who have gone before him—Dan Gurney, Cale Yarborough and David Pearson.

A firebrand who never backed down, Allison’s passion and talent resonated with racing fans of all stripes. My friends who worked in other racing disciplines often cited Allison when the conversation turned to NASCAR.

The leader of the Alabama Gang, Allison was one reason I volunteered to cover NASCAR at my first newspaper job in North Carolina. I had taken notice of Allison in the mid-1960s while watching ABC’s “Wide World of Sports” and listening to Jim McKay excitedly focus viewers on a relative newcomer at Daytona. Allison’s confident demeanor in the garage and behind the wheel, which quickly led to victories, marked him as a driver to watch in the eyes of McKay.

As I grew older, stories filtered in about Allison, the kind that underscored his independence and underpinned his legend. In a race at Bowman Gray in 1966, rookie Allison beat and banged bumpers and fenders with Curtis Turner until their cars were rolling junkheaps. When Cup drivers went on strike at Talladega in 1969, Petty and Allison, as the rulers of the roost, both spoke up about safety and on behalf of the drivers who felt they were not getting their fair share of the purses.

Allison’s independence led to a dispute with Junior Johnson over how they had lost the championship in the first shortened season of the new Winston Cup in 1972. They had won ten of 28 races in the Coca-Cola Chevy when Allison told the team owner to kiss his helmet bag and took the Coca-Cola sponsorship with him.

He drove a Matador, then a Mercury for Roger Penske, who also put him in his McLaren-Offys at Indy. He started on the fourth (1973) and fifth rows (1975) before mechanical failures took him out.

In 1977, Allison became an independent Cup team owner, which led to a second straight losing season. As a nervous rookie reporter that year, I finally met Allison at the Charlotte Motor Speedway while working on my first NASCAR feature story. After patiently answering my questions—about his ongoing victory slump no less—he asked me to lend a hand with his Baby Grand entry, a side project at the time. So, I helped him move the hood of an American Motors Hornet, which was sitting on the car’s roof, and put it back into place.

Two years later, after Cale Yarborough and his brother Donnie Allison had wrecked in Turn 3 on the last lap of the Daytona 500, Bobby ended up in the middle of the televised post-race fight on CBS that took NASCAR to new heights in the ratings.

The fiery temperament in the heat of battle was a sharp contrast to Allison’s friendliness. He was invariably approachable with not only fans but other drivers. He counseled younger drivers to “ask me about your car. Just don’t ask about mine.”

One could argue that Allison’s independent streak cost him championships. He certainly had his enemies. Looking back, some of his fellow competitors cast him as holier than thou. When he won the Cup championship in 1983, someone tried to sabotage him by putting sugar in one of DiGard Racing’s gasoline dump cans during the season finale at Riverside, which almost cost Allison the title due to an engine that began sputtering midrace and only survived with multiple pit stops.

Looking back, that morning I had said hello to Bobby and it was the only time I had ever seen him nervous as a spooked cat before a race.

My perception was Allison preferred to win through car preparation and mechanical knowledge and his immense driving skills, not by finding ways to bypass the rulebook. And, he liked doing things his way.

But, Allison eventually won his lone championship with notorious rulebreaker Gary Nelson as his crew chief at DiGard in a time when rumors and stories about cheating, that included championship rivals Junior Johnson and his driver Darrell Waltrip, constantly swirled through the garage.

Following his death, many of those who had become friends with Allison flooded social media with memories of his combination of success and outgoing ways, including a letter by Penske and a post from longtime Indy 500 announcer Paul Page. All the online comments and photos stand as testimony to the post-racing years of Allison’s life as much as his driving career. He applied the same determination and passion that won 85 Cup races to recovering from a life that managed to quickly swap ends on him.

But first came that harrowing flight up above the fence at Talladega on board his Buick in 1986 that nearly ended in a massive tragedy for the entire sport. As it was, Allison walked away after his car lifted off in the trioval due to a cut tire and nearly sailed into the crowd, almost taking out the flag stand and its occupants. Sitting in the press box at the top edge of the grandstands, I had involuntarily shouted, “Bobby, Bobby, Bobby” as his car seemed to hover over the fence and the grandstands from my viewing point. After his car bounced off the fence and came to rest on its wheels on the track’s apron, Allison climbed out and was never fazed.

Two years later, in 1988, Allison beat his son Davey to the flag stand and took the checkers at the Daytona 500 in the only last-lap duel between a father and son in that race’s history. Davey splashed Miller beer, the sponsor of his dad’s Stavola Brothers Buick, on Bobby’s head in Victory Lane and all was right with the world. Just like his dad, Davey was the kind of driver who, if he saw you in the waiting line at a local restaurant the night before a race, would stop to say hello. A daredevil second-generation member of the Alabama Gang, big crashes on board his Robert Yates Racing Ford never fazed Davey, either.

Who could have predicted the upcoming cascade of events?

Allison’s vital, winning career ended at age 50 just 12 races after his third Daytona 500 victory. A side-impact into Allison’s door at Pocono resulted when a cut tire spun his car sideways. He fought back from a severe head injury and then managed to maintain his equilibrium following the death of sons Clifford, killed in an Xfinity series crash at Michigan in 1992, and then Davey, killed in a helicopter crash at Talladega less than a year later and merely months after almost winning the Cup championship. Unlike his father, Davey didn’t survive emergency brain surgery.

Neil Bonnett, a member of the Alabama gang, was killed at Daytona in a crash during a practice session in 1994.

Part of Bobby’s everyman life was showing up at Catholic churches in the vicinity of tracks on the morning of Cup races, joining the congregation and taking communion. One suspects that deep Catholic faith not only helped him keep life in perspective, but served him well and his wife Judy, who died in 2015, in the face of so much loss.

The decades-long dispute with NASCAR over his victory at Bowman Gray in Winston-Salem in 1971 epitomized Allison’s willingness to stand up against the odds. The race had been advertised as awarding points for both the Grand American division of NASCAR as well as its Grand National series, the preceding name for the Cup series. But only Grand American points were awarded, leaving Allison out of the record books as the winner on the Cup ledger. He drove a Mustang legal under Grand American rules. In two other similar races where he drove a Grand American Camaro, Tiny Lund was awarded credit for a Cup victory.

NASCAR historians could never figure out the discrepancy over this single race, which technically did not have a winner. Unlike Petty (who finished second in a Plymouth at Bowman Gray), Allison always ruffled feathers at the sanctioning body, the most likely explanation.

In the first race I covered as a journalist in 1976, for example, I watched as Allison held up a restart by refusing to get his Mercury in line during a caution at the Southern 500 in Darlington. He thought official scoring had cost him one position. Two laps later, NASCAR finally gave in and restarted the race with Allison out of line, still contesting the single lost position.

I never thought he’d get the disputed victory at Bowman Gray that he deserved by winning it in a legal car and that NASCAR would just leave him out. But Allison won that fight in October, less than a month before his death, when he was awarded an 85th Cup victory. On the all-time list, that put him third behind Petty and Pearson. He finished two career victories ahead of Yarborough and Jimmie Johnson, plus one ahead of Waltrip.

Classic Bobby.