MEMORABLE DAYTONA 500 VIDEO
37-CAR PILEUP ON THE SPEEDWAY    |    CALE YARBOROUGH AND BOBBY ALLISON FISTFIGHT    |    DALE EARNHARDT TRIBUTE    |    RUSTY WALLACE FLIPS OUT OF CONTROL

Daytona Revs Up
Like many of his early racing contemporaries, Junior Johnson cut his driving teeth as a moonshiner, outfitting his car to outgun the authorities while running hooch throughout the Smoky Mountains. For years drivers like Johnson had been racing their souped-up whiskey wagons throughout the South. These early drivers’ skills and mechanical knowledge may have been born out of necessity, but their wheel-handling and fearlessness made them instant players on the NASCAR circuit. The sport’s whiskey-running roots helped give NASCAR its character and lent to its legend. And there was no better place to watch the moonshine runners run than Daytona.

Andretti
In those days you didn’t have much [driver] influx from other parts of the States. You were out of style unless you had a drawl. But if  you look at the drivers that were champions then, they were as good as they come.

Junior Johnson
Daytona was sort of a party town when the race showed up. A lot of times [infamous drivers] Curtis Turner and Joe Weatherly would stay up all night and race the next day. They could handle it; I could never handle it that strong. That used to be a big part of  racing. And now it just doesn’t happen at all.

Hunter
There’s more than one story about what happened to rental cars back in the old days. You’d have to rent a car to drive around the city when you were here, so Turner and Weatherly would race their rentals around the traffic circle in the middle of town.

Panch
I’ve heard that Joe Weatherly ran a rental car into the swimming pool one night.

Hunter
People were always pulling pranks on each other. One night a guy who worked for Goodyear came into a bar. Everyone was having drinks and laughing when all of a sudden this explosion went off. We all turned to see this guy standing  there under the chandelier with a shotgun. He said, “I think I got it.” He wasn’t arrested; he was just doing it to scare the crap out of people.

Jeff Hammond
1989 Daytona 500 Champion Crew Chief for Darrell Waltrip and Current FOX Analyst
Since the inception of NASCAR until somewhere around 1995, cheating was accepted. You’d come to Daytona with a dozen things you had done that you knew NASCAR wasn’t going to like (such as using nitrous or narrowing the chassis). When they got through the inspection process, if six of those things got through, you had a successful outing. It was all part of the spirit that made our sport so exciting.

Television Takes Hold
By the late ’70s, the stock cars that had run at about 145 mph during the inaugural 500 were approaching 200 mph. Two decades of speedway racing had built an expanding pantheon of stars that included Richard Petty, David Pearson, A.J. Foyt, Cale Yarborough, and the brothers Donnie and Bobby Allison. But Daytona’s popularity was still confined largely to the Southeast. That all changed on February 18, 1979, when CBS broadcast the first live airing of the Daytona 500. A huge blizzard happened to be pounding the East Coast that day, confining many Northerners to their homes. With nothing better to do, they tuned in to the 500. What they saw immediately pushed both NASCAR and the Daytona 500 into the national consciousness.

Michael Waltrip
2001, 2003 Daytona 500 Champion
Thirty years ago my family used to get into our car and drive an hour toward Bowling Green, Kentucky and sit on the side of the road to listen to the races on the radio being broadcast out of Nashville, just to hear how my brother [eventual 1989 Daytona champ Darrell Waltrip] was doing. That’s how desperate you had to be to want to know something about our sport. So [the 1979 Daytona 500] being live on network television was a huge deal.

Hammond
Worked the 1979 Pit Crew for Cale Yarborough
Once the race got under way, it was pretty obvious to everyone that Cale and both Donnie and Bobby Allison had good, fast cars. And as the race was winding down, everybody could see that Cale was just holding back, biding his time, trying to set Donnie up. Down on pit road, we all thought we were on our way to Victory Lane.

Yarborough
I had Donnie set up for the last lap to slingshot past him on the backstretch. Then when I made my move, he ran me right off the racetrack. It had been raining all night, and there wasn’t nothing but mud in the infield. When I hit that mud, I was out of control at 200 miles per hour.

Waltrip
Cale and Donnie got out of their cars, Bobby Allison drove up, and they all got in a wild, drag-down fistfight. I was 15 years old and standing right there in the infield. I thought seeing grownups fight was pretty cool.

Bobby Allison
1978, 1982, 1988 Daytona 500 Champion
I pulled up in the vicinity of the wreckage. Cale started yelling, and at that point I probably questioned Cale’s ancestry. That did not calm him down any. He ran toward me, and I think I probably questioned his ancestry a little bit more. With that he hit me in the face with his helmet. I said to myself, “I have to get out of the car and handle this right now or run from him for the rest of my life.” So I climbed out of the car, and—my interpretation—he started beating on my fist with his nose.

Yarborough
I never hit anybody with my helmet. I just pushed [Bobby] one time. It didn’t last that long, but it lasted long enough to give the sport a boost, I’ll tell you that.

Live TV commentary at that very moment
Here comes Richard Petty! He leads Darrell Waltrip by five car lengths, five more lengths to A.J. Foyt. Richard Petty takes the outside…And Richard Petty will win the Daytona 500! Apparently, we may have a fistfight. We see drivers in helmets, safety officials trying to jump in and separate them, as tempers have really flared after this amazing incident on the final lap!

Hammond
That’s the way NASCAR was. You had to sometimes make a stand, and that’s what Bobby felt like he had to do. And Cale felt like he needed to also. That will always be the day that we woke up America to what stock car racing was all about.

Yarborough
Everywhere I go, people still ask about it. About 80 percent of the country was snowed in that day, so it was the biggest TV audience we ever had. Usually when people watch ball games and stuff, they turn the TV off when it’s over. When this was over, they were jumping up and down in the middle of the floor.

Tony Stewart
2002, 2005 NASCAR Points Champion
I remember seeing it on TV. I was about eight years old. That was my first memory of Daytona. Nobody would have known that day was going to build this sport to what it is now.

Allison
NASCAR fined us $6,000 apiece. Then I think they used the $18,000 to make commercials with the fight. They play the clip all the time, but they haven’t given me a royalty or commission. I’m still waiting for it.