The Most Important Race in NASCAR History Deserves a Closer Look: The 1979 Daytona 500

Dale Earnhardt the rookie coming up on the inside of it now the Austral of number two where will kale make his move that's it Waldrop tried to slingshot very exotic and there's a fight between Cale Yarborough and Donnie Allison the tempers overflowing they're angry they know they have lost and what a bitter defeat on a cloudy and soggy mid February afternoon down in Florida one race changed everything in the NASCAR world that day 120,000 people saw a young upstart from Kannapolis North Carolina take the lead in his first ever run at the sports biggest event great beating and banging racing an unbelievable last lap crash and the sport's greatest driver add to his already unbeatable record and thanks to a push by to CBS broadcasters millions more bore witness to all these events as well and due to events happening outside of the track that day this one race is likely the only reason why anybody outside of the southeast even knows what NASCAR is in the first place so let's turn back the clock and find out why this one single race was the most important race NASCAR has ever run in its history let's find out why this means so much why this guy is so special and why in the world is everybody the track here today driving an Oldsmobile what would end up being the most important race in NASCAR history almost ended up not happening at all rain had plagued the Daytona area all week and there was even talk of postponing the race altogether and relegating it to Monday however the added pressure put on by CBS doing the first-ever live broadcast of a 500-mile race in television history made the race go through on time to keep everything running somewhat smoothly the race begins under caution as the first several laps will be run under yellow and drivers would report back what they thought of the track conditions the fact that CBS is even here is a minor miracle in and of itself ken Squier a veteran broadcaster and lover of Motorsports have been a staunch advocate of his employer getting more involved in racing joining him in the booth today is David Hobbs a Brit who's competed in IndyCar Formula One in the 60s and 70s and even ran in the 1976 Daytona 500 driving a Benny Parsons backup car the duo up in the press box had fought long and hard to get this race broadcasted and that jury Sunday it looked like it would all go up in smoke however Mother Nature played along and let the race begin at its scheduled time as the 41 starters test the track at a steady 70 miles an hour our pole sitter Buddy Baker is the odds-on favorite to win it all today he not only won the pole in his iconic gray ghost number 20 but he also won the first ever Busch clash last week and won his qualifying race running an experimental setup to see how far they could push their oldsmobile and in the 125 it seems to it worked he's been bad fast all throughout speed weeks and looks to pull off the triple winning the clash the qualifier and the 500 to his outside is Donnie Allison a long-running part-time competitor in the Cup Series he's making his 10th attempt at the great American race today he sat on the pole for the race before back in 1975 but today he feels especially confident in his car even though he blew an engine in his qualifying race on Thursday thankfully at the time NASCAR didn't penalize engine replacements as a result of racing in the duals so he gets to keep his starting position for the main event today behind both of them is Cale Yarborough starting third going for his fourth straight title in 1979 Cale has shown speed all week but has been just behind buddy and Donnie by a tick but if anybody can get that extra inch out of a car it's Cale Yarborough nicknamed Old Hickory Cale was a tough-as-nails driver who had a record of getting everything out of his equipment regardless of the budget behind it starting in the mid 70s he's joined forces with legendary driver turned car owner jr. Johnson and won his first ever title in 1976 he's become the first ever three-peat champ in NASCAR's top division and in 1979 he's poised to win an unthinkable four in a row despite being just off the pace from the 28 of Buddy Baker and the one of Donnie Allison his odds are good he's won the race twice before in 1968 in 1977 but his biggest goal is to overtake the king a number of Daytona 500 crowns Richard Petty sits on five Daytona 500 wins a record for the time however the king begins his journey today from the 13th position and has basically been a non-factor all week Richard can shoot for a top five but no one expects more than that from him today these four guys though all have something in common that will give them an edge over the field today they are driving the fabled Oldsmobile 442 cutlass supreme a holdover from the 1977 season the Olds Cutlass is a bad fast car that can cut through the air like nothing else on the big tracks at Daytona Talladega in Michigan no other maker model can rival its aerodynamics with its sloped front that produces more downforce and front grip combined with a sloped rear cabin that gently brings air to its rear spoiler it's not only fast but surprisingly stable and just on its home but in the draft as well suffice it to say if you want to win today you would better be driving an Oldsmobile and everybody knows it 21 of the 41 starters here today are running an Oldsmobile back to the race on lap 15 the race finally goes green and Donnie Allison dives to the inside and puts Buddy Baker behind him after four laps though Cale Yarborough would take the lead and then Benny Parsons and then Bobby Allison Donnie's brother the lead would turn into a revolving door of sorts as we would see 36 lead changes on the day now you might think that these two Donny and Cale battled up front all day based on this last lap past then right well that iconic backstretch battle almost never happened at all as a matter of fact it's a miracle they were anywhere near the front at the end of the race on lap 30 Donny Bobby and Cale are battling for the lead running one two three respectively when Bobby gets just a tick loose and Donny dips just a little too low coming out of turn to the to collect one another and Bobby slams into Donny hard enough to knock him into the air they slide through the mud and Bobby hits the inside bank hard with the rear of his vehicle but Donny misses any secondary damage meanwhile Cale ducks low and slides through the grass to avoid them which he does he doesn't get a scratch on his vehicle unfortunately that rain we've been talking about has turned the backstretch grass into a swamp all three drivers will have to be pushed out of the mud and lose a lap in the process it'll take a lot of hard work to get back up to where they were thankfully we've got nearly 170 more laps to get it done Buddy Baker the favorite to win it all today would pull into the pits during the ensuing caution running on seven cylinders as the team works on the car the engine just gets worse and then completely fails as it would turn out those first 15 laps under yellow would be the only last Buddy Baker would lead all day the odds on favorite today is out before even a quarter of the race is completed the race restarts with Neil Bonnett at the helm this time and he and AJ Foyt immediately go to war after ten laps though a rookies here to spoil the party some guy named Dale Earnhardt passes both of them David Hobbs up in the booth thinks that Dale might be a lap down but as he and the CBS crew go over their notes they determined that yeah that rookie and the blue and yellow number two just passed one of NASCAR's young guns and one of Indy cars greatest drivers of all time in the Daytona 500 his father Ralph Earnhardt was a well known short tracker in the southeast that dominated on the small tracks but his son is here fighting for the lead at one of NASCAR biggest although he's made just a few starts in the years prior to this race 1979 will be Dale's first year full-time competition and thus he's in the fight for the Rookie of the Year award in 1979 was arguably the most stacked rookie class in NASCAR history Dale will do battle for the award with the likes of Harry Gant Geoff Bodine and Terry Labonte the class will go on to win a combined 134 races and compete for championships for decades to come the rivalries most talked-about nascar lore from the 80s and 90s can trace their origins to this race right here where the four will compete against one another for the first time on the same asphalt this is where it all started and just for a handful of laps dale leads not only them but the entire field he'll lead 10 laps on the day astonishingly just after the halfway point on lap 108 Donnie Allison has clawed his way back to the front and retakes the lead he'll mix it up with Earnhardt for a bit before leading a big chunk of laps as Cale Yarborough has now also joined the fray the laps click off and the lead swaps hands another nine times before in lap 178 Donnie takes it for good thanks to a wicked fast pit stop but Cale sizes him up and slips him behind him as he exits the pits Donnie and Cale run one two for the remainder of the race while Cale patiently waits for 22 laps as he makes several faints and attempts to take the lead but to no avail kales coming off of winning his third consecutive championship and he sees an opportunity to win his third Daytona 500 - he may never top the king Richard Petty's six titles but he might just bite into his five Daytona 500 crowns here today Donnie however has never won the great American race and looks to be the second Alison in a row to win it as his brother Bobby won it last year on the last lap Cale finally has his timing down and he gets a big run coming off of turn two he looks low and Donnie crowds him to the inside but just before Cale goes into the grass he straightens it up and holds his line Donnie hits him as he goes to block and forces Kaylin to the dirt Cale loses control and drifts back up and slams into Donnie the two bounce off and slam into each other again this time even harder as neither one ever let off the throttle the two now junked cars completely lose control and wreck into the turn three wall and drift into the infield who is at fault here is up for debate kill 1 for a gap that was going to disappear and Donnie threw a block that was almost certainly going to wreck someone if not both of them at the end of the day as they say it was just one of those racing deals and all while this is going on all the way up on the front stretch Richard Petty has just maneuvered his way in front of Darrell Waltrip and AJ Foyt to take third place and the race is now on petty has only led 11 laps today and most of those came from the result of pitstop cycles he's been in the top ten all day but no one has picked him to win this race and for good reason Petty's spent most of the 1978 season being injured and actually went winless after the offseason everybody figured petit would use speed weeks to get himself used to being back in the saddle again and during the clash and qualifiers that seemed to be the case but thanks to some savvy pit calls in a fast Oldsmobile petty finds himself in third as the leaders have just wrecked out half a lap ahead CBS has cameras scramble to pick up third through fifth as every available shot had been directed at kale and Donny just as the trio sails into turn four the cameras find them Darrell Waltrip tries to set up a pass and makes a Banzai move to the inside of petty on the apron but to no avail petty wins an unthinkable six Daytona 500 and in probably the most unconventional way to the king is not used to having a win just handed to him like that domination has been his calling card up to this point the crowd of 120,000 on hand goes absolutely ballistic CBS has microphones can barely pick up the roaring of the engines coming across the finish line over the thundering crowd and his petty completes his cooldown lap and rolls down pit road on route to Victory Lane the camera feed switches to the Goodyear blimp showing something going on on the backstretch ken Squier up in the booth makes the call there's a fight between Cale Yarborough and Donnie Allison the tempers overflowing they're angry they know they have lost and what a bitter defeat Bobby Allison who just finished 11th has pulled beside the wrecked former leaders and is now in the midst of a full-blown two versus one fist fight with his brother against Cale Yarborough the CBS crew is in a panic trying to figure out if they should show the fight or not they change over to a ground level shot just in time to watch someone swing a helmet at someone else the camera doesn't catch a whole lot of it but the pictures from the photographer's on the infield make it all the way to the front page of the New York Times sports section on Monday and they tell the tale Donnie and kale had taken their helmets off to use his weapons against the other and Bobby had grabbed onto kales foot at some point during the scuffle and put him on the ground at that point the track workers break up the fight now all of this is amazing there was great racing lots of lead changes new faces up front a battle for the ages an unforgettable last lap pass the king of the sport adding on to his already widely believed to be unbeatable record and a bare-knuckle fistfight at the end of all of it CBS could have not asked for a better race to play host to the first ever live broadcast of a 500-mile race going into this weekend CBS had expected ratings to be pretty sizable it was a few weeks after the Superbowl and there were no other TV programs worth talking about that day and certainly no other sporting events going on in mid-february but his lady luck would have it that day a massive Blizzard has hammered the East Coast from Georgia to Maine the rains earlier today were part of the southern arm of that storm front everyone in CBS's prime demographic markets are snowed into their houses with nothing to do except to watch this oddity down in Daytona Beach Florida the execs for CBS had estimated when the ratings came in they'd get between 2 & 3 million viewers they got six and a half GDS please hold GDS please hold what's again please ask our mercy what does there's almost and he said yes please don't do that yeah that was awesome CP I said this isn't this whole North ecbs police in the world is killed off about the CPS if we want to dump ready actually around its sources yes please hold great CBS they fight at the end of every race yes yes it's an x-ray right yes but it's the next race yeah we're doing the next day 2500 right that was awesome we got to do the next race and so they did after being inundated with calls after the race from people who couldn't believe what they had just watched CBS broadcast a Daytona 500 live flag-to-flag every year until 2001 demand for more and more NASCAR races to be shown on TV rows and rows and for the first time in its history NASCAR went fully national whatever there's weird southern motorsport was people had to have more of it this one single race put NASCAR on the map and we haven't looked back since anyway I'm slap shoes thanks for watching and y'all take it easy [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: S1apSh0es

Views: 218,053

Keywords: NASCAR, daytona 500, nascar crashes, nascar history, 1979 Daytona 500, NASCAR fights, S1ap, S1apSh0es, slapshoes, cale yarborough, cale yarborough bobby allison fight, bobby allison, donnie allison, Daytona Beach, 1970's NASCAR, motorsports history, stock car racing, CBS NASCAR, Ken Squier, broadcast history, 1979 season, Richard Petty, AJ Foyt, Daytona, daytona 500 win, 2020 Daytona 500, full race, Daytona 500 highlights, Clash highlights, The Clash, Speedweeks

Id: 2iZz0aF1v3k

Length: 13min 46sec (826 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 09 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Innawoods18]

My favorite Bobby Allison quote when asked by NASCAR what happened:

"Well I went over there to check on them and Cale started running into my fist over and over again."

[u/MattyBlowby500]

I watched the full race for the first time a few months ago. It was incredible to watch.