TNN "The Great Drivers" - Bobby Allison

then dad and mom and used it as a base of operations for an almost superhuman racing career a career that took him from Riverside California to the Indianapolis 500 to the Daytona 500 and finally led him to the one goal that eluded him but grand national driving championship join me today as we meet one of the great drivers Bobby Allison [Music] at 47 Bobby Allison is one of the senior citizens a big-time automobile racer but his competitive zeal is positively poised not only does he still run the entire 31 race grand national schedule which is in itself the most physically demanding racing series in the world but Allison spends his spare time running another 30 odd short track stock car races from coast to coast although he is a native of Miami Florida he is thought of as the head of the legendary Alabama gang a select group of card stock car drivers including his brother Donnie and Neil Bonnett allison is a two-time winner of the most prestigious stock car race of them all the Daytona 500 and has been named NASCAR's most popular driver four times he ranks third on the all-time victory list known to be one of the most talented natural race drivers in the business allison lives in Hueytown Alabama with his wife Judy and three children his oldest son Davey is seeking to follow his father into grand national competition well Johnny and I left Miami one day with my pickup truck and a little modified race car and headed for Alabama where we had heard there was good racing and we came into the southeast corner of Alabama down around Dothan and stopped at a gas station that's the guy where the racetrack was he said well there's not one here but there's a real nice one about 100 miles up the road at Montgomery so he drove onto Montgomery and saw a real nice car sitting on a gas station we stopped there and that's where we met both Freeman who's still a good friend of mine and Donnie's both and Bo was a mechanic on Sonny blacks car he said stop let's have a glass of tea and we'll go out and look at the racetrack so we rode out to Montgomery Speedway which at the time had to be the absolute best 1/2 mile paved racetrack in the country and they were running the following night there but that was a Friday and they were racing here in the Birmingham area this little track called Dixie Speedway on Friday night this was 1959 and we drove on up here I ran at Dixie I ran fifth and the heat fifth in the semi feature and fifth in the feature and won more money than it would pay to win everything is if I had been running on the local tracks in Miami so the way I always talk about it is right then I felt like I had died and gone to heaven found country with friendly people nice racetracks and good purses and a place where I was able to get competitive in a hurry [Music] you get a chance to play this game much Oh a little bit I like to sneak down here and evenings and knock around Davy's really good and Clifford's pretty good on the table one it's hard to imagine how you with that schedule that you run it seems as if you're going to spend your whole life but balding into a race car one kind or another well I I have to agree with that I've been in and out gone an awful lot what I try to do to supplement that is the days when I am home spend some time with the family and try to do some things years ago when the kids were smaller it was easy to like go to the river for a day or go to one of the amusement areas or something that we've got several nice ones here in Alabama and some of them have freshwater beaches and so forth we did a lot of that you would you describe yourself as a workaholic well maybe only to a degree a workaholic obviously has to enjoy what he's doing but I don't think there are many workaholics that really have their professional activity and their hobby be the same thing and I think that's true for me when I first started racing I was in high school and at that time it was strictly a recreational activity for me and my dream was to somehow develop that into a career and so forth but that didn't come around right away and there was a difficult time forming a plan but what made that easy was the fact that I got so much enjoyment out of the race and activity even back in the beginning was there a time that you just that you really felt you were good I mean did was it early in the going that you could recognize that you believed that you were better than a lot of the other well how I felt about it and and even now think back about a little bit I felt I was a better mechanic than I was a driver to start with and I had some people helped me along the way and advised me along the way that knew some things about the mechanics and knew some racing tricks so to speak and what happened like when I first came to Alabama I was still pretty much of a novice but I had a very good race car and so the race car allowed me to perform and because the race car was fast and it handled good and it drove good it allowed me to get a lot of good experience early early on and from there I discovered that I could hold the pedal down pretty hard no matter what circumstances I was involved in I felt like I began to get the experience behind the wheel to become a good racecar driver okay I noticed a lot of things around here though the plaques on the wall a lot of them had to do with the Boy Scouts and other civic endeavors around Hueytown are those of largely honorary or if you really spent a lot of time with those with those organizations well I'd like to spend some time with them I I don't think that I've spent enough and in view of what I think they're entitled to but I have gotten personally involved especially in the Boy Scouts Alabama though is really very much your home you never have any second thoughts about going back to Florida or any of that this must you you really totally integrated into this just absolutely in this society and yeah well it was strange you know I was born and raised in Miami and I liked the country down there I was addicted to the Everglades when I was a kid I fished and hunted and roamed through the glades just amusing myself so to speak and I thought that was really the greatest place in the world and when I came into Alabama I found a different kind of terrain but I found a a group of people that were were outwardly friendly and warm and country that was pretty in a different respect and a lot of water you know I like to swim and I like boat riding and water skiing stuff like that and fishing and there was a lot of water in Alabama and and of course there's tall hills and hardwood trees and a lot of things that people don't really think of when you say Alabama you think hot country and kind of flat ground and and maybe pine trees but especially north and central Alabama is much different from that and on top all that I found racetracks that were exactly what I needed to develop my career and purses that allowed me to support myself solely through racing support the family and everything and it it's just something that like I discovered where I was supposed to be Bobby you just won your first grand national championship and it must have been a big mental strain on you not so much from driving a car but to having to constantly deal with the press and your fans and the curious public about that whole issue of winning that thing is it was it where did the relief come from from winning it the actual championship or just not having to deal with that subject anymore well the championship certainly is the greatest part of it but one of the the real nice fringe benefits is the idea that that all of the reporters that I've seen and dealt with over the years and the fans that have supported me as you can see from day one and so forth can't ask me am I never gonna win it because now I have [Music] Bobby over a career that has spanned as long as you have and you really been racing since you've been old enough to hold on us turn onto us there were a lot of ways we all tend to think of a man as a champion like yourself is having sort of a ever escalating career towards one success piled on another but you've had some hard times in your in your careers there any particular times that you can recall as to being a low point or a series of low points well there have been a few my career certainly has had ups and downs that have been tremendous highs and tremendous lows and 73 found myself in a situation that I hadn't really planned for where I had informed jr. that I was leaving to go back with home in a moody yet again and then that didn't happen found myself without a ride put some cars of my own together and went out we want a couple races but it was a far cry from what I had hoped for and financially it was bad but from there went into a long skid that really didn't end until the 1978 season and by the time I sign all of bud more for 78 and we hit it off for Daytona I was feeling bad physically and a depressed mentally and broke and about the only encouragement I had was that I still enjoyed it when I got behind the wheel and of course I had the support of Judy Ann and the kids but from my own standpoint the only relief I had was when I got behind the wheel and once I rolled out pit road where I didn't have to pay attention to anything but the driving of course that trip to Daytona resulted in my first ever Daytona 500 win probably yeah jr. Johnson once told me and he said this with a great deal of deference to your talents he said he felt that you were probably them endowed with the most raw talent of any driver that he had ever been around but he said he that you felt that if you had a failing that it was getting too much involved with the with the crew in terms of trying to run the race team do you think that was a problem with you were you too hot-headed and too demanding of a crew in those days in the early days I think there probably was a time when when my experience my initial experience really did cause a a problem with mechanics even up until the most recent year that I ran a team out of here in Eureka which was the 77th season I only drove for junior for one season and probably the biggest reason that that didn't go on any further even though we had great success together was the fact that jr. and I couldn't communicate I have an awful lot of admiration for him and I've heard that he's got great admiration for some of my talent maybe not all of them but I think that what would put me kind of at odds in that situation was when jr. hired me I asked him after four years of me begging him for a ride why all of a sudden did he come to me and he said well we have a fast car but we can't get it to handle and so we want you to get our car handling and I was told that herb would work with me and do the things that I wanted done and herb mab that is and that we'd go on from there well herb and I worked great together you know I really like the guy we had a lot of success and so forth but I had a difficult time getting the whole crew to change some things on the car that that I felt could be improved but that jr. had really liked back in his driving days and in fact sometimes had to kind of figure out how to present a situation so that I would get it done I wanted the rear panhard bar changed one time and I was told that you know jr. always ran it this particular way and so we're going to Riverside which turns the opposite direction so I said well if it's better like that then we should turn it around for Riverside and so they said well yeah yeah so we had both mounting positions on for Riverside and we tried it back-to-back and and the way I really preferred it turned out to be better and it accomplished a better performance out of the car but I don't think it made any friends Yuba you have tried to you have run your own team for a long time though on the short tracks even though you run with Grand National crew chiefs and teams exclusively of your short track efforts is that right that's true and of course I operate this little business down here that that racist Davis cars my son and some some I own short track activity I think that probably what I should say at this point is that in my early years I had no financial backing whatsoever and there wasn't enough prize money to pay any hired help I had good volunteer help some some very good friends that still are close to me even yet today but the burden kind of fell on my own shoulders and many times in those days I would tow from here to Richmond Virginia alone just me and the truck with the race car and in order to be able to pay the bills with what money I could take in I couldn't pay any out to any hired help or anything like that and I think that developed an attitude of just grabbing the wrenches or whatever and and doing what I thought was the next best step to take and you know when I moved into the Grand National picture and when I moved well into the Grand National picture I found a wide variety of how that was accepted with bud Morris crew for instance I could take the whole toolbox and they would all just support whatever I wanted to do but with several of the other teams that I've been with there was great resentment if I picked up a wrench and with a few crews some resentment if I even made a comment I think that's the strength of the Dai Guard operation if I was to leave here today and and fly over there and pick up a torch and the welder and wrenches and and do all sorts of wild things I would get a hundred percent support rather than resentment and I think it shows when we get to the racetrack [Music] Bobby so much of racing we all know is its raw emotion I mean the drive to succeed you've been in it you run 60 odd races a year and the super speedways the short tracks you you're testing you're living in a race car and an awful lot of time is there any moment in in the course of a racing season that it that that urge to win that urge to just keep your foot in it is less than it was say five years ago I think the only place that I might even see an inkling of that is in the short track of parents schedule but even at that I don't really want to concede to less of an urge to win I've always felt that that there is only a percentage of wins that you can have and that if you do your best effort on some days you're not gonna win anyway and so if I find myself in a less than perfect situation on the short track I'm not as riled about it as I would have been five or ten years ago can you see at any particular point when you would consider retirement or is there any any specific goal that you set for yourself or any moment that when you know that that it's time to pack it in and do something else well my present contract would die guard will end about two weeks before I turn 50 years old I think that's kind of neat from my standpoint that in a professional career that that I can feel that competitive and and that capable of fulfilling my duties behind the wheel that that I would sign that kind of a paper to along with Bill Gardner and and I got all the grief that dagger I wanted me to I think it's a combination of good Hill years of experience taken the place of just the raw enthusiasm that makes race drivers go when they're younger and the continued success that also encourages I feel that I've made a pretty good living and that at least some of it has been handled properly but it still makes me feel real good when there's a great big paycheck at the end of the race that paying you back for all those years or and there wasn't any kind of a paycheck Thank You Bobby Thank You Brock thank you for joining us today with Bobby Allison on the great drivers promotional consideration provided by : Winchester firearms makers of the world-famous model 101 wind choke one of the many fine classic doubles from the olden Winchester collection [Music]

Channel: Calhoun98

Views: 13,049

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Id: QoaYpObtHMk

Length: 21min 47sec (1307 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 26 2018