Terry Labonte's cool and consistency won him the coveted season points titleby Ed Hinton
What did it take for Terry Labonte to win the Winston Cup points championship, NASCAR's most coveted title? What did it take to put together an 18-year perfect-attendance record in the hardest school of knocks in American auto racing? What did it take to blow the doors off Richard Petty's record of 513 consecutive Winston Cup starts?
Luck, guts and stamina, certainly. But those qualities are obligatory in any first-rate NASCAR driver. What is different about the 40-year-old Labonte, considering that drivers are often as temperamental as professional tennis players, is this: "He's in a class of his own when it comes to being cool,"
says Gary DeHart, his crew chief on the Hendrick Motorsports team. "Mentally, he's at the opposite end of the spectrum from the other drivers."
How relaxed is Labonte? On Oct. 25, during the first practice for the next-to-last race of the season, the throttle on his Chevrolet stuck, wide open, as he barreled into Turn 3 of Phoenix International Raceway. Seeing a white concrete wall approaching with lightning inevitability at 150 miles per hour would panic most mortals, but not Labonte. He calmly reached with his left hand for the ignition kill switch on the dashboard. Just as he found it, the car slammed broadside into the wall. He flipped the toggle switch at the moment the car caught fire.
Labonte kept his consecutive-starts streak alive at Atlanta and also came away with the big prize.
photograph by
Next, he hit the brake pedal. Nothing. The brake lines had been severed by the impact. The car kept rolling, and the only way to stop it was to hit the wall again, intentionally this time. Labonte did, and finally the car came to a stop about half a racetrack away from where the trouble had begun.
Only then did Labonte notice that his left hand was throbbing. Still, his thoughts were about the car. "I was disappointed that we weren't going to be able to run that one," he says. "It was my favorite car—probably the best one that has ever come out of our shop."
Labonte made his way to St. Luke's Hospital, but only after taking a few laps in his backup car. X-rays of his left hand revealed a spiral fracture of the second metacarpal—the bone just below the first knuckle of his forefinger, the one that forms a V with the thumb. It is an especially inconvenient place for a lefthanded person to have a fracture, particularly one who makes his living turning left.
At the hospital, team members discussed alternative drivers, until Labonte spoke up. "I'm going to drive the car," he said matter-of-factly. What about a relief driver to help out? "Look," Labonte said, "I'm going to drive the car." End of discussion.
Though he could grip the wheel with only three fingers, Labonte never considered not racing. On Sunday morning, team owner Rick Hendrick presented him with a foot-long syringe he had procured from a veterinary clinic. "We're all set if your hand starts hurting," Hendrick said.
In '96, Labonte had two triumphs: He broke Petty's endurance record and—busted hand and all—became the season's champ.
photograph by
"Ha, ha," Labonte said softly. "You guys think this is very funny."
With a special ring attached to the steering wheel, Labonte was able to pull
the wheel with the weight of his entire arm. He finished third at Phoenix and might even have won had he not taken on a poor-handling set of tires during a late pit stop.
The result allowed Labonte to increase his season points lead—to 47 over teammate Jeff Gordon and 99 over Dale Jarrett—going into the season finale, at Atlanta on Nov. 10. But the long turns of Atlanta Motor Speedway, Labonte knew, would be tough on someone with an impaired hand. It would take all his cool to get him through this one.
An eighth-place finish at Atlanta would give Labonte his second Winston Cup championship; he had won his first in 1984. "It takes the same thing to win it now as it did in '84. You got to be consistent," said Labonte, racing's paragon of consistency.
The Winston Cup points system favors steady drivers like him. A victory is worth 175 points, but second place gets 170, third 165, and so on. Thus, finishing near the top is almost as highly valued as winning, and Labonte almost always finishes near the top.
In Atlanta, his left hand numb from an injection of a local anesthetic, Labonte did what he had already done 27 out of 30 times in 1996: He finished. And he finished fifth, his 21st top-five finish of the year, which gave him a 37-point victory over Gordon on the season. The Atlanta race turned into a Labonte family affair; the winner was Terry's 32-year-old brother, Bobby.
Fast and steady wins the race—i.e., the Winston Cup points race—and Labonte is both. And then there is that legendary cool. One day during his 1984 Winston Cup championship season, his then crew chief, Dale Inman, became irked by the driver's stoicism. "Terry was so laid-back about racing that I would look at him and wonder, Is he just doing it for the money?" Inman recalls. "So I asked him point-blank, 'Do you enjoy racing?' And he said"—and here Inman speaks in a voice as soft as Labonte's—"'More than anything I've ever done. I just love it.'"
His sangfroid—Labonte's nickname is Iceman—allowed him to earn the Winston Cup durability record this spring by starting his 514th consecutive race and to be redubbed, naturally, Ironman. Comparisons to his baseball counterpart, Cal Ripken Jr., come easily. But Ripken doesn't have to qualify for every game he plays. Labonte does. Indeed, Petty's streak wasn't ended by an injury (he drove with broken bones on numerous occasions) but by a failure to qualify for a race at Richmond in 1989.
Terry Labonte: 1996 Winston Cup Champion
photograph by
Labonte's consistency over the past three seasons can, at least in part, be attributed to his team, Hendrick Motorsports, which he calls "the best I've ever been with." But what about the four seasons before he hooked up with Hendrick? Labonte was in the NASCAR wilderness, failing to win a single race despite having won at least one race in each of the seven preceding seasons (he has 18 Winston Cup wins). Labonte recalls that on April 21, when he started the Goody's 500 at Martinsville, Va., to surpass Petty's mark, "People came up to me and said what amazed them was that I'd made all those races in those cars a few years ago that, uh, weren't as competitive as they should have been." A little chuckle affirms that Labonte is, as usual, understating matters.
Some of those cars were mechanically unworthy of qualifying. Other drivers might have parked them in disgust or crashed them while trying to force their way into the field. But Labonte's composure held, even as his reputation crumbled. "Everybody said he was used up, washed up," says DeHart. "I just couldn't buy that. I'd seen him run good when he had something to run."
In the summer of '93, Hendrick decided to part ways with Ricky Rudd, who didn't click as a part of Hendrick's three-driver team, especially with rising prodigy Gordon. Hendrick longed for someone cool enough to be a team player with the young star as well as with veteran Ken Schrader. So he hired Labonte for the '94 season. Labonte responded with six wins and $2.7 million in prize money during his first two years with the team. Suddenly his cool had become an asset, not an enigma.
There was a time when he did not control his emotions quite so effectively. Born in Corpus Christi, Texas, and raised on quarter-midget racing, Terry began racing his dad's '57 Chevys illegally at age 16. His father, Bob, grins as he remembers the years when Terry wasn't quite so easygoing. "We had to fight our way out of a couple of tracks on account of Terry's taking somebody out," says Bob. "We had a big fight with Rick Rapp [a stalwart of south Texas short tracks] and his gang one night when Terry was about 17. In the race, neither of them was gonna give, and they went down into the corner and Terry pinched him off and then Rapp ran into Terry. We got into it big-time." The feud went on for about a month, during which "Rapp drove with a knife in the seat with him," Bob recalls. "I gave Terry a can of Mace to carry in the seat with him, and I told him, 'After the race, the first son of a bitch who comes over here, you let him have it.'"
It never got that serious, and as often happens with such feuds, Rapp and the Labontes eventually became friends.
On another south Texas night, says Bob, "We were in technical inspection, and some guy raised some questions about our pistons. I grabbed him by the collar and pushed his head inside the hood compartment, and I said, 'If you want to
have a closer look, have at it!' I turned him loose and he stood up. Terry jumped off the back of my pickup, turned the guy around and decked him."
Labonte got his fight from his dad, Bob.
photograph by
Standing in Victory Lane at Atlanta in November, Bob said that he really hadn't had much to do with his sons' careers. But, protested Bobby, "I'd say otherwise. Quarter-midget racing, go-karts, you name it. If there was anything we wanted to race, he got it for us. He worked two jobs to make it happen. There is nobody I know of who has ever given his children more."
And young Terry eventually put those gifts to good use when he attracted the attention of Billy Hagan, a Louisiana oil-exploration big shot and short-track team owner. Says Hagan, who discovered Labonte at Myers Speedway in Houston, "He looked like he was planning ahead."
In 1978 Hagan gave the 21-year-old Labonte his first Winston Cup ride, in a race at Darlington Raceway, widely acknowledged as the toughest track on the circuit. Labonte finished fourth. Hagan signed him for the entire 1979 season, and the two stayed together until the oil bust of the mid-'80s hit Hagan hard. By 1986 Labonte wasn't even being paid. How much money did the driver lose? "Enough to get your attention," he says. But Labonte has never attempted to recover his wages. Hagan had brought him out of the Saturday-night bullrings and into Winston Cup racing, and Labonte hasn't forgotten that.
In 1987 Labonte signed with Junior Johnson. He spent three years with Johnson, who says that Labonte's low-key style may have cost Labonte victories on the racetrack. "Terry has been too much of a gentleman to win as many races as he should have," says Johnson. Labonte shrugs at the criticism. "Well," he says, "I'm not going to wreck somebody to win a race."
Good idea, and one that promotes self-survival. Drivers who wreck others often wreck themselves in the process or get nailed later. That can lead to injuries severe enough to force drivers to sit out races. Terry rolled on, even if it was without the pepper of Bobby, who came into Winston Cup in 1993 with as much fire as Terry had ice.
Gordon (left) was not only Labonte's chief rival in '96 but also his teammate.
photograph by
Not that the obligatory luck, guts and stamina haven't played their part. In 1982 Labonte's streak almost ended at 123 races. At full speed on the old Riverside, Calif., road course, his Buick suddenly refused to turn. "Talk about panic," he says. He hit the end of a retaining wall head-on, breaking his left leg, right foot, nose and several ribs, and badly cutting his face.
Riverside was the last race of the season, so Labonte had time to recuperate and his streak remained intact. The wreck, the force of which knocked the car's motor backward under the dash, was caused by a still-unexplained mechanical failure, one of those things race drivers fear most because it turns them into mere passengers in their own cars.
Labonte's strongest show of stamina came less than halfway to the record, in 1987. In April he broke his shoulder in a wreck at Darlington, but he didn't miss a start that season.
By and large, however, the streak was preserved by ice. Maybe he should have gotten hotter at times, Labonte admits, shaken up teams, demanded the replacement of lax crewmen: "Several times I should have stood up and said, 'Hey, we've got to make changes, get rid of these people.' If there's anything I can look back on and say that I should have done differently, it would be that. But it's not my personality. I like people. The people I've disliked in my life, I can count on one hand."
Labonte got his motivation to be consistently great from the King, Richard Petty.
photograph by
The return on that attitude is insurance on the streak, and the streak has now paid off in the Winston Cup championship. Labonte has no enemies, no payback-seekers gunning for him. And with the season finale in Atlanta, he has run his remarkable streak to 537 consecutive races. Hendrick thinks enough of him to have signed him through the year 2000. And so, barring injury or an unlikely change of heart about his profession, the limits of Terry Labonte's longevity and achievement won't be known until sometime in the next millennium.
|
|
|
