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Talladega's Winston Select 500 was jinxed—from beginning to endby Ed Hinton
Say this for Talladega Superspeedway, the biggest, baddest tri-oval track in the world: Things don't go just halfway haywire there. When they go wrong, they go way wrong. So it has been from time to time, ever since the track was born under a bad sign in 1969. And so it went for the entire weekend of this year's Winston Select 500, in front of what just might have been the biggest sporting crowd—pushing 200,000 on race day—ever to gather in North America outside of Indianapolis.
Sterling Marlin's easy win over Dale Jarrett amounted to the weekend's comic relief. It was funny because it so blatantly belied the prerace poor-mouthing by Marlin's team owner, Larry McClure, that their po' lil' ol' Chevrolet Monte Carlo hadn't a lick of a chance against such supposedly overhorsepowered Ford Thunderbirds as Jarrett's. But fans eavesdropping on the Marlin team's radio transmissions heard crew chief Tony Glover assure his driver, "The race is ours," well before the race was half over. In the dicey world of stock car racing, that may have been a record mouthful of confidence.
Besides, this race needed something funny to happen. This year enough misfortune had befallen the Winston Select 500 to have old-timers murmuring about the infamous Talladega Jinx:
•Track qualifying record holder Bill Elliott (212.809 mph in 1987) spun into the infield after being bumped from behind, and he fractured his left femur in two places.
•Ricky Craven, 1995 Winston Cup Rookie of the Year, fractured a neck vertebra when he took the worst-looking tumble Talladega has seen in 13 years.
•Bob Loga, president of the Automobile Racing Club of America, died from injuries he suffered on Friday in a passenger-car accident outside the track.
•As a result of Craven's crash, which involved 13 other cars, the race was red-flagged for an hour while the garage area was transformed into a war zone of twisted, spent metal and a fence was repaired.
•Team owner Robert Yates and his drivers, Ernie Irvan and Dale Jarrett, had a pole-winning engine blown and a superspeedway-specific T-Bird carjacked by NASCAR officials.
•Those very same NASCAR officials slunk out of northern Alabama looking inept—if not just plain silly.
Many of the mishaps that make up the Talladega Jinx happen simply because the place is so incredibly fast. The 2.66-mile tri-oval has 33-degree banked turns, which are among the steepest in racing. If Indy Cars raced at Talladega, they would hit speeds of more than 250 mph—pretty scary when you consider that a 747 fully loaded with passengers leaves the ground at 206 mph. When the NASCAR circuit first stopped at the new Talladega track, in 1969, a large group of star drivers led by Richard Petty went on strike, fearful that their cars couldn't handle the track. The field was padded with replacement drivers.
The strikers were later appeased with rule changes designed to slow down Winston Cup cars. And ever since, every NASCAR technical move to restrict speeds has been made primarily with Talladega in mind. Speeds there and at Daytona, the fastest courses NASCAR runs, are now held in the 190-mph range by "restrictor plates" placed on the engines' carburetors. The plates decrease the amount of oxygen an engine can take in, thus cutting horsepower from the mid-700 range seen at tracks like Atlanta and Charlotte to around 450 at Talladega.
NASCAR officials have good reason to worry about excessive speed. At the 1987 Talladega 500, during the same weekend Elliott set the track's qualifying record, Bobby Allison's Buick went airborne, tore down about 50 yards of safety fencing along the main grandstands and might have crushed hundreds of spectators had not two steel cables, backups to the fence, withstood the strain and held.
All of that was little comfort this year to the Robert Yates Racing duo of Irvan and Jarrett. Never before had a more publicly exasperated—and privately furious—pair occupied the front row for the start of a NASCAR race. Soon after Friday's qualifying, Winston Cup director Gary Nelson, NASCAR's top technological officer, accidentally blew the irreplaceable engine that had just powered Irvan to the pole. Yates had been counting on that engine to propel Irvan to victory on Sunday.
"I didn't know Gary Nelson was a driver," Irvan said bitterly after winning the pole on Friday. He's not: Before becoming an official, Nelson was a mechanic and one of NASCAR's wiliest crew chiefs. But he "drove" Irvan's car that afternoon on a huge computerized treadmill that NASCAR calls a chassis dynamometer. The machine is designed to gauge not just an engine's horsepower output, as does a regular dyno, but also the amount of horsepower a car can transmit to the track surface, or "put on the ground," as NASCAR insiders say. Chevrolet teams had been whining that Fords—specifically Yates's Fords—"have an advantage in either horsepower or aerodynamic drag," as McClure put it, even with restrictor plates in place.
NASCAR, ever conscious of keeping competition as equal as possible, meant to check out the track-applicable horsepower on both the hottest Ford of the weekend, Irvan's, and the hottest Chevy, Marlin's. But Nelson slipped the clutch on Irvan's T-Bird and blew the engine. After that performance, he didn't bother to test Marlin's car that day.
The apologetic official offered to fly the engine back to Yates's shop in Charlotte, at NASCAR's expense, for rebuilding. Yates knew there wasn't time for that, because the engines used for the restrictor-plate races are much more complex beasts than normal NASCAR engines. Yates performed emergency surgery on-site, using a few salvaged pieces from the ruined engine to go with parts from undamaged ones.
Jarrett also had a bone to pick with NASCAR. He had qualified another Yates Thunderbird second, but that wasn't the T-Bird he wanted to drive. He wanted to drive the one in which he had won the Daytona 500 back in February. But that car had been taken by NASCAR for display in its Daytona USA theme park. NASCAR had paid Yates a mere $100,000 for the car, whose value Jarrett placed as high as $300,000 because of all the highly specialized labor that had gone into its construction. Teams custom-build cars—as well as engines—especially for use at Daytona and Talladega. Rarely can a car's exact weight distribution and aerodynamics be duplicated. So at Talladega, Jarrett had to settle for a reasonable facsimile of his Daytona winner.
Irvan and his patchwork engine were no factor once the race started. Struggling far back in the pack, he was caught in the day's biggest crash, the 14-car wreck that sent Craven's car barrel-rolling, disintegrating—except, thankfully, for its roll cage—as it tore down the catch fence between Turns 1 and 2. The race was red-flagged for nearly an hour to repair the fence.
Earlier, Elliott's T-Bird had been tapped from behind as he exited Turn 2 and was sent bouncing like some horrific bucking bronc through the infield inside the backstretch.
Because of the big crash, near race's end Jarrett's car was the only Ford with any chance to win, and that chance was slim. Even with Jarrett glued to Marlin's bumper with two laps remaining, Glover assured Marlin by radio that Jarrett was powerless to pass.
McClure's prerace whining that his Chevrolets were sorely disadvantaged left him with a sheepish grin late Sunday afternoon, as he swore that the only reason Marlin had outrun Jarrett was that "Tony had our car handling perfectly, and Sterling could drive it wide open. Jarrett's car pushed [understeered], and he had to back off at times."
Across the garage area, Jarrett hooted at the claim. "My car never pushed all day," he said. "I never lifted [his foot off the gas pedal]."
The Chevy teams were believed to have been lobbying NASCAR to allow them to use improved cylinder heads that would give them more horsepower. Richard Childress, owner of Dale Earnhardt's Chevy and another mover in the techno-squabble, privately expressed fear after the race that NASCAR wouldn't grant the wish now that Marlin had shown so strongly.
All in all, Jarrett was just relieved to leave Talladega. "It is," he had said before the race, "the most nerve-racking place we go."
That's because most tracks on the NASCAR circuit aren't considered jinxed. But Talladega has a history of mishaps and spectral occurrences long enough to make the most unsuperstitious driver rub his rabbit's foot.
The jinx started gathering speed in 1973 when rising star Larry Smith died in what appeared to be a minor crash on the banking. Track rumor had it that Smith had cut the protective inner lining out of his helmet to accommodate his long hair.
On the morning of the 1974 Talladega 500, drivers and crewmen arrived in the garage area to find that the majority of cars in the field had been subtly sabotaged overnight by a person or persons unknown and never caught. The tires were cut, too little to flatten, but they would surely have blown out once the race started and they were stressed. "If they catch whoever did this," said Buddy Baker, the nerviest Talladega driver of the time, "they ought to charge them with attempted murder, because that's exactly what it was."
More jinx material: In 1977, the mother of then journeyman driver David Sisco was killed when she was struck by a pickup truck in the track's infield. But by then no tragedy, no matter how freakish, shocked seasoned Talladega-goers. In 1975, Richard Petty's brother-in-law, Randy Owens, had been killed when a pressurized water tank he was standing near exploded in the track's pit area.
And in 1973, Bobby Isaac heard the loudest voice in Talladega's history. Isaac suddenly parked a race car that was challenging for the lead. When asked why, Isaac swore that while running at full speed he had heard a ghostly voice telling him to stop immediately or suffer the consequences. Isaac believed until the day he died of a heart attack in 1977 that he had pulled out of that race just in time.
Throughout the '80s the jinx seemed to be slumbering. But it came to life again with the 1993 death of local-favorite driver Davey Allison from injuries suffered in a helicopter crash in Talladega's infield. That tragedy occurred on a test day, not a race weekend, so it wasn't linked as closely to the bizarre series of events during the races.
And there are local tales that the first racing fatality in Dry Valley was a Talladega Indian chief, in a horse race, sometime during the 18th century. He was probably going too fast.
After this year's race Nelson fired up the dyno again, this time to test Marlin's Monte Carlo and Jarrett's Thunderbird. He didn't blow either engine this time, and apparently he did get some horsepower readings.
But NASCAR wouldn't reveal the test results. So what had been the point of this weekend-long sideshow? "Our education," said NASCAR spokesman Kevin Triplett, who let it go at that, then walked out of the media center and into the warm—and eerie once more—darkness of old Dry Valley.
It had all been so typically Talladega. |
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The Talladega Jinx took aim at pole sitter Ernie Irvan, track-record holder Bill Elliott and practically every other driver—except eventual winner Sterling Marlin.
