He Walks The Straight And Narrow

Allison hasn't counted the number of races he's run or the racing miles he's driven (as for wins, he thinks "about 520"), but NASCAR tallies the Grand National miles, and he has logged more than 156,000. He just can't get enough of racing cars around in circles, and that, far more than anything else, is what makes Bobby run.

In 1976 and 1977 Allison survived a terrible slump. It started with two serious crashes in '76, a little more than four months apart. The first, in the Carolina 500 at Rockingham, N.C. in February, put him in the hospital for four days with a broken sternum, broken ribs and internal bruises after he barrel-rolled his Mercury. The second, at a short track in Elko, Minn. on a Saturday night in July, nearly did him in. He slid in some oil and hit a concrete abutment. Says Neil Bonnett, now a Grand National circuit driver but then racing on short tracks under Allison's tutelage, "I came into his shop the next Monday and there was the car with the front all pushed in, the motor pushed back into the firewall, the steering wheel jammed back against the roll bars, blood all over the inside. I thought he must have been dead."

Allison had 11 broken bones, including four ribs and two facial bones, plus smashed bones in both feet, a total of 40 stitches near his right eye and in his right cheek and upper lip, a "blowout fracture" of the bone below the right eye and "various other sundry ailments." He was in intensive care in a hospital in Minneapolis, 26 miles away, until Thursday, when a friend came and flew him back home. But he was in another battle for the Winston Cup, and because full points for a given car's performance are earned by the driver who starts a race—even if he is relieved by another driver—Allison felt he had to start that Friday night in Nashville. On Thursday, Bonnett swiped him off his back porch.

"We just picked him up, cut a big cast off his foot and put him in the motor home and headed for Nashville," says Bonnett. "Bobby managed to qualify and run one lap and get his points, and he pulled in and I took over and drove the race. But he was beat up so bad he couldn't hardly move. We had to sew some big handles on the shoulders of his uniform to pull him out of the car, and I know we about killed him when we did."

Allison raced the next week in a 500-miler and finished the 1976 season in fourth place, and in great pain. He didn't win again until February 1978, enduring a dry spell of 67 races. The injuries from the crashes had weakened him more than he knew, and new, unrelated ailments began to eat at him. He found he had no energy, and his stomach gave him such agony he thought he had an ulcer. A doctor told him he didn't, that he had just worn himself down.

There were no decent offers for 1977, so Allison ran as an independent, and it was a wretched year. He was losing weight—eventually he dropped from 195 pounds to 145—and was "just hanging on for dear life. But even when I was sick real bad I could muster up my competitiveness. The one thing I could still do was get in that race car and drive."

That winter he was hired by car owner Bud Moore, who knew Allison was ailing but had faith in him. The union with Moore ended the slump, and the race that broke it, the 1978 Daytona 500, epitomizes Allison's career. It was a victory for persistence and survival.

Driving a Thunderbird he had dubbed the "Luxury Liner," Allison was leading a 125-mile qualifying race on the Thursday before the Sunday of the 500, when Buddy Baker skidded and crashed into him. "It tore that car all to pieces," says Allison. "I came back down to the garage area, my old stomach was a mess over it, and Bud said, 'Don't worry about it, we'll have that car fixed. These guys loved it when you were leading.' And I thought to myself, 'Yeah, and Santa Claus will come in here on his sleigh with his reindeer, too.'

"I went down to a friend's camper and said, 'I gotta lay down.' I thought, 'Lord, if I could just go to sleep and erase this whole deal.' Right then I felt like I didn't have the strength to lift up a pair of high-top shoes. I laid down there for a couple hours, and late in the afternoon I gathered myself up and went back to the garage, and those guys had straightened the sheet metal out, changed the engine, changed the spindles, had the rear end apart and inspected it, even touched up the paint! I looked at that car and my mouth fell open. I said to myself, 'If these guys can do that for me, by God I'm going to drive that car the best I can.' "

In the end he had to start the Luxury Liner in 33rd position because he hadn't finished the qualifying race. In the ensuing 500 miles he survived two more crashes, the second of which squeezed the T-bird between another car and the wall at 185 mph. The Luxury Liner was battered when it crossed the finish line, but it was 33.2 seconds ahead of Cale Yarborough's second-place car. It was Allison's first Daytona 500 victory after 18 years of trying.