This is the 15th anniversary race weekend of the reason for restrictor plates in NASCAR: narrow avoidance of what could have been the worst disaster ever in auto racing, if not all of sports.
Since that nearly cataclysmic day, May 3, 1987, the Winston Cup schedule has been altered slightly. So the date is not exact. But it happened here. In the middle of spring.
For a moment, the lives of a thousand people, probably more, hung by threads.
Surreally Bobby Allison’s car floated–3,400 pounds gone airborne, light as a kite, high above the grandstands, headed into the throng.
The high “catch fence” offered no protection. It collapsed like so much snow fencing. It virtually evaporated under the weight and velocity of the Buick that had been launched from the track surface at 210 m.p.h.
At that instant, one thought was: Le Mans 1955 is being overshadowed terribly.
There flashed before your eyes old film footage of Pierre Levegh’s Mercedes flying upside down, afire, disintegrating, into the main grandstands at Le Mans, killing 82 people instantly. The final death toll would be more than 100.
But those grandstands were small compared with these. So that was mild compared with this, you thought in that instant. And so were all the soccer riots and stadium collapses in South America and Europe.
This, you thought, is the worst disaster ever in sports. Right here. Right now.
Three days earlier, Bill Elliott had won the pole with the all-time NASCAR qualifying record speed of 212.809 m.p.h.
For the previous three years, teams had pleaded with NASCAR to slow the cars down. Junior Johnson, arguably the most fearless driver ever and by this point a car owner, argued that while Indy cars were safe at 200-plus m.p.h., the crude, heavy stock cars were going faster than human reflexes could control.
Allison himself said that “we definitely needed to do something,” he recalled last week. “Go to smaller carburetors, smaller engines, something.”
Yet right up until race day, NASCAR basked in the headlines blaring Elliott’s big number.
It happened on the fifth lap of what was then called the Winston 500.
“My engine blew up,” Allison recalled.
The entire front assembly of his engine–crankshaft, oil pump driver, all the front pulleys–broke off.
“All of that went under the car, and I ran over it with my right rear tire,” he said. “That catapulted the car up . . . then it spun around backward. That really made the car go up in the air.”
Reversed, the car’s aerodynamic design, meant to hold the car to the track surface with downforce, worked the opposite way. The Buick became a de facto airplane.
If you watch Sunday’s Aaron’s 499, the new corporate name for the Talladega 500, on television, pay particular attention to the camera shots of the fence just past the dogleg in the front stretch. Focus on two huge steel cables, perhaps 2 inches in diameter, that run parallel just behind the fence on the grandstand side.
Those two cables are the reason you’ll be watching a race at Talladega on Sunday–and they may be the reason you’ve seen any auto racing at all, in America or perhaps even in the world, for the last 15 years.
It could have been bad enough to renew the worldwide outcry of 1955 that automobile racing be banned.
But those two cables held.
When the fence came crashing down, the cables held like two great rubber bands and deposited Allison’s Buick back out onto the track.
There were no fatalities, only a few serious injuries, and a lot of cuts and bruises. Allison himself was OK. His son Davey, who saw the crash in his mirrors, went on to win the race.
But that was the end of “unrestricted” racing at Talladega and its older sister, Daytona. For the remainder of that season, smaller carburetors were mandated at both places, to be replaced in 1988, and ever since, by carburetor restrictor plates.
And drivers have been complaining ever since–about the lack of throttle response when plates are in place, and the accompanying danger of racing in such huge packs because they don’t have the power to break away from one another.
Allison won that first plate race, the Daytona 500 of 1988, and participated in the second one, at Talladega that May. He remembers neither. A life-threatening crash at Pocono that June ended his career and left him with the first several months of 1988 erased from his memory.
So he doesn’t recall what it was like, with the power stifled. But it doesn’t matter. He is still a strong advocate of plates.
“The restrictor is the most fair thing NASCAR ever did,” he said. “But it’s the most highly criticized thing they ever did.”
Doesn’t he sympathize with driver complaints about throttle response?
“No,” he said flatly.
“The only time you get throttle response is when you’re off the gas. And at Talladega, you’re not off the gas, no matter what you’ve got.”
Even in the late `60s and early `70s, in the least restricted racing NASCAR has ever known, “with duel four-barrels and a 426 hemi at Talladega, you had no throttle response if you were driving the car properly,” said Allison.
At Talladega the idea is to have the pedal to the floor all the time, and “you don’t have throttle response when you’re already on the gas, wide open,” Allison said.
So restrictor plates “became a good excuse” for drivers, he said. “The cars are all together because everybody’s working so hard, the equipment is available, the sponsorship has allowed everybody to afford everything, so everybody’s got it. The old days, where maybe a rich guy had more horsepower because a poor guy couldn’t afford it, are gone forever.”
By the early ’90s, NASCAR had developed roof flaps for the cars. When a car spins backward, the rush of air opens the flaps and helps hold the car down. So they rarely get airborne nowadays–and certainly never kite like Allison’s did.
Still, NASCAR is adamant about keeping speeds well below 200 m.p.h. at Talladega and Daytona.
Watching cars run in the 180s at the two giant tracks of Talladega and Daytona can be yawn-inspiring. Drivers say they’re going too slow, and they despise it, almost to a man.
But if you were here on May 3, 1987, and watched for that moment when a thousand lives and the future of a sport hung on the strength of two cables, well remember why there are restrictor plates.
Baker tribute: The passing of NASCAR pioneer Buck Baker this week, at 83, left myriad wonderful stories resonating.
He drove in the first Southern 500 at Darlington in 1950, the first 500-miler ever for NASCAR.
“None of us knew what it would take [physically] to run 500 miles,” he used to recall. “One guy took beer in his car. After the first few laps, that beer got to churning and the suds began to spill out of that car like a washing machine overflowing.
“Me, I took a jug of tomato juice.”
Baker crashed, the jug broke, and the red stuff spilled all over Baker. The first emergency worker to reach him hollered to the others, “This poor [fellow] has done got his head cut off!”
In 1976 he came out of retirement at Daytona, and didn’t qualify particularly well. Asked if he were disappointed, he said, “Hell, no. A man 57 years old don’t need to be runnin’ no faster than that no way.”
Just last summer, his son Buddy, himself a former NASCAR star, was driving Buck along a North Carolina highway in a passenger car.
“Some guy cut me off,” Buddy recalled.
“Daddy said, `Run him off the road. Stop him.'”
“I said, `What for?'”
“So I can get out and whip his [bleep],” the 82-year-old tough guy replied.
Pit stops: For the record, Elliott also holds the restrictor-plate qualifying record, 199.969 m.p.h, at Talladega in 1988. The last time practice speeds approached that was in October 2000 at Talladega. When drafting packs hit 198-plus m.p.h. in practice, NASCAR ordered even smaller restrictor plates for race day. … Sterling Marlin enters the weekend with only a 27-point lead over Matt Kenseth in the Winston Cup point standings. But Kenseth quickly concedes that plate racing “isn’t my favorite kind” and hopes only to do decently there. Marlin, on the other hand, rarely complains about restrictor plate racing and in fact usually thrives on it.
