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Ryan McGee, ESPN Senior Author
We’re closing in on the ultimate handful of weeks of the 2023 NASCAR Cup Sequence season, the inventory automobile collection’ seventy fifth anniversary marketing campaign. To have fun, every week via the tip of the season, Ryan McGee is presenting his favourite top-five issues in regards to the sport.
The 5 best-looking vehicles? Examine. The 5 hardest drivers? We have it. High 5 mustaches? There will be just one, so perhaps not.
With out additional ado, our 75 favourite issues about NASCAR, celebrating 75 years of inventory automobile racing.
Earlier installments: Hardest drivers | Biggest races | Greatest title fights | Greatest-looking vehicles | Worst-looking vehicles | Greatest cheaters | Greatest what-ifs | Weirdest racetracks | Greatest racetracks | Greatest scandals | Weirdest bulletins
5 best fights
Since we began our NASCAR seventy fifth anniversary celebration of countdowns, our matters have run the gamut from toughness to greatness to weirdness. So, it feels solely pure that as we roll into the ultimate turns of this Rova-like journey collectively, that we have now arrived at this week’s matter. One that mixes toughness, greatness and weirdness, squeezes them collectively right into a fist … after which makes use of that fist to punch some idiot within the mouth.
So, tape up these fingers, put in a mouthpiece, e-book Michael Buffer to shout his ready-to-rumble factor and rise out of your corners of the ring as we current our 5 all-time best NASCAR fights.
Honorable point out: 1972: Wheeler, Baker’s yard brawl
Buddy Baker was often known as NASCAR’s Light Large, a nickname that was essentially the most backhanded of compliments. At 6-foot-6 and 249 kilos, he was large for a racer however a sweetheart of a person, and his disposition tagged with him with a “quick however delicate” status. That solely turned worse when the son of three-time champ Buck Baker struggled to win races, with “solely” three victories on the shut of 1971, his twelfth season within the Cup Sequence.
To vary that status, Baker’s good friend and PR rep, legendary promoter Humpy Wheeler, determined Baker ought to take up boxing within the offseason. Wheeler, a Golden Gloves champion, began sparring with Baker in his storage. It labored, as Baker misplaced weight and felt his stamina growing.
Then, sooner or later, Wheeler landed slightly too sharp of a shot to Baker’s face. The Light Large went full Bruce Banner-turned-Hulk. The exercise escalated into an all-out brawl that regarded like Colin Firth and Hugh Grant in “Bridget Jones’s Diary” because it spilled out of Wheeler’s storage into the driveway and finally into the yard of his next-door neighbor, who referred to as the police to interrupt it up.
“We ended up laughing about it,” Wheeler recalled final yr. “Buddy additionally received much more races after that and ended up within the NASCAR Corridor of Fame, so I take full credit score for all of that as a result of I punched him within the nostril.”
5. Charlotte 2014: ‘That is Matt Kenseth!’
For so long as I’ve been masking NASCAR, I’ve developed one thing of a knack for locating myself ringside for some very sudden and really surprising postrace storage brawls. The very best was once I was interviewing Dale Earnhardt Jr. at Richmond, and in the midst of it, we each regarded up on the large display screen simply as Marcos Ambrose punched Casey Mears, and Dale Jr. stated to me, “What the hell? These are the 2 nicest dudes ever!”
However by no means have I been as shocked as I used to be after we had been all posted up behind Brad Keselowski’s hauler after the autumn 2014 occasion at Charlotte Motor Speedway. Why BK? As a result of he had simply ended the 500-mile occasion by clipping Denny Hamlin’s automobile and likewise bumping Matt Kenseth’s trip in the course of the cool-down lap. When Hamlin barked at Keselowski within the storage, we completely anticipated that. What none of us noticed coming — particularly Keselowski — was notoriously mild-mannered Kenseth popping out of nowhere, sprinting previous us all to bolt in between a few 18-wheelers, an alley the place Brad had no escape, and deal with him like Fred Warner taking down a operating again.
It was all caught on stay TV, with Allen Bestwick talking for the whole planet when he stated, “That is Matt Kenseth!”
4. Just about the whole 2000s: Biffle vs. the world
The one different time one driver basically ran via me to go after one other was following an Xfinity Sequence race at Bristol in 2002 when Kevin Harvick ran over me and others to go full WWE and leap off the highest of a race automobile to land on Greg Biffle’s head whereas “The Biff” was giving postrace interviews.
That was solely a small fraction of the feuds that the previous Vans and Xfinity champ discovered himself caught up in throughout this century’s first decade-plus, together with a 2011 run-and-punch of Jay Sauter in the midst of a race at Richmond, grabbing maintain of Jimmie Johnson at Martinsville in 2013 and, in essentially the most notorious stay interview of my profession, a shoving match with Boris Mentioned at Watkins Glen in 2011 wherein Mentioned, ahem, stated to me, “He is essentially the most unprofessional little scaredy-cat I’ve ever seen in my life. He would not even struggle me like a person after. So, if somebody texts me his deal with, I will go see him Wednesday at his home and present him what he actually wants. He wants a freaking whopping, and I’ll give it to him.”
Talking of #NASCAR75 fights, fairly positive that is my most well-known/notorious postrace interview. pic.twitter.com/yKLLqRcr06
— Ryan McGee (@ESPNMcGee) October 10, 2023
3. Phoenix 2012: Bowyer’s desert sprint
All of us like to consider Jeff Gordon as Mr. Gentle-Mannered, the gentleman racer with the great hair and the rainbow-colored automobile. Should you actually paid consideration, although, you already know he additionally raced with a fireplace akin to the flame stickers that lined that automobile later in his sport-altering profession. See: his 2011 on-track struggle with Jeff Burton that Texas Motor Speedway nonetheless makes use of in its promotional materials, his 2006 “helmet-on” shove of Kenseth at Bristol and his 2014 pit street melee with Keselowski, additionally at Texas.
However nothing tops his dramatic duel with Clint Bowyer at Phoenix in 2012, when Gordon believed contact with Bowyer had ended his title hopes, so he returned the favor by hooking Bowyer later within the race. When he exited the No. 24 Chevy again within the storage, Bowyer’s crew was ready, however Gordon’s crew was prepared and a “West Aspect Story”-level struggle broke out. In the meantime, Bowyer ran the size of pit street and into the storage with ESPN cameras in tow, trying to bolt into Gordon’s hauler to reignite the struggle.
The stress between the 2 drivers lingered for years, lastly put aside after they ended up as broadcasting teammates at Fox Sports activities.
2. The post-1989 NASCAR All-Star Race bunkhouse stampede
All due respect to these crews, the Battle Royale of crew throwdowns will at all times be what occurred in Charlotte Motor Speedway’s Victory Lane following the 1989 NASCAR All-Star Race.
With the white flag in sight, Darrell Waltrip was main by a number of toes over Rusty Wallace, whose Pontiac slid up into the left rear nook of DW’s Chevy and despatched it spinning into the infield grass. As Wallace’s crew chased the automobile up the hill to the winner’s circle, their path was blocked by Waltrip’s crew. What adopted was an countless collection of shoves, punches, at the very least one biting of fingers and a crewman almost shedding each ears when his headset was ripped off.
The struggle was finally damaged up by the police, however the affect of lasted for years. Waltrip decried that Wallace had “let greed overcome pace” and immediately went from dangerous man to good man within the eyes of a grandstand that had lengthy booed him. For Wallace, it was the other.
“The following morning there have been followers parked on the lake of their boats by my home simply screaming at me,” Wallace recalled. “And when my youngsters awoke there have been police vehicles in my driveway. I used to be like, ‘Dad had a tough day. I will clarify it to you whenever you’re older.'”
1. 1979 Daytona 500: ‘And there is a struggle!’
You knew this needed to be the No. 1 struggle, proper? It is the one the place, even now all these a long time later, you possibly can nonetheless hear Ken Squier on CBS shouting, “And there is a struggle!”
The quick model of this story: Cale Yarborough and Donnie Allison wrecked one another whereas operating 1-2 on the ultimate lap of the Nice American Race, opening the door for Richard Petty to slide by and take the victory. When their vehicles got here to relaxation within the rain-saturated infield grass between Turns 3 and 4, Yarborough and Allison received out and began shouting. That is when Bobby Allison, nonetheless mad about being knocked out of competition early within the race, pulled over to examine on his brother … and ended up preventing with Cale, too.
As Bobby likes to say, “Cale questioned my ancestry after which he commenced to beating on my fist together with his face.” CBS cameras lower to the struggle stay because it occurred, the blood-red cherry on high of the primary ever flag-to-flag protection of the Daytona 500, an viewers of thousands and thousands boosted by the truth that a snowstorm had many of the East Coast caught indoors with nothing else to observe.
Days later, NASCAR president Invoice France Jr. referred to as Yarborough and the Allisons onto the carpet at sanctioning physique HQ and slapped them with large fines … that he by no means collected. “Hell,” Yarborough stated years later, “he ought to have paid us further for what we did for the game that day.”