We’re closing in on the ultimate handful of weeks of the 2023 NASCAR Cup Collection season, the inventory automotive collection’ seventy fifth anniversary marketing campaign. To rejoice, every week by way of 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. Prime 5 mustaches? There could be just one, so possibly not.

With out additional ado, our 75 favourite issues about NASCAR, celebrating 75 years of inventory automotive racing.

Earlier installments: Hardest drivers | Best races | Greatest title fights | Greatest-looking vehicles | Worst-looking vehicles | Greatest cheaters | Greatest what-ifs | Weirdest racetracks | Greatest racetracks | Greatest scandals | Weirdest bulletins | Best fights

---

5 biggest rivalries

As NASCAR’s seventy fifth season winds right down to its remaining three races, we’ve got additionally entered essentially the most intense stage of our NASCAR seventy fifth anniversary celebration, the inexperienced/white/checkers of our top-five countdowns. So, no extra of the cutesy stuff. It’s time to stand on the loud pedal and let the tough aspect drag. We simply hope somebody worthy of the problem will run door-to-door with us till we get there. In different phrases, we’d like a rival. Heck, all of us want a rival, however particularly racers. They stay for them.

As Jean Girard reminded Ricky Bobby: “God wants the Satan. The Beatles wanted The Rolling Stones. Even Diane Sawyer wanted Katie Couric. Will you be my Katie Couric?”

So, seize a can of Perrier, a loaf of Marvel Bread and control that ache within the butt who refuses to cease filling your rearview mirror, as we reveal our prime 5 all-time NASCAR rivalries.

Honorable Point out: Bruton Smith vs. NASCAR

Editor’s Picks

2 Associated

As we’ve got acknowledged so many occasions throughout these countdowns, it’s not possible to think about NASCAR changing into what it’s with out the guiding palms of the France household, from Huge Invoice to Invoice Junior to now, with Jim France, Lesa France Kennedy and Ben Kennedy. However it’s equally troublesome to make any type of guess at the place the France household’s pet undertaking is likely to be had they not been pushed at each flip by their colleague/arch-nemesis Bruton Smith.

Again within the day, Smith tried to type a league to rival NASCAR throughout its adolescence and went on to not-so-secretly again different comparable efforts over the many years that adopted. He introduced in Jimmy Hoffa’s Teamsters to fund the development of Charlotte Motor Speedway, who in flip went to court docket vs. the France household making an attempt to type a drivers’ union. Throughout NASCAR’s Fashionable Period, it was Smith’s Speedway Motorsports Inc. that purchased and constructed racetracks across the nation in an arms race versus the France household’s Worldwide Speedway Company.

For a half-century, the France clan and Smith fought, sued and pointed fingers. By the tip, in addition they grew inventory automotive racing right into a billion-dollar enterprise.

5. Tony Stewart vs. (insert identify right here)

Once I began penning this entry, it was going to be about Tony Stewart and his feud with fellow dash automotive dash automotive graduate Jeff Gordon within the early-2000s, a conflict of championship titans that raged on for 5 years and resulted in at the least three main crashes. However then I remembered Smoke’s ongoing dustup with Matt Kenseth a decade later, the one which resulted in him hurling his helmet at Kenseth’s automotive at Bristol. Then I remembered his “little wealthy child” rift with Joey Logano. Then I remembered his televised struggle with Robby Gordon at Daytona. Then I remembered him going after the complete media middle, together with me.

An hour after I began penning this entry, I used to be nonetheless arising with those that Stewart battled with on the observe and within the storage. So, yeah, “insert identify right here.”

4. Darrell Waltrip vs. The Institution

Earlier than there was Smoke and even previous to a younger, reckless Dale Earnhardt being nicknamed Ironhead by the veteran superstars he stored wrecking, there was Jaws. When Darrell Waltrip arrived within the Cup storage of the Nineteen Seventies, he did so with a silver tongue, introducing the NASCAR world to the artwork of speaking trash.

He angered Richard Petty by declaring The King’s reign was over, ticked off Bobby Allison by calling him a cheater and pissed off Cale Yarborough by questioning the legendary robust man’s intelligence. It was a annoyed Yarborough who labeled him Jaws, explaining “he is like that shark within the motion pictures who will not cease flapping his gums.”

Waltrip made all of them much more furious when he proceeded to start out beating them on Sunday afternoons. He wound up profitable three championships and an ideal sum of 84 races, which tied him with Allison for what was then-third on the all-time wins checklist and, even higher, gave him yet one more profession victory than Yarborough.

3. Jeff Gordon vs. Dale Earnhardt

Like Stewart, there have been so many choices right here as a result of so many considered Earnhardt as their largest rival. All these legendary Cole Trickle vs. Rowdy Burns scenes in “Days of Thunder,” from the door-banging rental automotive race to the “Japanese inspection” assembly with NASCAR brass, are true tales taken from Earnhardt’s ongoing mid-Eighties spat with Geoff Bodine. And I as soon as witnessed two attorneys on a company team-building retreat get right into a roll-on-the-floor fistfight over an Earnhardt vs. Rusty Wallace debate on the top of their ’90s No. 2 automotive vs. No. 3 automotive stress.

However Gordon vs. Earnhardt grew to become greater than all of these as a result of it was a rivalry of cultures. Earnhardt, aka The Man in Black, was the dominant power within the sport when Gordon arrived in 1992. He was a middle-aged North Carolinian, all belt buckles, blue denims and beer. In distinction, Gordon was a 20-something Californian with blow-dried hair who dated fashions and drove a rainbow-colored automotive.

The fact is that we by no means bought to see them each persistently on the prime of their sport on the racetrack on the identical time, though there have been positively moments (see: the 1997 Daytona 500). After Earnhardt’s resurgent 2000 season, an ’01 showdown felt inevitable, however Earnhardt’s demise denied us that dream.

2. David Pearson vs. Richard Petty

The battles between the Silver Fox and The King have been so transcendent they develop into NASCAR’s model of the Steelers and Cowboys or the Dodgers and Yankees, names and battles that have been recognized not merely amongst auto racing or sports activities followers, however amongst each single American, particularly throughout the Nineteen Seventies. It was clean vs. tough across the edges, North Carolina vs. South Carolina, Dodge vs. Mercury, Wooden Brothers vs. Petty Enterprises.

They rank 1-2 in wins (Petty’s 200 to Pearson’s 105), poles (Petty 123, Pearson 113) and even second-place finishes (Petty 157, Pearson 89). They ran 551 races collectively, Petty profitable head-to-head 290 to 261, however of these 551 races they mixed to win 205 of them, each completed within the prime 5 greater than half the time and within the prime 10 greater than 60% of the time. Each. Holy cow. They completed 1-2 a whopping 63 occasions, Pearson profitable 33 to Petty’s 30.

I’m engaged on my subsequent #NASCAR75 Prime 5 rankings. It’ll be rivalries. So, yeah, I’ve simply watched the tip of the 1976 Daytona 500 six straight occasions…and the 1974 Firecracker 400 at the least that many. pic.twitter.com/rbLC3Lsr6J

— Ryan McGee (@ESPNMcGee) October 18, 2023

If all they’d executed was pull off the 1976 Daytona 500 wreck-and-roll end, that might have been sufficient to make them legends, however that may not have even been their greatest race end at that observe (see: Pearson’s faux engine bother and slingshot victory within the 1974 Firecracker 400). Pearson followers nonetheless say that if he’d chosen to finish in additional full seasons, he would have gained seven championships like Petty. Petty followers nonetheless say that is bitter grapes. Even now, many years after Pearson or Petty made their remaining Cup begins, their rivalry lives on, as I documented on this story from the 2012 NASCAR Corridor of Fame induction ceremony.

1. Ford vs. Chevy

With all due respect to Toyota, Pontiac, Plymouth, even Studebaker, take your decide, in relation to auto producers, the Blue Oval and the Bow Tie have been the driving power of each victory and animosity since inventory automotive racing started so many many years in the past. They rank 1-2 in all-time Cup wins, with Chevy’s 850 and Ford’s 727. The following closest is Dodge manner again at 217. Each single driver within the NASCAR Corridor of Fame drove for at the least certainly one of them, and most steered each.

At any time when one has achieved an edge on the racetrack, the opposite has instantly cried foul and their hundreds of thousands of followers and American freeway loyalists have hollered together with them. It’s Coke vs. Pepsi, Apple vs. Microsoft, and Mastercard vs. Visa provided that they have been all performed out not in company boardrooms however on superspeedways coated in metal and touring 200 mph.

Hey, when’s the final time you noticed a sticker within the again window of a pickup truck that confirmed the child from Calvin and Hobbes with a Ford emblem on his shirt urinating on a Chevy emblem or vice-versa? Hell, I noticed that on two completely different autos simply at present.

Additionally, I imply, if we’re speaking NASCAR rivalries…properly… pic.twitter.com/iMJ2dkL82D

— Ryan McGee (@ESPNMcGee) October 18, 2023