Cale Yarborough

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True Grit – Yarborough Won With Heart And Determination

Many of the trophies Cale Yarborough won across a 30-year career in auto racing no longer exist. Some were lost in a 1988 fire at his Florence, SC automobile dealership, and others vanished when a propane gas tank explosion destroyed one of the outbuildings on his farm in Sardis, S.C.

Not even a swath of destruction, however, could reduce the impact of this spark plug of a driver from South Carolina farm country. Racing on barely pennies at the start of his career, he persevered to become one of NASCAR’s best ever, a driver who raced from the heart, gave no quarter and competed on the high ground with other greats of his era, men like Richard Petty, David Pearson, Bobby Allison and Darrell Waltrip.

More often than not, he was in front of them. He won 83 Cup races (sixth all-time), was the first driver to win three straight championships (1976-78) and took the checkered flag first four times in the Daytona 500.

The numbers – and his true-grit driving style – earned Yarborough, now 72, election to the NASCAR Hall of Fame. He is part of the third class, one that also includes Dale Inman, Darrell Waltrip, Glen Wood and the late Richie Evans. They will be inducted in a ceremony in Charlotte, NC Friday. SPEED will broadcast the event Sunday at 6 p.m. (ET).

Yarborough’s time in the Cup series spanned 1957 to 1988, three decades in which he recorded 562 starts and won $5.6 million. Perhaps most remarkable in his long list of achievements is the incredible 1977 championship season, one in which he won nine times and finished in the top five in 25 of 30 races.

Yarborough, who was born in Sardis, S.C. – near Darlington – and still lives there, is remembered as one of the sport’s fiercest closers. With a notable exception – the 1984 Firecracker 400 he lost to Richard Petty, who won that day for the 200th time, Yarborough was a bear when money time arrived. He was as tough as any driver in the sport’s history over the closing laps of a race.

“I conditioned myself to run 400 or 500 or 600 miles,” he said. “I just put that in my mind that that’s what I had to do, and that I had to run the first lap and the last lap about the same if I was going to win.”

Yarborough was a smart and powerful wheelman, but he also was forever figuring.

“I studied the race as it went along just in case I got in a situation,” he said. “I studied other drivers and what their cars were doing and what I might have to do if it came down to the end of the race. There were several times that me looking ahead and studying about what I might have to do paid off.”

One of those times was not in the 1979 Daytona 500, perhaps the most famous “non-win” in Yarborough’s career. That was the day he and Donnie Allison battled side for side for the race win on the last lap only to crash into each other in the third turn and wind up on the infield apron wrestling – a tussle that also featured Donnie’s brother, Bobby.

Petty went on to win that race after the Allison-Yarborough smashup, and television replays of the fight between Yarborough and the Allisons sent water-cooler chatter into overdrive and gave NASCAR an extreme publicity boost. Some say the race and its conclusion started NASCAR on a growth spurt that carried well into the 1990s.

“I think it opened the world’s eyes to stock car racing,” Yarborough said. “The only regret I have is that it wasn’t a better fight. I think we could’ve put on a heck of a show if we’d known the cameras were on.

“(The fight) was just something that happened, but I really think it’s one of the best things that ever happened in stock car racing.”

Prior to that race and that season, Yarborough had made some sensational history without having to resort to fisticuffs.

He joined team owner Junior Johnson to win consecutive championships in 1976, ’77 and ’78, becoming the first driver to perform the three sweep (and the only one to do it until the arrival of Jimmie Johnson).

Earlier, Yarborough had won 14 races driving for the Wood Brothers team. He detoured to IndyCar for a while, running strong in the Indy 500 and finishing as high as 10th, but his home was in stock cars, and he returned to NASCAR to dominate the circuit with Johnson.

Yarborough was different from most of the other successful drivers of his era in that he had virtually no interest in the hands-on mechanics of auto racing. Unlike men like Bobby Allison and Petty, who knew a thing or two about race-car innards, Yarborough saw himself purely as a driver.

“I could tell my people what the car was doing, and they knew how to fix it,” he said. “I had a good feel for a car. I knew what I needed, and I could relate it to them. I wasn’t a mechanic.”

And he almost wasn’t a driver. As a youngster growing up on a farm, Yarborough developed a wide variety of interests. He was a standout high school football player (he turned down a scholarship offer from Clemson University), an accomplished boxer and a basketball player. But he got a taste of racing at a young age, and everything else took a back seat.

Yarborough grew up relatively poor. The family had trying times after his father was killed in a plane crash when Cale was 11.

“I’ve been motivated all my life,” he said. “I was born with competition in my veins instead of blood, I think. (Growing up poor) didn’t hurt anything, but I would’ve probably driven as hard just to win … if it paid nothing. I just felt like, if you’re going to do a job, do it right.”

He started running Sportsman races at little tracks in South Carolina and began building toward the Cup series. After years of struggle and watching every penny, he finally got his first victory – at Valdosta, GA – in June 1965.

“I just kept plugging away at it,” he said. “I knew deep down with the right break at the right time that I’d make it, and I never gave up on it.”

An early major victory – and the one still remembered by Yarborough as his best – came in the 1968 Southern 500 at Darlington Raceway, a track close to his home. The track then was a flatter, tough, 1.375-mile course, and Yarborough outran Pearson over the closing laps to win on a brutally hot day.

“I wouldn’t take nothing for that, on the old race track where my career really started,” he said. “I’ve thought about those kinds of things a lot. A lot of the things I dreamed about doing and wanted to accomplish, I was lucky enough to do most of them.

“That was the old Darlington before they remodeled the track, and you still had to bounce the car off those guardrails every lap to be able to run 500 miles there, much less win. The guys who don’t remember that race track – the superstars of today, they don’t know what they missed.”

Former driver Pete Hamilton remembers racing with Yarborough during that period.

“Probably the guy I battled with more than anybody else was Cale Yarborough,” he said. “We had some pretty tough fights at a lot of different places. In those days, we didn’t have side glasses or window netting, and you could look over at the other guy going down the straightaway. I remember looking over at Cale going about 185. You could see the determination in his eyes.”

Junior Johnson called Yarborough “sneaky brave. I’ve seen Cale drive cars that I didn’t think anybody could drive. And he would not quit. There was no end to his willpower.”

Yarborough retired from full-time driving in 1980 in order to spend more time with his three daughters, a decision sparked by the realization that he had been on the road so much that he hadn’t had time to repair one of their bicycles.

He continued to drive part-time and started his own Cup team, one that produced a win for driver John Andretti in 1997. Yarborough quit as an owner in 1999.

Mike Hembree is NASCAR Editor for SPEED.com and has been covering motorsports for 29 years. He is a six-time winner of the National Motorsports Press Association Writer of the Year Award.