Cale Yarborough, one of the NASCAR drivers who bridged the sport’s historic and modern eras, has died at the age of 84 in Florence, S.C.
Yarborough was born in Timmonsville, a small town near Florence in South Carolina’s Pee Dee region. Nearby Darlington became home of NASCAR’s first superspeedway in 1950. Darlington Raceway has hosted the Southern 500 every year since then, one of the sport’s crown jewels.
It is considered one of NASCAR’s proving grounds, a track where even the best drivers will scrape the wall or miss the entrance to pit road. Yarborough lied about his age in his first attempt to qualify for the Southern 500, which got him disqualified. He successfully qualified for the first time in 1957 at the age of 18. His car went clear over the outside wall at Darlington in 1965. He walked back to the infield uninjured.
He would go on to win the Southern 500 five times (only Jeff Gordon has won it more times). He would win the Daytona 500 four times (only Richard Petty has exceeded that). He won three consecutive season championships in 1976, 1977, and 1978. Jimmie Johnson, who called Yarborough his “childhood hero,” is the only other driver to have won three or more championships in a row. Yarborough won 83 races in NASCAR’s top series over his career, tied for sixth-most all time.
Yarborough’s race teams built rocket ships, and he piloted them to pole position. He still holds the record for most poles in a single season, qualifying first 14 times in 1980. He was the first driver to run a Daytona 500 qualifying lap at over 200 miles per hour in 1983. He crashed on his second qualifying lap that year, but won the race anyway with a backup car.
Perhaps his most famous Daytona moment, though, was in a year he did not win. The 1979 Daytona 500 was the first NASCAR race broadcast live from start to finish on national television. Previously, abridged versions of races would be shown on programs such as ABC’s Wide World of Sports. CBS showed the whole race, pioneering many of the broadcasting techniques that are still used for races today.
The race had come down to a thrilling finish: Donnie Allison led Yarborough by hardly a car length coming to the last lap. Yarborough had a run coming off the exit of turn 2 and tried to squeeze past Allison on the inside, but Allison moved down, forcing Yarborough’s left-side tires into the grass. They rode door-to-door down most of the backstretch and both crashed coming to the final turn. With their wrecked cars in the infield grass, Richard Petty and Darrell Waltrip sailed by, with Petty holding back Waltrip for the win.
As Petty was celebrating, Allison and Yarborough got out of their cars and began arguing. The TV cameras broke away to catch the two men fighting. The fight made what had been a mostly regional sport into national news, launching the modern era of NASCAR, with giant sponsorship deals, new tracks built around the country, and millions tuning in to see these crazy men drive dangerously fast and battle for victory.
Yarborough succeeded at the highest level in both eras, winning his first race in 1965, a race with no sponsors at a long-since-demolished track in Valdosta, Ga., and his last race in 1985, the Miller High Life 500 at the opulent Charlotte Motor Speedway with the Hardee’s logo on the side and hood of his car.
Longtime driver and car owner Junior Johnson, immortalized in Tom Wolfe’s article calling him the “last American hero,” once said, “When you strap Cale into the car, it’s like adding 20 horsepower.” R.I.P. to a racing legend.