The night Terry, Dale and Rusty dueled
— -- The history of NASCAR is written in moments. The races during which the greatest of those moments choose to reveal themselves are the lucky ones -- ones that endure long after the mundane details of their box scores have faded.
This weekend will mark the 20th anniversary of one of those events, the Goody's 500, run on Aug. 26, 1995. It didn't gift us with just one timeless moment. It gave us two.
The host racetrack was still known as Bristol International Raceway. The hills around the half-mile cereal bowl hadn't yet been shaved down and replaced with the track's current coliseum configuration. Instead, those hills were dotted with varied grandstands large and small, and even some fans sitting on folding chairs and blankets.
After a 90-minute rain delay courtesy of Tropical Storm Jerry, the 36 drivers were finally called to their cars to go racing. What transpired during the next five hours became legendary, thanks to two did-you-just-see-that moments. Mark Martin started on the pole position, joined on the outside of the front row by Terry Labonte. A few rows behind them, the two biggest stars in the sport were already conspiring to chase them -- and everyone else -- down.
But why try to tell the story of those men on that night, when we can let them do it for us?
Rusty Wallace, driver, Penske Racing No. 2 Miller Genuine Draft Ford: I had qualified fifth and Dale [Earnhardt Sr.] had qualified right behind me in seventh. Before the race I remember we were standing by our cars, just bs'ing like we used to do. And I remember what we were talking about. Jeff Gordon was just kicking our asses. I was damn sick of it and Earnhardt was damn sick of it. He'd qualified right in front of us, so Earnhardt says to me: "When this race starts, let's just go on up there and put a bumper to him, get him out of the way, and then we'll just check out and get gone and go win this damn race between you and me." And I just laughed and said: "OK, man, you got it, partner, let's do it."
Terry Labonte, driver, Hendrick Motorsports No. 5 Kellogg's Chevy: Our car was really fast, I remember that. We were really good on short tracks. We'd won at North Wilkesboro and Richmond the year before and had the best car in the Bristol night race that year, too, but we got wrecked by a lapped car.
Tom Roberts, PR director, Rusty Wallace: I had written up my prerace info, and I was so proud of it. We called the team the Kings of the Short Tracks and with good reason. Going into that race that night, Rusty was on a streak of 23 consecutive top-10 finishes on short tracks. Back then that was three years' worth of short track races.
Wallace and Earnhardt made good on their promise to freight train it to the front. As they crossed the start-finish line to complete Lap 1, they'd already forced Gordon to the high side and kept him there, moving into fourth and fifth. That's where they stayed until Lap 33.
Wallace: We were sticking with that plan, man, and I was leading the charge. Earnhardt was just all over my butt. I'm coming off Turn 4 and got a little loose, and he stuck right into me and put me right into the wall. Listen, he was all jacked-up on adrenaline, and so was I. So I don't think he meant anything by it. But at the time I didn't feel that way. Here I was with my best short track car [nicknamed Midnight] and the damn thing is in the fence and one corner is bent and I think there was a fire for a second ... and the race had barely started. I was like, I was just talking to this SOB about how we were going to move everybody else out of the way, and he ended up getting into me!
Andy Petree, Earnhardt's crew chief: Dale hadn't done it on purpose. I know Rusty thought Dale had done it on purpose, and I know his team thought Dale had done it on purpose.
Roberts: Robin Pemberton [Wallace's crew chief, now NASCAR vice president of competition] was all up in arms. He was up on the pit box. He always referred to Earnhardt as "that old man." So he's yelling at the pit road officials: "I can't believe that old man would do that so early in the race! There's no call for that! He needs to be black flagged!"
He was. As Wallace re-fired his car and drove around to angrily point a finger at Earnhardt, NASCAR officials watched the same ESPN replays that viewers at home were seeing and determined that the defending Winston Cup champ should indeed be placed at the tail end of the lead lap. When shown the black flag, Earnhardt parked his Chevy on the track at the start-finish line to let the field go by. That resulted in a classic NASCAR television moment, as still-wet fans held up multiple variations of fingers -- Earnhardt 3s, Wallace 2s and the good old-fashioned middle-finger 1s.
Petree: That happened right in front us. And yeah, we weren't happy about it. But we also knew we had, what, 460 laps to get back to the front. And we knew we had an unhappy Dale Earnhardt behind the wheel, so he was going to get there however he needed to do it. He was pretty quiet on the radio. He was just going to work.
Roberts: During all of that, Rusty didn't say a word over the radio. Our whole team was still really mad. And a bunch of guys were steaming and stewing. I was mad because the streak I'd been writing about was over. But Rusty wasn't saying anything. He wasn't letting anything out. He was holding it all in. Then we got wrecked again at another point [with Bill Elliott on Lap 205] and again, he again he didn't say anything. I thought, well, this is bad. For 400-plus laps and a whole other rain delay, it was like a pressure cooker. He was just building it up inside that car.
Wallace: I had a few hours to just ride around there getting more and more pissed every lap, man.
Meanwhile, up front, there had been a revolving door of leaders, from Martin to Gordon to Derrike Cope to Dale Jarrett. Earnhardt had even managed to make his way to the front on four occasions. But some crafty pit strategy by crew chief Gary DeHart and his righthand man, Andy Graves, had Labonte in the lead with 68 laps remaining. Clicking by at a rate of one every 16 seconds, those laps were going fast. But not as fast as that black No. 3 car.
Labonte: We were running tires that were a lot older than Dale's, so he was coming in a hurry. And to be honest, the lap traffic wasn't doing me any favors. So the team was warning me over the radio that Dale was coming, and I was like, "Um, yeah, I noticed that."
Andy Graves, Labonte's assistant crew chief, now group vice president and technical director of Toyota Racing Development, USA: We were watching the gap between Earnhardt and us and doing the math, and we knew pretty quick that he should be right to us by the last lap.
Dale Jarrett, driver, Robert Yates Racing No. 28 Texaco-Havoline Ford: I was running second, and Earnhardt totally blew by me. His car was all torn up. He'd come from the back of the field twice. When he went by me, and they'd just told me there was like 10 laps to go and I thought, "Man, I hope Terry up there is ready because The Intimidator is on his way."
With 10 laps to go, Labonte's lead was 1.6 seconds. With three laps to go, it was less than a second. As the white flag flew, Labonte ran up behind the cars of Mike Wallace and Jeff Burton, racing for the eighth position.
Petree: With a couple of laps to go, I honestly didn't think we would catch Terry, so I climbed down off the pit box. I thought it was over and we were going to finish second and that was cool. Back then NASCAR always had the second- through fifth-place cars pull into the gas pumps after the race. The pumps were down inside Turn 4, so I was walking down there to meet Dale. When I walked past Labonte's pit stall, I motioned to Gary [DeHart] to say, "nice job man, congrats," and he gave me a look like, "dude, where are you going?" And I kept walking.
Labonte: I hit that lap traffic big time coming off of Turn 2, and they were racing for position, and they didn't do a real good job of getting out of the way. I looked in the mirror, and there's Dale, and I was like, "man, this isn't going to be good."
In a move strikingly similar to his contact with Wallace 466 laps earlier, Earnhardt dived to the apron, got the right front of his car below the left rear of Labonte, and sent the leader spinning toward the checkered flag.
Petree: About the time I get down to the pumps, here they come off the turn and Dale is turning Terry. They went sliding down the front stretch to the finish line, away from me. So now I'm running out there to see what happened!
What happened was that Labonte took the checkered flag as his machine careened sideways, first drifting left and then slicing back to the right and slamming nose-first into the wall just past the finish line.
Labonte: I knew he was going to hit me, so I knew I couldn't slow down. I just stayed in the gas the whole time because I knew I had to beat him to the line, no matter how I got there. I thought to myself, I'm definitely going to wreck, but I'll worry about that after I cross the finish line.
Graves: He slid ride by our pits, but honestly, I didn't know what had happened because of all the chaos. There was smoke and the crowd was just losing its mind. I was really mad. Steve Hmiel [Mark Martin's crew chief] saw me and grabbed me and said, "Why are you so mad?" And I was like, "Man, we just wrecked on the last lap!" And he says, "But you won!" And I think that's the first time I realized that we had.
Rick Hendrick, car owner, Terry Labonte: I remember Richard Childress [Earnhardt's car owner] said to me later, "I'll write you a check for the wrecked car." I joked with him that with Earnhardt driving for him all those years I figured he'd gotten used to having to give that speech. But I was only half-joking.
As Labonte made a cool-down lap in his smashed Monte Carlo, the man who'd smashed it pulled his second place car into the gas pump area. Meanwhile, Rusty Wallace, who'd finished 46 laps down in 21st place, parked his battered Thunderbird in the garage. And that's where we meet NASCAR's version of an Oliver Stone "magic bullet."
Roberts: [Wallace] still didn't say much of anything when he got out of the car. We started walking with him, toward Turn 3 to leave the track. Tom Polanski was Rusty's motorcoach driver and he had handed Rusty a bottle of water. Well, he drank some of it, maybe most of it, but certainly not all of it. I also had a bottle of colder water, full, and handed it to him.
Wallace: I start walking and instead of heading for the exit, I start walking straight for the gas pumps. These guys are walking with me. And my son Greg was with us -- I can see him look at me like, "oh hell, what's happening here." I got up to Earnhardt's car and I yelled "Hey!" and he didn't hear me. I yelled again. Nothing.
Winston Kelley, pit reporter, Motor Racing Network radio, also now executive director, NASCAR Hall of Fame: I was doing the postrace interview with Dale. We were standing on the driver's side of the car, and he was in the middle of answering a question, and I felt something glance off my shoulder and then there was this splash of liquid.
Roberts: He'd launched the older water bottle, the emptier one, and it wound up hitting Earnhardt on the nose.
Wallace: I was trying to bounce it off the car, hit Earnhardt in the shoulder, get his attention and tell him what I wanted to tell him. But I missed and ended up hitting him in the damn head.
Kelley: It didn't hurt us. But it sure did startle us.
Petree: I don't know who all that water bottle hit, but I know it hit me. I guess it had bounced off of those other guys, but I know Rusty Wallace hit me with that water bottle.
His attention officially gotten, Earnhardt broke off his interview with Kelley and walked toward Wallace, who promised his old rival "I'll see you at Darlington!" for the next week's race. As crews, fans, and NASCAR officials flooded the scene to separate the racers, Earnhardt flashed his trademark grin while Wallace added, "I ain't forgetting Talladega and I ain't forgetting this bulls---!"
Wait ... did he say Talladega?
Roberts: He was talking about the time Earnhardt had gotten into him at Talladega in the '93 season, two years earlier!
Wallace: [Laughs] Yeah, I was so damn mad, I was bringing up all kinds of stuff. That wreck at Talladega was bad. I'd turned over a bunch of times. And I guess I'd been stewing on that a while so I went there, too. It wasn't a fight. It was a fight of words. I don't know how many times we called each other a sonofabitch, but it was a lot. Then I left. And he left. And it was over. Like, over. That's how we did it. I don't think we ever talked about it again unless we were laughing about it.
Roberts: That's the part fans don't ever believe when I tell them now, and they certainly wouldn't have believed me if I'd told them back then. Rusty and Dale were the biggest rivalry in NASCAR. But they were friends. There were a lot times that during the week I would be looking for Rusty to get a quote or something and you know where he was? He was over at Dale Earnhardt's house drinking cold beers.
Remember Terry Labonte, the race winner? While Wallace and Earnhardt were barking in Turn 4, Texas Terry had cruised by in his jalopy of a racing machine, the sound of the engine drowned out by metal scraping along the concrete. The sight of his crushed car rolling into Victory Lane, misshapen and smoking, is still considered to be a defining image of the Bristol night race.
Graves: We ran the length of pit road to get down to Victory Lane to meet Terry. It was at the end of the garage, actually right by where the gas pumps and Rusty and Dale's thing was going on. The roar of the crowd was just . . . it was unbelievable. It just kept going on and going on. I think everyone there knew we'd all just seen something really special. I'm not joking when I tell you that I am getting goosebumps right now talking about it.
Labonte: Everything under the hood was totally broken, so between the cooldown lap and pulling into Victory Lane, I dumped what probably looked like a hundred gallons of oil and water and everything else all over the racetrack, down pit road, through the infield, everywhere. When it was time to pose for pictures, people were slipping and falling down on the oil.
Graves: Terry used to always joke that if he ever wrecked, he always tried to drive it back to the garage, no matter what. He'd say: "As long you drive it back to the garage, it doesn't go on your record in the box score as a wreck." So he drove that thing back, too. [Laughs]
Graves, fellow crew member Slugger Labbe (now crew chief of, in a twist, the No. 3 Chevy at Richard Childress Racing), and Hendrick Motorsports chief engine builder Randy Dorton all climbed atop the wrecked hood and their destroyed engine. In the official winner's circle photo, that's where they stand, half a body taller than anyone else. The photo of the car itself was printed onto four special edition Kellogg's Corn Flakes boxes, one of which still sits in the collection at Hendrick Motorsports. Rusty Wallace's water bottle, however, remains at large.
Kelley: For years on the MRN Radio trailer, in my locker, I had my color-coded notebook from that night. And the ink on it was smeared from the water that came from that bottle. I don't have it anymore. And now with the job I have at the Hall, man, what I wouldn't give to have kept that notepad. We'd have it on display!
Wallace: Looking back on that night, man, that was a fun damn night. I still get asked about all the time. I got asked about it yesterday. Those were good times, man. You know they were good because here we are, 20 years later, and we're still talking about it.
Labonte: People always ask me if I was mad about wrecking that car. I won. I was too happy to be mad.
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