No NASCAR driver showed greater grit and determination than Robert Arther Allison. Born in Miami in a large family, Bobby Allison learned competitiveness right away. He started racing in Hialeah, Florida under an alias, and his mother's first sight of his racing came when he tumbled down the frontstretch right in front of her.Ben White, of Winston Cup Scene, authors this overdue look back at a stock car career filled with triumph - and ultimately destroyed. He includes voluminous quotes from Bobby Allison on the entirety of his career.
Allison, his new wife Judy, and their year-old son David Carl moved from Miami to Hueytown, Alabama in 1962 to race on that state's rich short track circuit. Bobby was soon joined by younger brother Donnie, and the two built a race shop that soon became famous throughout the sport. It was in Alabama that Bobby struck up a friendship with Charles "Red" Farmer, perhaps the state's greatest short tracker, and a future winner of Daytona's Permatex 300 for superspeedway Late Model Sportsman cars. Bobby and Donnie would also take under their wing a happy-go-lucky pipe fitter who competed against them, named Neil Bonnett.
Bobby Allison competed in NASCAR's Modified Tour and finished high in points several times, but his goal was the Grand National Series. He began competing there almost immediately with his own equipment, and in 1966 at Oxford, Maine, he drove a well-worn Chevrolet to his first Grand National victory. He won several more times that year and early in 1967, but then came the first big break. Holman-Moody was the primary raceshop for Ford's Grand National efforts, and with Richard Petty driving his Plymouth to 27 wins that year, Ford went berserk looking for a driver who could stop him. Fred Lorenzen recommended Bobby Allison, and at the tail end of the 1967 season, Allison won at Rockingham and at Ashville-Weavervile, NC. The win at Ashville came after a heated car-banging duel with Petty - but the first of such showdowns.
By 1969 Allison had left Holman-Moody and joined up with Mario Rossi of Dodge. Campaigning Rossi's #22 Dodges and those fielded out of his own Hueytown shop, Bobby ran for the Grand National title, but finished a frustrating second to Bobby Isaac in 1970.
Along the way, Bobby had acquired sponsorship from Coca-Cola, and it proved vital over the next two seasons. The withdrawal of the factories from NASCAR injured the sport greatly, even though in 1971 Winston cigarettes came on board with a series sponsorship package that would eventually overcome the recession caused by the factory withdrawal. Without the factories, Allison left the defunct Rossi team and was very hard pressed to campaign his own cars. Finally, in May of that year, Ralph Moody of Holman-Moody came calling again, and Bobby took his Coke sponsorship into what would prove to be one of the strongest rides he'd ever had. Bobby rocketed to nine wins in the Holman-Moody Mercury and during this stretch challenged Richard Petty week in and week out. The result was some of the most exciting racing the sport had ever seen - and some of the nastiest, for no two personalities clashed more viciously than Richard Petty and Bobby Allison. The most dramatic clash of the two in 1971 came at the Talladega 500. Three wide with Pete Hamilton in the final mile, Allison slapped doors with Petty, sending him into Hamilton and sending both off the track.
When Holman-Moody disbanded after 1971, Allison took his Coke backing to the Chevrolet team of Charlotte Motor Speedway president Richard Howard, a car wrenched by winning team owner Junior Johnson. The key to the pairing was the hiring of engine builder Robert Yates, with whom Allison had worked at Holman-Moody. The combination pulled down ten victories and led over 4,000 laps, and it too everything Richard Petty could muster to win eight races and stave off the hard-charging Allison in the 1972 points race. This was most decisively shown at North Wilkesboro, NC in October of that year. The two fought ferociously over the course of the final 50 laps, and when Allison became trapped behind a lapped car, the resulting wreck would have eliminated anyone else, but Petty and Allison still went at it, Petty winning with a hard last lap pass. The crowd nearly rioted afterward, and Petty had to be taken to safety after a fan accosted him.
Such feuds were common with Bobby. White unwisely underplays the feuds Bobby had with other drivers, notably Cale Yarborough, Darrell Waltrip, and Terry Labonte. Such feuds deserve retelling if for no other reason than for their frequency and ferocity. Allison's determination to win was his greatest strength, but also his greatest weakness, for it led to incidents that were generally avoidable.
One such incident was the controversial National 500 at Charlotte in 1973. Allison protested the 1-2 finish of Cale Yarborough (in the Howard/Johnson Chevrolet) and Richard Petty, claiming both cars ran engines with more cubic inches than allowed by the rules. It turned out Cale's engine was indeed illegal - White implies that Petty's engine was likewise illegal, failing to note that only three of Petty's eight cylinders were checked, and that they averaged out to the then-legal limit of 431 cubic inches - and when the race results stood, Allison filed a lawsuit against NASCAR, a suit dropped after a closed-door meeting with NASCAR president Billy France.
Losing the 1972 title contributed to Bobby leaving the Richard Howard-Junior Johnson team to try again with his own equipment, but each time he ran his own team, "he broke himself," said Donnie Allison. It got so bad that, in 1977, his health deteriorated, and he required trips to the Mayo clinic - trips that seemed to catch most observors off guard.
Allison continued to win in the 1970s, driving for Roger Penske and Bud Moore, but it was with DiGard Racing that Allison achieved his goal of the Winston Cup championship. This time Bobby's arch-enemy was Darrell Waltrip, in the Junior Johnson car. Allison missed no opportunity to taut the Waltrip/Johnson pairing as the NASCAR-approved "company car," and also missed no opportunity to beat them on the track. Allison's 1982 season was what any racer could want - sweeps of races at Daytona and Pocono, and wins at Dover, Michigan, Richmond, and Atlanta - but no championship. The title finally came in 1983, and was the apex of a superlative career.
It was downhill after that. DiGard team owners Jim and Bill Gardner - known in the sport as money guys, for their status as businessmen rather than racers - were essentially con artists, and their race team, built more as a tax write off than anything else, was neglected, especially after the 1983 championship. Ben White provides the alternately fascinating and depressing details of the fall of DiGard Racing, a downfall fully consummated when first Allison, then Robert Yates and crew chief Gary Nelson, quit in 1985.
Allison wound up with Bill and Mickey Stavola, and by the 1988 Daytona 500 his son Davey was a Winston Cup star. The two finished 1-2 in one of the sport's most poignant finishes - a poignancy that took on a more tragic quality that June. On the opening lap of the Miller 500 at Pocono, Allison hit the wall in Turn Two, slid low, and was slammed through the driver's door at full speed by part time racer Chauncy "Jocko" Maggiacomo. Only quick work by the track's safety crew kept Allison on the threshhold of life, but even though he would recover, the crash destroyed Bobby's career.
And it was just the beginning. Bobby formed a race team out of the remains of the team he had won Daytona with, and campaigned for seven seasons with such drivers as Hut Stricklin, Jimmy Spencer, and Derrike Cope. Bobby had a strong deal with Buick, and with them made a very strong effort for race wins in 1991, but when GM disbanded all non-Chevrolet racing efforts other than Pontiac's for 1992, it started the downfall of Bobby Allison Motorsports.
The deaths of Bobby's sons Clifford and Davey - followed by the death of Bobby's lifelong friend and protege Neil Bonnett in 1994 - accelerated the downfall, and affected Judy Allison all the worse. Everything - the race team, and the marriage of Bobby and Judy - finally collapsed in 1996, and by 1997 Bobby was essentially a ruined man; even the mammoth collection of racing trophies he had acquired over his years of racing had to be sold off.
It is a depressing story, not made any better by a somewhat overly optimistic quality in White's retelling. Even the title is a bit deceptive - what had been a Circle Of Triumph has become a Circle of Futility.
But for all that, Bobby Allison's life - and this excellent book - remain worth remembering
