Bodine, a Darn Yankee, Wins Daytona 500

For the first time since 1970, a Yankee race car driver turned back the Good Ol’ Boys of the South to win the Daytona 500, premier event of NASCAR’s stock car racing circuit.

Geoff Bodine, who learned to race on his family’s track in Chemung, N.Y., survived a wreck-strewn race Sunday to win by 11 seconds over Terry Labonte after his chief challenger, Dale Earnhardt, ran out of fuel three laps from the end.

The last Daytona 500 winner not from Georgia, Alabama, Texas or the Carolinas was Pete Hamilton of Dedham, Mass., the 1970 winner. Only two other non-Southerners, Mario Andretti of Nazareth, Pa., and Fred Lorenzen of Elmhurst, Ill., have won here since the first race in 1959.

Bodine’s win was only his fourth in Winston Cup competition since he joined NASCAR in 1982 after a career of racing modifieds in the Northeast. He had started on the front row next to pole-sitter Bill Elliott, the defending champion.

Although Sunday’s 42 starters made up the fastest field in stock car history, Bodine’s winning speed of 148.124 m.p.h. was the slowest since Richard Petty’s 143.977 in 1979. This was caused by eight caution-flag periods for 46 of the 200 laps.

When the cars were running at speed, the pace was torrid. Late in the race, when Bodine and Earnhardt were steaming around Daytona International Speedway’s high banking in a two-car draft of yellow Chevrolets, the speeds soared to more than 200 m.p.h.

After the two leaders made their final pit stop 40 laps from the end, Bodine had a five second lead but Earnhardt ran him down in 15 laps. The extra effort may have caused him to run out of fuel, a circumstance which left fans wondering if Earnhardt could have passed Bodine on the final lap with a traditional slingshot maneuver.

“We’ll never know, will we?” Bodine said after an emotion-packed embrace with his wife Kathy. “I know I was getting tired of finishing second behind Dale this week and I was going to do everything I could not to do it again.”

Earnhardt had beaten Bodine by a car length to win a 125-mile qualifying race Thursday and he beat him by the same margin to win the Goody’s 300 sportsman’s car race Saturday.

“I thought we could stretch the gas, but we didn’t,” Earnhardt said. “I think I could have taken him earlier, but I wanted to conserve my fuel. I was waiting for the finish.

“I was right where I wanted to be until it died between (turns) one and two. I coasted in, but the engine blew when I hit the gas coming out of the pits.”

Elliott, who won 11 superspeedway races last year, lost all chance at a repeat Daytona 500 win when his Ford was involved in a 10-car accident in the fourth turn of lap 117. He was in eighth place.

Neil Bonnett, 12 laps down after a lengthy pit stop to repair his transmission, was racing with the front pack when a tire blew and he started spinning. Before cars quit sliding, rebounding and ramming into one another, Cale Yarborough, Harry Gant, Joe Ruttman and Bonnett were out of the race and Elliott’s right wheel was damaged so badly that it took six pit stops to get it repaired so that he could finish the race.

During one of his stops to have sheet metal pounded away from the tire, Elliott was sent spinning into the pit wall when Jim Sauters clipped him. Elliott finally finished 13th, just ahead of the disappointed Earnhardt.

Ruttman’s car suffered the most damage of any car. The former U.S. Auto Club champion from Upland, Calif., was close to making up a lost lap when the accident occurred.

“It appeared to me that car 12 (Bonnett) got sideways and began to slide,” Ruttman said. “I was 20 to 25 lengths back with some cars between. I thought 12 would slide high and then clear the track so I decided to stay high. That proved to be the wrong move. Others slowed and I ended up in the wrong spot with nowhere to go.”

Ruttman’s car appeared to have been pummeled from all directions.

Others involved in the accident were Darrell Waltrip, Kyle Petty, Phil Parsons, Tommy Ellis and Labonte, but all of them were able to continue.

Yarborough, who was running fourth at the time in quest of his fifth Daytona 500 win, was not happy with Elliott’s move in the accident scene.

“I made it through, but Elliott ran over me,” Yarborough screamed. “He never backed off, he just ran right into me. My car was running decent and we still had a long way to go.”

Another old favorite, Richard Petty, suffered a dislocated shoulder earlier in the race when his Pontiac slid along the outside retaining wall after a tire blew. On the fourth lap, Petty brushed the wall and tire engineers surmised that the impact upset the right front suspension and caused premature tire wear.

Only 19 cars were still running at the end of the 3 hour 22 minute 32 second race as blown engines and four wrecks took their toll.

Bodine won a record $192,715 from a $1.4 million purse, breaking the year-old mark of $185,500 by Elliott.

“The money isn’t important at a time like this,” Bodine said. “What might have looked like the world’s longest kiss after the race was Kathy and I going over all the problems we’d gone through getting into victory lane at Daytona.

“It was the culmination of a lifetime of problems, things like living apart summers while I lived out of a trailer in back of garages trying to make it as a racer, of my two boys growing up having a father only part of the time, of my dog being at home while I was away, of a lot of lost weekends. I guess until I write a book, no one but Kathy will know how much this means to me.”

Bodine, like so many of today’s stock car drivers, grew up in a racing environment. His father, Eli, owned a race track and built Geoff his first go-kart when he was 5.

“It goes clear back to my grandfather. He built the track in Chemung and my father was running it when the family gave me an old worn-out ’58 Plymouth that I fixed up and raced. That’s where it all started and now here we are. The whole family is down here with me.”

Although it was a New York victory for Bodine, the team has a California flavor to it.

Gary Nelson, the chief mechanic, is from Redlands and learned the wrenching business from Ivan Baldwin at the Orange Show Stadium in San Bernardino. Rick Hendrick, the car owner, owns a dealership in Corona and once was a drag boat racing favorite in his “Nitro Fever” at Long Beach Marine Stadium.

“What a difference two weeks can make,” said an elated Hendrick, at 36 the same age as his driver. “Two weeks ago I had the worst moment in my racing career. Today was the best.”

Two weeks ago, in the 24 Hours of Daytona, Hendrick’s car, a new GTP Corvette, was sitting on the pole when he had to withdraw it.

“My driver (Sarel van der Merwe of South Africa) said it was vibrating too badly to race,” Hendrick said. “Later we found it had a cracked block, so it is fortunate we didn’t start.”

The win was Nelson’s fourth at Daytona and his second in a row. He was the crew chief when Bobby Allison won the 500 and the Firecracker 400 in 1982 and also last July when Greg Sacks won the Firecracker.

“We were lucky,” Nelson said. “We knew the Earnhardt crew was having troubles because we knew they were too good a crew to lose five seconds to us in the pits. Then Dale ran us down under the green so we didn’t know what to expect.”

Bodine tried several times to get Earnhardt to pass him, but the former Winston Cup champion from Kannapolis, N.C., wouldn’t take the bait.

“He didn’t want to go by because I knew he was waiting until that last lap to try something,” Bodine said. “I slowed way down, two or three seconds, to save my tires but he stuck right behind me. I think if I’d gone down pit row, he would have followed me. It made it a very tedious race. I know he had his strategy, but I had mine, too. I won’t say what it was because I might need it again, but I know it would have been a very interesting last lap.

“When Dale ran up close behind me, it made my car run loose, and that caused the tires to wear. He did a lot of things to make my day miserable and I’ve got the sore hands to prove it. But when I had my chance, I made it miserable for him, too. We all use tricks to hinder the other guy. That’s what racing’s all about, doing what you can to win. It turned out that today was our day, just like last year was Bill Elliott’s day and yesterday was Dale’s day.”

Elliott agreed.

“One year ago we had our act together,” he said. “This year, obviously, it isn’t the same. The GM cars have their act together. It seemed like they could run anywhere on the track today. I wasn’t holding back. I ran as hard as I could. Bodine and Earnhardt had me covered all day.”