A consumer’s guide to the best and worst of sports media and merchandise. Ground rules: If it can be read, played, heard, observed, worn, viewed, dialed or downloaded, it’s in play here.
What: “Sports Illustrated Presents 50 Years of NASCAR.”
Price: $5.95, on newsstands today.
To help Bill France and NASCAR get their 50th anniversary season off to a running start, Sports Illustrated has published a collector’s issue devoted to the stock car racing body.
Fifty years of racing, with 30 to 50 races a year, makes for a lot of stock cars spinning around speedways. Fortunately, SI does not try to chronicle them all, but it does make strong statements with lists of the 12 greatest drivers and the 10 greatest races.
Some eyebrows will be raised at the driver list, which does not include Richard Petty, Dale Earnhardt or Jeff Gordon as No. 1. It’s worth the price to find out who is.
There is no such problem with the race list. The universal favorites are 1) the 1976 Daytona 500, with David Pearson crawling across the finish at about 10 mph to beat Petty, who could not keep his engine running after the two cars tangled coming off the final turn of the final lap; and 2) the 1979 Daytona 500 in which Cale Yarborough and Donnie Allison wrecked each other on the last lap, climbed out of their cars and started yelling at each other in the infield while Petty--half a lap behind--motored to victory. The real excitement started when Bobby Allison stopped during his cool-off lap, got out of his car and whacked Yarborough with his helmet. It was the first 500-mile race to be televised live, and CBS got its money’s worth with a fight as well as a race.
They’re not ranked--that would cause some real fighting among rival supporters--but Ben Blake does a fine job presenting an evolution of cars from the Ford Coupe of 1939 through the 1951 Hudson Hornet, 1957 Ford convertible and Petty’s legendary No. 43 Plymouth Superbird to Gordon’s 1997 Chevrolet Monte Carlo and the about-to be-unveiled 1998 Ford Taurus, the first four-door Winston Cup car.