We’re closing in on the ultimate handful of weeks of the 2023 NASCAR Cup Sequence season, the inventory automotive sequence’ seventy fifth anniversary marketing campaign. To have fun, every week via the top of the season, Ryan McGee is presenting his prime 5 favourite issues in regards to the sport.
High 5 best-looking automobiles? Test. High 5 hardest drivers? We have it. High 5 mustaches? There will be just one, so perhaps not.
With out additional ado, our 75 favourite issues about NASCAR, celebrating 75 years of inventory automotive racing.
Earlier installments: Hardest drivers
High 5 biggest races
We began our season-long energy slide via NASCAR’s seventy fifth anniversary celebration with a take a look at a number of the racers, so it feels solely pure to upshift our focus towards the occasions they raced in — the best ever run by inventory automotive racing’s premiere sequence. Whittling it down from 2,700 races to only 5 good occasions was no simple process. Then once more, neither was the job of competing in these legendary showdowns, not to mention being the racers who rolled into Victory Lane once they have been over.
So, seize a digicam and a few trophy polish and skim forward as we current our picks for NASCAR’s 5 biggest races.
Honorable point out: 1950 Southern 500, Darlington Raceway
Labor Day weekend 1950 within the South Carolina Sandhills was solely barely chillier than the equator of the solar as 75 — sure, 75! — automobiles took the inexperienced flag and hammered their means into the primary flip of NASCAR’s first-ever asphalt speedway, an egg-shaped oval plowed into peanut fields. The Strictly Inventory division was in solely its second season and had run solely brief tracks and virtually solely on filth. Nobody was prepared for the 1.25-mile beast we now know because the Monitor Too Powerful To Tame. Lower than half the sector completed the race and collectively popped so many tires that crewmen began stealing wheels off the automobiles of followers parked within the racetrack infield.
Hollywood stuntman Johnny “Madman” Mantz received by 9 laps, having well bolted on a set of thick truck tires after which using across the flat apron whereas his rivals ruptured their rubber rings blasting across the excessive groove. Was it an amazing race competition-wise? No. Was it the race that propelled NASCAR into its superspeedway future? Completely.
5. 1995 Goody’s 500, Bristol Motor Speedway
There are those that will argue that the Bristol evening race run 4 years later — aka the evening Dale Earnhardt rattled Terry Labonte’s cage — was higher, however