Photo courtesy the NASCAR Hall of Fame.
Spanning multiple eras of competition, NASCAR has announced the seventh class of inductees to its Hall of Fame in Charlotte, North Carolina. The results of the voting panel’s election were disclosed at a conference during race week leading up to Sunday’s Coca-Cola 600. This year’s class includes Jerry Cook, Bobby Isaac, Terry Labonte, O. Bruton Smith and Curtis Turner.
Now a NASCAR official, Jerry Cook was one of the sanctioning body’s premier short-track stars, especially in the open-wheel Modified division. Cook won six national titles in those cars, four of them consecutively. He’s most famous for his season-long duels with his fellow Rome, New York, native, the late Richie Evans, who was previously inducted into the hall. Cook did a lot to administer the Modified division after he retired from driving in 1982.
Bobby Isaac was a quiet, intense driver who knew how to wring speed out of a stock car. He was the 1970 NASCAR Grand National champion in a Dodge, won 37 races in his career, and still ranks 10th on NASCAR’s all-time list of pole winners. In 1969, at the height of the aero wars when he finished second in the standings to David Pearson, Isaac scored 19 poles, which remains a NASCAR record.
NASCAR Hall of Fame. Photo courtesy Charlotte Visitor’s Bureau.
Terry Labonte was one of the sport’s great stars of the 1980s. He won Winston Cup titles in 1984 and 1996, and the 12-year gap between those championships remains a NASCAR record. Labonte’s run of 665 consecutive starts was a record until it was broken in 2002. He’s one of just six drivers to have won championships in two different decades, and he ranks 10th on the all-time list for top-10 finishes.
O. Bruton Smith, the North Carolina business magnate, once attempted to field a stock car series that would have been a direct competitor to NASCAR. Instead, Smith was instrumental in the construction of Charlotte Motor Speedway, which is the crown jewel of his Speedway Motorsports Inc. chain of race tracks, which has grown to include Texas, New Hampshire, Bristol, Atlanta, Las Vegas and Kentucky.
Given the fact that he was once slapped with a lifetime suspension by NASCAR, Curtis Turner looms as something of a wild card among the inductees. An ex-bootlegger who made and lost several fortunes, Turner was famed as one of NASCAR’s most spectacular drivers, especially on dirt. With Smith, Turner built Charlotte Motor Speedway, but was tossed from the sport for several years by Big Bill France after he made a failed attempt to unionize race drivers. Turner died in a 1970 plane crash.
The next three vote-getters among the 20 nominees for the hall were founding champion Red Byron, the 1973 champion and beloved broadcaster Benny Parsons, and team owner Rick Hendrick. Harold Brasington, the businessman who first built Darlington Raceway and hosted NASCAR’s first 500-mile event, was chosen the winner of the Landmark award.
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