Buddy Baker at Daytona in 1968. Photos courtesy NASCAR Media.
He was big, he was brawny, he was fast and utterly fearless. It finally took inoperable lung cancer to bring down the superspeedway hero Buddy Baker, who died yesterday morning at his home on Lake Norman in North Carolina. He was 74.
Baker scored 19 victories in NASCAR’s top series in a career that spanned 33 years and 699 starts. But he won the big ones. He was considered a master of NASCAR fastest tracks, Daytona and Talladega. He won three straight races at the fearsome Alabama supertrack. He captured the 1980 Daytona 500 at an average speed of more than 177 MPH, a record that still stands today as NASCAR’s fastest race ever. In terms of pure speed, Baker was the first driver ever to turn a lap in a stock car of more than 200 MPH, during a test at Talladega, and scored an even 40 pole positions. He was arguably best known as a Dodge factory driver during the great manufacturer wars of the late 1960s, notably driving for Ray Fox and then for Cotton Owens in a winged Dodge Daytona.
Announcing for TNN in the 1990s.
A second-generation star, he was nominated earlier this year to join his father, Buck Baker, in NASCAR’s Hall of Fame. Born Elzie Wylie Baker Jr., he lived most of his life in the Charlotte area, having started driving in a car prepped by his father in 1959, just after graduating from high school. Baker enjoyed a highly successful second career as a racing analyst for the then-Nashville Network, and followed it with a popular evening show on Sirius XM’s NASCAR channel. It was only last month that Baker told his live audience that he was stepping away from the microphone after being diagnosed with terminal cancer.
One of Baker’s closest friends was Don Miller of Mooresville, North Carolina, the retired president of Penske Racing, who had hired Baker as a driving coach when the team was still known as Penske Racing South. He was beside himself when we reached him for his thoughts.
“I knew it was going to happen, but it just doesn’t seem possible. Each time I would go over there and it would just tear my heart out,” Don said. “Buddy taught Rusty Wallace and Ryan Newman how to drive a superspeedway. I brought him in because we weren’t doing real well on the superspeedways at the time. He touched a lot of people, but a lot of people didn’t know him. For the time I knew him, it was our personal relationship that drove things. We had so much fun, it was always a good time. He and Bobby Allison were probably two of the best storytellers ever in NASCAR. Buddy was a very, very special friend.”
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