April 1, 1973 - Atlanta 500

NASCAR's 1973 Winston Cup season opened with wins by its heavy hitters, although one was a veteran of only five Cup starts. 

• Mark Donohue - a superstar driver but with only a handful of NASCAR starts - won the season opening race on Riverside, California's road course giving Roger Penske his first win as a NASCAR Cup owner. 
• Richard Petty won the next two races - the Daytona 500 and Richmond 500.
• David Pearson dominated the Carolina 500 at Rockingham by leading 491 of 492 laps.
• Cale Yarborough topped Pearson by one lap by leading all 500 laps of the Southeastern 500 at Bristol. 

The circuit remained in the south for the sixth race of the season, the Atlanta 500, at Atlanta International Raceway.

 

As has frequently been the case at Atlanta over the decades, the story of the first couple of days of race week was rain. The first round of qualifying was scheduled for Thursday, but rain negated all on-track activities. The drivers returned Friday, and the cars were pushed to pit road even though the prospects of completing the round seemed bleak. Sure enough, rain arrived again after only a couple of cars made their laps. The rest of the day was scratched as was the final attempt on Saturday. 

Unlike today's era where NASCAR has an established policy for setting a race's line-up when qualifying cannot be held, no such procedure existed in 1973. Instead, NASCAR divided the entrants into two buckets and randomly drew the starting order from each. The first group included the 17 drivers NASCAR viewed as the quickest. Not so coincidentally, the "quickest" also included the most popular drivers, those most likely to win, those with more prominent sponsors, etc. 

The remaining entrants were put in a second drawing which didn't exactly go over well with some of the group who believed they deserved consideration for the first group. The driver most notably upset about the ad-hoc process was a rookie originally from Owensboro, Kentucky named Darrell Waltrip.

Waltrip was especially bent after drawing the 39th starting spot and thinking he should have started no worse than 17th. Through some off-track dealing with another driver, Waltrip took the green flag from the 18th spot. 

Following the draw, NASCAR official Lin Kuchler acknowledged Waltrip should have been in the first group. Once the line-up was set though, it was too late to make the change. To borrow a line from Goodfellas: 

We had a problem, and we tried to do everything we could. And we couldn't do nothing about it. That's it.

Source: The Tennessean

As the drivers found ways to spend three days watching rain, The King made some use of his extra time. He crafted makeshift heel pads for his boots from a Styrofoam cup. Petty burned his heels the previous Sunday as he pursued Cale all day at Bristol.

With that, Richard ... dismounted from the big, Petty-blue tractor cab, heading for the track's infield restaurant, the Caution Café, where the lunch menu offered country fried steak, turnip greens and cherry cobbler for only $2. Petty limped as he walked, favoring his right leg.

"Yep," he said, "burned my heel good up at Bristol, Tennessee last weekend. Engine exhaust through the floorboards. Nothin' I could do about it - it was like some cat was down there with a blowtorch, treatin' me to a blister. A lot of folks, they sort of think race drivers aren't athaletes, that the car does all the work. Now in a pro football game, the ball's in play for only about six or seven minutes, and there's two squads to split the time, offense and defense. A race driver's workin' for three or four hours with no time-outs, and his life is on the line every second. Oh, they get bunged up good, those ballplayers, but I don't believe they ever get a hotfoot like this un."

Then, while the rain still poured down on the blossoming dogwoods of northwest Georgia, Richard cut out a couple of pads from a Styrofoam coffee cup to protect his sore heel and sat back to await [Andy] Granatelli's arrival. If he winced at all while he waited, it was probably his heel talking. - Sports Illustrated

USAC Indy Car regular Gordon Johncock drew the top starting spot. Johncock piloted Hoss Ellington's Chevy with a one-time, unique sponsor: L'eggs panty hose. Bobby Isaac started second in Bud Moore's Ford. Jim Vandiver, Yarborough, and Benny Parsons rounded out the top five starters.

Isaac, Yarborough, and Parsons were regular NASCAR competitors and consistently ran up front. Ellington's car was always quick even though its Atlanta driver had few NASCAR starts on his resume. Vandiver, however, wasn't neither a Cup regular or a consistently quick car. Yet he was included in the 17-driver group for the first drawing. His inclusion, along with a couple of others, likely added to DW's bitterness of having to sit at the kid's table for the second drawing. 

The driver with whom Waltrip swapped spots was Charles Barrett who was making his Cup debut. Barrett, a Georgia late model racer, started the race in a George Elliott-owned #09 Ford. A few years later, Elliott began fielding Fords with his sons, Bill, Ernie, and Dan.

When the race got underway on a rainless Sunday afternoon, Yarborough was the early lap bully. He seized the lead on lap one and pulled the field around the 1.5 mile oval for the next 40 laps. Pearson, Petty, and Isaac then took turns at the point before Cale returned to lead another 30 laps or so. 

Pearson began to tip the laps led ledger a bit more his way as he led a stretch of 43 of 50 laps as the race neared the one-third mark.

As Pearson and Yarborough jousted at the front, Petty hung around with plans to seize the lead again if the top two couldn't hang at the front. Instead, it was the 43's engine that left the party early. Petty puked a motor a few laps shy of halfway. His STP Dodge swapped ends, and he drilled the guardrail as former teammate Buddy Baker and Waltrip spun behind him. Petty nearly sailed over the fence and seemed headed for nearby McDonough, GA as Baker and Waltrip continued. 

With the King out of the picture, the Timmonsville Flash and Silver Fox continued to wage battle over the next 100 laps. For the most part, neither driver could hold the lead for more than a few laps before the other returned to the point. 

As the race entered its final triad, Yarborough's Chevrolet gained the upper hand. He overtook Pearson and returned to the lead with about 100 laps to go and stayed there for the next 40+ laps.

With just a bit more than 50 laps to go, however, Yarborough blew a hammy - in a manner of speaking. Smoke began to bellow from his car, and he faded from the front. Pearson once again reassumed the lead, and he cruised the remaining laps in his Wood Brothers Mercury to capture his 68th career victory. 

Isaac finished the day as he started it - in second place. Parsons finished third - a finish that paid big dividends as he eventually won the 1973 Winston Cup title. Baker recovered from the spin in Petty's wreck to finish fourth in his Harry Hyde-prepared Dodge. And despite all his late race woes, Yarborough still managed to hang around long enough to eke out a P5.

Other finishers of note:

• After winning the season-opener at Riverside, the Atlanta race turned out to be Mark Donahue's final Cup start. He finished a less-than-memorable 30th after losing an engine. Sadly, he died two years later following an accident during a practice session for the Austrian Grand Prix.
• The race was also the final Cup start for Pete Hamilton, the 1968 NASCAR Grand National Rookie of the Year. Hamilton won three races in 1970 - all in the #40 Petty Enterprises Plymouth Superbird - and his 125-mile qualifying race for the Daytona 500 in 1971 for long-time owner Cotton Owens. He continued to be involved in motorsports over the years - particularly with southern late model drivers.
• Charles Barrett finished 18th in his Cup debut - right where he would have started had he not traded spots with Waltrip. 

Source: Atlanta Constitution

TMC