Two Dyno days one winner

[fleet]

Originally Posted by intocarss

"Cale Yarborough, right, fought Donnie, far left, and Bobby Allison in 1979.

Cale Yarborough, muscular and tenacious, quit the Clemson football team to race stock cars.

Apparently, people do not ask him about his titles in 1976, ’77 and ’78 as much as they ask him to recall the second race of the 1979 Winston Cup season, the Daytona 500 on Feb. 18. Yarborough helped make Nascar nationally famous that day.

Richard Petty won the race, but Yarborough got into a fistfight with Bobby and Donnie Allison in the infield after he and Donnie Allison thumped into each other several times while racing on the backstretch at Daytona International Speedway.

It was the first Nascar race to be televised in its entirety to a national audience, and the fistfight, not the race itself, caused a commotion. More people started tuning in to races on Sundays to see what these good ol’ boys might do to each other next.

“I’ve told that story several million times, and I’ll do it again,” Yarborough said in a teleconference last week. “I had the fastest car and had it set up to where I could slingshot him on the last lap. That may have been a mistake on my part.”

After a pause, he said: “I should maybe have gone on and passed him, go on and won the race handily. I was trying to make a show out of it. Unfortunately, it really came out to be a show. It was one of the best things ever happened in Nascar.”

Yarborough said that he made up with the Allisons the next day and that they had been friends ever since. Bobby Allison, who won the championship in 1983, visited Yarborough at his farm recently, he said. It is still probably the most famous racing fight."

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/26/sp...scar.html?_r=0