We are closing in on the final handful of weeks of the 2023 NASCAR Cup Series season, the stock car series’ 75th-anniversary campaign. To celebrate, each week through the end of the season, Ryan McGee is presenting his top five favorite things about the sport.
Top five best-looking cars? Check. Top five toughest drivers? We’ve got it. Top five mustaches? There can be only one, so maybe not.
Without further ado, our 75 favorite things about NASCAR, celebrating 75 years of stock car racing.
Top five toughest drivers
We drop the green flag over our world 600-ish NASCAR 75 greatest lists not with the greatest drivers (we will get to that later this fall) or greatest champions (yes, we’ll be doing that one, too). Instead, we present our first fast five, and it is a list of the dudes who would most likely break me in half if we did not include them on some sort of NASCAR 75 list very early on.
I’m referring to the Paul Bunyans of stock car racing. The most Herculean of hot shoes. Those who could have just have easily fit walking the hallways of Avengers Tower as they did striding through the garage area at Darlington Raceway. Their bones and muscle fibers seemingly made from the same steel used to construct their racing machines.
So, without further ado, adieu, ahem, here are our picks for NASCAR’s five toughest drivers.
Honorable Mention: Bud Moore
The kingpin of NASCAR’s highly underrated Spartanburg, South Carolina, posse, Moore never drove in a Cup Series event but became a legendary owner and mechanic, winning 63 races and a pair of championships over nearly four decades and earning election to the NASCAR Hall of Fame’s second-ever class in 2011.
On June 6, 1944, 19-year-old Moore hit Utah Beach as part of the Allies’ D-Day invasion of Normandy, France. As his friends and fellow Army draftees died around him, Moore nearly drowned when he stepped into an underwater crater. Over the next 17 months, he fought under General George Patton throughout the Big Push into Europe, including Cherbourg, the Battle of the Bulge, the liberation of Paris, and his way across Germany and into Czechoslovakia, where he caught three enemy bullets in the left leg. One day, while on patrol in a Jeep with only one other soldier, Moore flushed out and captured an entire unit of Nazis, four officers and 15 enlisted men, for which he earned the first of his two Bronze Stars. He was also awarded five Purple Hearts.
Until his death in 2017, he bristled whenever NASCAR media members used any sort of war or battle metaphors when referring to the action on the racetrack. “Racing ain’t war,” he’d growl. “War is hell.”
5. Kenny Schrader
If this were a list of the beloved racers among their peers, Schrader — that’s what everyone calls him, just Schrader — would be on this list, too. Why? Because he has long been the epitome of the greatest compliment that any driver can bestow upon a colleague: He’s a racer’s racer. The man turned 68 on May 29, and how did he celebrate? By finishing fourth in the DIRTcar UMP Modifieds A-Main at Indiana’s Lawrenceburg Speedway. As of now, he’s scheduled to run 57 events over 17 different series, including SRX Thursday Night Thunder on ESPN … and that’s just the events we know about. He ran 763 Cup Series events from 1983 to 2013, winning four times and also suffering a YouTube’s worth of CGI-looking crashes, from a Talladega barrel roll in 1995 to a Daytona Duels crash in ’98 that is still perhaps the hardest hit I’ve ever witnessed live.
But Schrader is on this list because of something else I’ve seen in person: the large section of thumb missing from his left hand. At Evergreen Speedway for the sixth-ever NASCAR Trucks race (he won the third one), the man with the day job racing for Hendrick Motorsports was fiddling with an alternator belt when a crew member fired up the engine. That belt took off the top half of his thumb. He joked with the team that he now had “one less nail to bite” and said he was going to put it under his pillow that night to see if he could maybe “get some money from the Finger Fairy.” It wasn’t sewn back on because, he explained, “It was too small a chunk to try and save.” In his first race back, the grueling Coca-Cola 600 at Charlotte, he led 169 laps and was in the lead late before a blown engine ended his night early.
4. Ricky Rudd
The man they call “the Rooster” raced alongside Schrader throughout the 1980s and ’90s and has always indeed been, as they say back in Chesapeake, Virginia, tougher than woodpecker lips. Rudd, who is a nominee for this year’s soon-to-be-elected NASCAR Hall of Fame class, won 23 Cup Series races and in 1998 was voted onto the coveted 50 greatest drivers list compiled for NASCAR’s 50th anniversary.
I personally have seen Rudd bend roll bar steel with his bare hands while trying to repair his Ford after a wreck. I was also standing in his pits in ’98 when he won at Martinsville Speedway amid a surface-of-Mercury heatwave kind of day, even after his in-car cooling systems had failed and his skin was covered in heat blisters. When the team stuffed a water hose into his firesuit during a pit stop, they’d unknowingly left the black hose in the sun, so the water that poured down his back was practically boiling. He said at the time, “I didn’t yell at them because I knew it was an accident.”
But the most legendary Rooster Rudd moment happened in 1984. During what was then known as the Busch Clash, Rudd’s Bud Moore-owned Ford became airborne as it rolled out of Turn 4, and once it came back to earth rolled over seven times. In the crash, which long predated the HANS device that stabilizes drivers’ heads and keeps them from smashing around the cockpit in an accident, Rudd’s head and face became so swollen that his eyelids were mashed shut. So, for the Daytona 500 one week later, the crew used duct tape to pull his cheeks down and create an opening that his zombie-like blackened eyeballs could see out. He finished seventh in the Great American Race. The following weekend, his eye sockets once again pried open, he held off Darrell Waltrip to win at Richmond.
Reminder: 2023 @NASCARHall vote is next week and Ricky Rudd is a nominee. Here’s the Rooster with his eyelids taped open at ’84 Daytona 500, face swollen from a wreck in the Clash a week earlier. He finished 7th. The next week at Richmond he – still taped up – won. #NASCAR75pic.twitter.com/xdxS1HrIAT
Because “the King” is so smooth and so cool, it is easy to forget that hidden inside that legendarily lanky frame lies an indestructible skeleton that would wow Wolverine. His Royal Fastness walked away from two of the most spectacular accidents in NASCAR’s 75 years, both televised nationally, in the days when not all races were.
The first was in 1970 at Darlington, when his Plymouth Road Runner hit the knee-high pit road wall with such head-on force that it sent chunks of concrete flying into the infield, one bouncing off NASCAR Hall of Fame writer Tom Higgins. As ABC Sports legend Jim McKay watched the car tumbling and Petty’s unconscious body being flung farther out of the window with each rollover, he was convinced Petty was dead. He wasn’t. In fact, as the ambulance hauled him away, “I had to sit up in my stretcher and tell the driver how to get to the hospital because he didn’t know how to get out of the dang racetrack,” Petty joked. That crash led to NASCAR finally mandating window nets.
In 1988, his Pontiac was shredded into scrap as it rolled down the Daytona frontstretch and up against the catchfence. As wife Lynda ran to the infield care center, crew members and a clergyman all stopped her to say that he was OK. “I thought, ‘They are lying to me. He’s dead. He’s got to be dead,'” she said. He was not. And it was also not the family’s first infield care center surprise. That came after a race at Pocono Raceway in 1980. Convinced he had broken his neck via another big fence-wrecking tumble, when the doctor hung Petty’s X-rays on the wall, he pointed to some older bone scars and asked the seven-time Cup Series champ, “When did you break your neck before?” Replied The King, “I didn’t know I had broke it before. I probably broke it sometime when I broke something else, and [that] hurt worse. Your body can only hurt one place at a time.”
2. Dale Earnhardt
If you are surprised to read this man’s name on this list, then I’m not sure why you’re even reading this at all. First of all, before he was “The Intimidator” or “the Man in Black,” his nickname, as bestowed upon him by Wrangler Jeans, was “One Tough Customer.” Earnhardt was so tough that few can recall seeing him actually fight anyone, and yet everyone always did whatever they had to in order to avoid an altercation with him because they were so convinced he could kick their ass.
“It’s the damndest thing I ever saw,” Dale Earnhardt Jr. said, shaking his head. “Dad would do something on the racetrack that would make even the toughest guys super pissed. And then those same guys … would go to confront Dad, and he would just look at them or squeeze the back of their neck like he would do, and they would end up just saying, ‘Oh, it’s cool, Dale. We’re good,’ And then they’d walk away! How big of a badass do you have to be to have that kind of effect on people?”
Well, Junior, I’d say the kind of guy who spent his time away from the track voluntarily knocking down trees with bulldozers and picking up baby cows and carrying them around like bags of groceries. Or the kind of guy who broke his collarbone at Talladega in 1996 and then came back to win the pole and nearly win the race on a road course at Watkins Glen. Or the guy who in ’82 broke his leg at Pocono but kept it a secret because he didn’t want his team owner (Bud Moore!) to replace him. He had screws placed in that leg and later that year one of them came loose, so he put a rag between his teeth for something to bite down on and tapped the screw back in himself. He also survived a horse crash on the side of a mountain in New Mexico and climbed out of the window of his Chevy in the middle of a race at Richmond to scrape mud off the windshield, driving with his knee under caution.
1. Cale Yarborough
So, who in the wide wide world of NASCAR could possibly be tougher than a man named “One Tough Customer”?
How about a guy who survived a skydive after his parachute failed to open properly? True story, 1958 in Jacksonville, Florida, Yarborough was member of a stunt team when he jumped from 5,000 feet and bounced off the ground, suffering a chipped shoulder.
How about a guy who survived a lightning strike? True story, he was a kid standing in the family farmhouse when a bolt struck the ground outside, bounced into the house and blew him across the room, unconscious.
Rattlesnake bite? Yep. Right behind his toe. If his uncle hadn’t tied a tourniquet around Cale’s foot and rushed him to the doctor, he likely would have died.
Fending off a bear while piloting an airplane, a la Mission Impossible? Oh, hell yes. Cale had always wanted a pet bear (because of course he did) and was flying the sedated ursine in the box in the back of his self-piloted prop plane. The bear woke up early and was making quick work of the box before Yarborough got landed and could get it back to napping.
Yarborough was also launched out of Darlington Raceway and down a hill mid-race, dramatically turned his car upside down solo at Daytona shortly after breaking the 200 mph barrier in qualifying … and then won the race in a backup car. Oh, yeah, he was also involved in NASCAR’s most iconic fistfight, slugging it out with Bobby and Donnie Allison on live television at the end of the 1979 Daytona 500.
As the great Barney Hall used to say on MRN Radio, “Cale Yarborough is tougher than a locust post.” I don’t even know what that is, but it sounds pretty dang tough to me.
ESPN baseball reporter. Covered the Washington Wizards from 2014 to 2016 and the Washington Nationals from 2016 to 2018 for The Washington Post before covering the Los Angeles Dodgers and MLB for the Los Angeles Times from 2018 to 2024.
NEW YORK — Giancarlo Stanton, one of the first known adopters of the torpedo bat, declined Tuesday to say whether he believes using it last season caused the tendon ailments in both elbows that forced him to begin this season on the injured list.
Last month, Stanton alluded to “bat adjustments” he made last season as a possible reason for the epicondylitis, commonly known as tennis elbow, he’s dealing with.
“You’re not going to get the story you’re looking for,” Stanton said. “So, if that’s what you guys want, that ain’t going to happen.”
Stanton said he will continue using the torpedo bat when he returns from injury. The 35-year-old New York Yankees slugger, who has undergone multiple rounds of platelet-rich plasma injections to treat his elbows, shared during spring training that season-ending surgery on both elbows was a possibility. But he has progressed enough to recently begin hitting off a Trajekt — a pitching robot that simulates any pitcher’s windup, arm angle and arsenal. However, he still wouldn’t define his return as “close.”
He said he will first have to go on a minor league rehab assignment at an unknown date for an unknown period. It won’t start in the next week, he added.
“This is very unique,” Stanton said. “I definitely haven’t missed a full spring before. So, it just depends on my timing, really, how fast I get to feel comfortable in the box versus live pitching.”
While the craze of the torpedo bat (also known as the bowling pin bat) has swept the baseball world since it was revealed Saturday — while the Yankees were blasting nine home runs against the Milwaukee Brewers — that a few members of the Yankees were using one, the modified bat already had quietly spread throughout the majors in 2024. Both Stanton and former Yankees catcher Jose Trevino, now with the Cincinnati Reds, were among players who used the bats last season after being introduced to the concept by Aaron Leanhardt, an MIT-educated physicist and former minor league hitting coordinator for the organization.
Stanton explained he has changed bats before. He said he has usually adjusted the length. Sometimes, he opts for lighter bats at the end of the long season. In the past, when knuckleballers were more common in the majors, he’d opt for heavier lumber.
Last year, he said he simply chose his usual bat but with a different barrel after experimenting with a few models.
“I mean, it makes a lot of sense,” Stanton said. “But it’s, like, why hasn’t anyone thought of it in 100-plus years? So, it’s explained simply and then you try it and as long as it’s comfortable in your hands [it works]. We’re creatures of habit, so the bat’s got to feel kind of like a glove or an extension of your arm.”
Stanton went on to lead the majors with an average bat velocity of 81.2 mph — nearly 3 mph ahead of the competition. He had a rebound, but not spectacular, regular season in which he batted .233 with 27 home runs and a .773 OPS before clubbing seven home runs in 14 playoff games.
“It’s not like [it was] unreal all of a sudden for me,” Stanton said.
Yankees manager Aaron Boone described the torpedo bats “as the evolution of equipment” comparable to getting fitted for new golf clubs. He said the organization is not pushing players to use them and insisted the science is more complicated than just picking a bat with a different barrel.
“There’s a lot more to it than, ‘I’ll take the torpedo bat on the shelf over there — 34 [inches], 32 [ounces],'” Boone said. “Our guys are way more invested in it than that. And really personalized, really work with our players in creating this stuff. But it’s equipment evolving.”
As players around the majors order torpedo bats in droves after the Yankees’ barrage over the weekend — they clubbed a record-tying 13 homers in two games against the Brewers — Boone alluded to the notion that, though everyone is aware of the concept, not every organization can optimize its usage.
“You’re trying to just, where you can on the margins, move the needle a little bit,” Boone said. “And that’s really all you’re going to do. I don’t think this is some revelation to where we’re going to be; it’s not related to the weekend that we had, for example. Like, I don’t think it’s that. Maybe in some cases, for some players, it may help them incrementally. That’s how I view it.”
Eovaldi struck out eight and walked none in his fifth career complete game. The right-hander threw 99 pitches, 70 for strikes.
It was Eovaldi’s first shutout since April 29, 2023, against the Yankees and just the third of his career. He became the first Ranger with multiple career shutouts with no walks in the past 30 seasons, according to ESPN Research.
“I feel like, by the fifth or sixth inning, that my pitch count was down, and I feel like we had a really good game plan going into it,” Eovaldi said in his on-field postgame interview on Victory+. “I thought [Texas catcher Kyle Higashioka] called a great game. We were on the same page throughout the entire game.”
In the first inning, Wyatt Langford homered for Texas against Carson Spiers (0-1), and that proved to be all Eovaldi needed. A day after Cincinnati collected 14 hits in a 14-3 victory in the series opener, Eovaldi (1-0) silenced the lineup.
“We needed it, these bats are still quiet,” Texas manager Bruce Bochy said of his starter’s outing. “It took a well-pitched game like that. What a game.”
The Reds put the tying run on second with two out in the ninth, but Eovaldi retired Elly De La Cruz on a grounder to first.
“He’s as good as I have seen as far as a pitcher performing under pressure,” Bochy said. “He is so good. He’s a pro out there. He wants to be out there.”
Eovaldi retired his first 12 batters, including five straight strikeouts during one stretch. Gavin Lux hit a leadoff single in the fifth for Cincinnati’s first baserunner.
“I think it was the first-pitch strikes,” Eovaldi said, when asked what made him so efficient. “But also, the off-speed pitches. I was able to get some quick outs, and I didn’t really have many deep counts. … And not walking guys helps.”
Spiers gave up three hits in six innings in his season debut. He struck out five and walked two for the Reds, who fell to 2-3.
The Rangers moved to 4-2, and Langford has been at the center of it all. He now has two home runs in six games to begin the season. In 2024, it took him until the 29th game of the season to homer for the first time. Langford hit 16 homers in 134 games last season during his rookie year.
Eli Lederman covers college football and recruiting for ESPN.com. He joined ESPN in 2024 after covering the University of Oklahoma for Sellout Crowd and the Tulsa World.
USC secured the commitment of former Oregon defensive tackle pledge Tomuhini Topui on Tuesday, a source told ESPN, handing the Trojans their latest recruiting victory in the 2026 cycle over the Big Ten rival Ducks.
Topui, ESPN’s No. 3 defensive tackle and No. 72 overall recruit in the 2026 class, spent five and half months committed to Oregon before pulling his pledge from the program on March 27. Topui attended USC’s initial spring camp practice that afternoon, and seven days later the 6-foot-4, 295-pound defender gave the Trojans his pledge to become the sixth ESPN 300 defender in the program’s 2026 class.
Topui’s commitment gives USC its 10th ESPN 300 pledge this cycle — more than any other program nationally — and pulls a fourth top-100 recruit into the impressive defensive class the Trojans are building this spring. Alongside Topui, USC’s defensive class includes in-state cornerbacks R.J. Sermons (No. 26 in ESPN Junior 300) and Brandon Lockhart (No. 77); four-star outside linebacker Xavier Griffin (No. 27) out of Gainesville, Georgia; and two more defensive line pledges between Jaimeon Winfield (No. 143) and Simote Katoanga (No. 174).
The Trojans are working to reestablish their local recruiting presence in the 2026 class under newly hired general manager Chad Bowden. Topui not only gives the Trojans their 11th in-state commit in the cycle, but his pledge represents a potentially important step toward revamping the program’s pipeline to perennial local powerhouse Mater Dei High School, too.
Topui will enter his senior season this fall at Mater Dei, the program that has produced a long line of USC stars including Matt Leinart, Matt Barkley and Amon-Ra St. Brown. However, if Topui ultimately signs with the program later this year, he’ll mark the Trojans’ first Mater Dei signee since the 2022 cycle, when USC pulled three top-300 prospects — Domani Jackson, Raleek Brown and C.J. Williams — from the high school program based in Santa Ana, California.
Topui’s flip to the Trojans also adds another layer to a recruiting rivalry rekindling between USC and Oregon in the 2026 cycle.
Tuesday’s commitment comes less than two months after coach Lincoln Riley and the Trojans flipped four-star Oregon quarterback pledge Jonas Williams, ESPN’s No. 2 dual-threat quarterback in 2026. USC is expected to continue targeting several Ducks commits this spring, including four-star offensive tackle Kodi Greene, another top prospect out of Mater Dei.