75 things for NASCAR’s 75th anniversary: Biggest scandals
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Ryan McGee, ESPN Senior Writer
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.
Previous installments: Toughest drivers | Greatest races | Best title fights | Best-looking cars | Worst-looking cars | Biggest cheaters | Biggest what-ifs | Weirdest racetracks | Best racetracks
Five biggest scandals
As October looms, so do the final six rankings of our NASCAR 75th anniversary celebration top five all-time greatest lists. A few weeks back we listed the greatest cheaters, and the immediate response on social media was, “Yeah, but what about that time that one guy did that thing that was so scandalous?!” For those who wondered, “Why TH isn’t McGee responding to me?” it’s because I knew this week’s list was coming.
From rule benders to rule breakers to people who seemed to have forgotten there were any rules at all, it’s time to grab a list of policies you’re totally going to ignore, a redacted court document and a suspended NASCAR license as we present our top five all-time biggest NASCAR scandals.
Honorable mention: NASCAR’s D.B. Cooper
On May 2, 1982, a man identified as L.W. Wright competed at the Talladega Superspeedway in a Chevy Monte Carlo, starting 36th and finishing 39th despite having never run a Cup Series race before or since. As soon as his run in the Winston 500 was over, he vanished, taking the money he had received from investors, parking the race car purchased from Sterling and Coo Coo Marlin, and then disappearing for 40 years, despite the efforts of authorities and lawyers to track him down.
He resurfaced one year ago, speaking with longtime NASCAR journalist Rick Houston at a secret location and still proclaiming his innocence. We broke the news here on ESPN with this May 2022 story.
5. The King’s big engine
There are only three rules that even the shadiest of racing innovators still shake their heads at: “rocket fuel” gas additives, illegal use of tires and running an engine that is larger than regulations allow. On Oct. 9, 1983, the King of Stock Car Racing found himself caught up in a royal mess that involved two of those three NASCAR no-nos.
Richard Petty earned the 198th win of his career, the latest step in his much-hyped march toward the magical 200-victory mark, at Charlotte Motor Speedway, holding off fellow Hall of Famers Darrell Waltrip, Benny Parsons and Terry Labonte. But in postrace inspection, the famous No. 43 Pontiac was found to have a 381.983-cubic-inch engine, well over the allowed 358-cubic-inch limit. What’s more, during the final pit stop, the team had bolted left-side tires on the right side, also way against the rules.
After three hours of deliberation, it was determined that the win would stand, but Petty was stripped of 104 points and handed a then-record $30,000 fine. Years later, mechanic Maurice Petty, himself a Hall of Famer, confessed to it all. That night, big brother Richard (in)famously said, “We have accepted NASCAR’s penalty. I’m only the driver, and I didn’t know anything about the motor or tires.”
4. Wendell Scott’s missing trophy
On a cold Dec.1, 1963, evening at Jacksonville Speedway Park in Florida, the poor-but-proud powder blue No. 34 Chevy of Wendell Scott outlasted a field of 21 rivals, taking the checkered flag a full two laps ahead of second place Buck Baker. As was the motorsport modus operandi at the time, though, protests were filed and the hand-scored lap sheets kept by NASCAR and the individual teams were rounded up for review.
Baker was declared the winner, taking the Victory Lane photos and collecting the trophy. Later that night, NASCAR admitted a scoring error and declared Scott the rightful winner, but Baker and the trophy were long gone.
“They all knew I had won that race,” Scott said decades later. “But they didn’t want a Black man kissing that beauty queen in Victory Lane.”
That’s right, Scott was the first — and, until Bubba Wallace in 2021, the only — Black race winner in the NASCAR Cup Series. NASCAR didn’t give Scott a new trophy for years, finally righting that inexplicable wrong in 2021, 57 years after his win. Scott was elected to the NASCAR Hall of Fame in 2015.
3. Aaron Fike’s heroin confession
NASCAR’s original drug-related scandal took place in 1988, when Tim Richmond, amid rumors that he was suffering from AIDS, was suspended for testing positive for banned substances and the sanctioning body’s very loose “We’ll test only if we have our suspicions” approach was born. That policy stood until April 2008.
What changed? Aaron Fike, a Truck Series competitor who had been arrested one year earlier for heroin possession, admitted to ESPN that he had raced with heroin in his system multiple times, even finishing in the top five the same week he was arrested. Fike’s confession forced NASCAR to overhaul its drug policy, publishing a formal list of banned substances and implementing random drug testing more in line with other major sports.
That new policy led to another giant scandal, the May 2009 suspension of driver and five-time Cup Series race winner Jeremy Mayfield, who tested positive for methamphetamines and began a yearslong series of lawsuits. For the full story behind Fike’s confession, read this ESPN The Magazine story from April 8, 2008.
2. ‘Spingate’
We touched on this briefly a few weeks ago in our list of top five biggest cheaters, but the details of what took place on Sept. 7, 2013, at Richmond International Raceway are worth diving into. Entire chapters of books and endless hours of podcasts have been dedicated to that night, but here’s the SparkNotes version: In the final cutoff event for the 10-race Chase postseason field, driver Clint Bowyer of Michael Waltrip Racing was sent a code by his crew chief Brian Pattie — “Is your arm starting to hurt? Must be hot in there.” — immediately followed by a Bowyer spin that brought out the caution flag with less than 10 laps remaining. Then, with three laps remaining, MWR GM/VP Ty Norris ordered Brian Vickers to make a green-flag pit stop.
It was all designed to help teammate Martin Truex Jr. move up in the field and make the Chase cut. It worked. For a minute. Then NASCAR cracked the MWR code.
MWR was fined a record $300,000 for manipulating the outcome of the race and the postseason, Norris was suspended; all three crew chiefs were placed on probation; and all three drivers were docked 50 points, which knocked Truex back out of the postseason field. Embarrassed sponsor NAPA cut ties with the team, putting Truex’s career in jeopardy (he recovered with Furniture Row and Joe Gibbs Racing) and setting MWR on the path that would ultimately end with its closure two years later.
1. Jimmy Hoffa vs. NASCAR
Yes, you read that right. The infamous union leader, who has inspired Hollywood movies with his questionable business practices and inspired a million conspiracy theorists searching for his final resting place, went to war with NASCAR. It didn’t go well.
It started in 1960, when driving ace Curtis Turner and entrepreneur Bruton Smith needed funding for their under-construction and already-bankrupt Charlotte Motor Speedway. Hoffa’s Teamsters union stepped up, offering the needed cash in exchange for the formation of a NASCAR drivers’ union. The Federation of Professional Athletes (FPA) was born, and Turner, along with fellow superstar Tim Flock, recruited the paddock with the promise of more prize money, a pension plan, health and death benefits, safety advancements, even scholarship funds for the children of deceased members.
NASCAR founder and president Bill France didn’t have so much of a problem with all that, but he was adamantly against something Hoffa was asking for in return, the establishment of horse track-style betting windows at speedways.
“Organized gambling would be bad for our sport,” France wrote in an open letter to the FPA. “And it would spill innocent blood on our racetrack. I will fight it to the end!”
He did, going to court vs. the Teamsters … in Florida.
“We went down there to Daytona with all these super-high-powered, high-dollar New York lawyers,” Flock recalled shortly before his death in 1998. “And those country lawyers of Bill France’s just whipped ’em. Our guys would be pouring their hearts out in the courtroom, and the judge would be sitting up there reading comic books and magazines. We never had a chance.”
Drivers bailed on the FPA, which folded in 1962, and Turner and Flock were slapped with lifetime bans. Turner returned briefly in 1965, but Flock remained on the outs until his death in 1998, finally elected to the NASCAR Hall of Fame in 2014. Turner was voted in two years later.
LOS ANGELES — It’s easy to take Shohei Ohtani for granted. By now, we’ve settled into the rote comfort: He is the best player on the planet, and that’s that. Ohtani’s baseline is everyone else’s peak. He is judged against himself and himself only.
And it’s human nature that when we watch something often enough — even something as mind-bending as a player who’s a full-time starting pitcher and full-time hitter and among the very best at both — it starts to register as normal.
Which is why his performances on Friday — the unleashing of the full extent of Ohtani’s magic — was the sort of necessary reminder that one of the greatest athletes in the world, and the most talented baseball player ever, is playing right now, doing unfathomable things, redefining the game in real time. And that even when he starts the day mired in an uncharacteristic slump, Ohtani needs only a single game to launch himself into the annals of history.
Where Ohtani’s performance in Game 4 of the National League Championship Series ranks on the all-time list of games will be debated for years. In the celebration following Los Angeles‘ 5-1 victory over the Milwaukee Brewers, though, Dodgers manager Dave Roberts stood on the field and said, “That’s the greatest night in baseball history,” and no one cared to argue.
Over the course of 2 hours, 41 minutes, in front of 52,883 fans, with millions watching domestically and tens of millions more in Japan, Ohtani threw six shutout innings and struck out 10 in between hitting three home runs that traveled a combined 1,342 feet, including one that left Dodger Stadium entirely. It was the sort of game that happens in comic books, not real life — and it was a game that completed a championship series sweep and sent Los Angeles to its second consecutive World Series. It was the kind of night that leaves patrons elated they saw it and also just a little ruined because they know they’ll never see anything like it again. Everyone was a prisoner, captive to perhaps the greatest individual game in the quarter-million or so played over the last century and a half.
It was, at very least, one of the finest displays of baseball since the game’s inception, up there with Tony Cloninger hitting two grand slams and throwing a complete game in 1966 or Rick Wise socking two home runs amid his no-hitter on the mound in 1971. And unlike those, this came in the postseason, and in a game to clinch Los Angeles the opportunity to become the first team in a quarter-century to win back-to-back championships.
It wasn’t quite Don Larsen throwing a perfect game — but Larsen went 0-for-2 in that game and needed a Mickey Mantle home run to account for his scoring. It wasn’t Reggie Jackson hammering three home runs, either — because Reggie needed Mike Torrez to throw a complete game that night to make his blasts stand up.
Ohtani is the only player who can do this, the offense and the defense — the mastery of baseball, the distillation of talent into something pure and perfect.
Hours earlier, his day had started by navigating the tricky balance of starting and hitting on the same day. His metronomic routine, such a vital piece of his three MVP seasons (the fourth will be made official in mid-November), is upended completely when he pitches. He budgets for the extra time he needs to spend caring for his arm by sacrificing his attendance at the hitters’ meeting, instead getting the intel he needs from coaches in the batting cage about an hour before the game.
Nobody could tell, when Ohtani arrived in the underground cage Friday, that he was mired in a nasty slump that had stretched from the division series through the third game of the NLCS, a jag of strikeouts and soft contact and poor swing decisions and utter frustration that got so bad earlier in the week he had taken batting practice outside at Dodger Stadium, something he never — like, really, never — does. He had decided to do so on the plane ride back from Milwaukee, where the Dodgers had humbled the Brewers with the sort of starting pitching never seen in a league championship series.
Game 4, his teammates were convinced, was going to be a culmination of that extra cage work and the matching of his pitching peers’ dominance.
“You guys asked me yesterday, and I said I was expecting nothing short of incredible today,” Dodgers third baseman Max Muncy said. “And he proved me wrong. He went beyond incredible.”
After walking the leadoff hitter, Brice Turang, Ohtani struck out the next three hitters, popping a pair of 100 mph-plus fastballs and unleashing the most confounding version of his splitter seen all year. He followed by obliterating a slurve from Jose Quintana in the bottom of the inning for a home run, the first time a pitcher ever hit a leadoff homer in the game’s history, regular season or playoffs.
The strikeouts continued — one in the third inning, two more in the fourth, preceding Ohtani’s second home run, which left 50,000 mouths agape. In the stands, they cheered, and in the dugout, they whooped, and in the bullpen, they screamed: “The ball went out of the stadium!” Alex Vesia, the reliever who would come in after Ohtani struck out two more in the fifth and sixth innings, could not conceive that a person could hit a baseball in a game that far. Officially, it went 469 feet. It felt like 1,000.
“At that point, it’s got to be the greatest game ever, right?” said Vesia, who did his part to help keep it so. Ohtani allowed a walk and a hit in the seventh inning, and had Vesia allowed either run to score, the sparkling zero in his pitching line could’ve been an unsightly one or crooked two. When he induced a ground ball up the middle that nutmegged his legs, Mookie Betts was in perfect position to hoover it, step on second and fire to first for a double play that preserved Ohtani’s goose egg.
In the next inning, Ohtani’s third home run of the night, and this one was just showing off: a shot to dead center off a 99 mph Trevor Megill fastball, a proper complement to the second off an 89 mph Chad Patrick cutter and the first off a 79 mph Quintana slurve). If it sounds impressive to hit three different pitches off three different pitchers for home runs in one night, it is. To do so throwing six innings, allowing two hits, walking three and striking out 10 is otherworldly.
“We were so focused on just winning the game, doing what needed to be done, I’m not sure we realized how good it really was,” Dodgers catcher Will Smith said. “I didn’t really appreciate it until after. Like, he actually did that?”
Yes. Yes he did. In baseball history, 503 players have hit three home runs in a game, and 1,550 have struck out 10 or more in a game. None, until Friday, had done both. And that’s what Shohei Ohtani does, who he is. For eight years, he has transformed what is possible in baseball, set a truly impossible standard to match, and now, finally, having signed with a franchise capable of giving his talents the largest stage, Ohtani gets to perform when it matters most.
Milwaukee won more games during the regular season than anyone. Regardless of how impotent the Brewers’ offense was this series, they were a very good team, and the Dodgers flayed them. The final game was an exclamation point — and a warning for the Seattle Mariners or Toronto Blue Jays, whichever survives the back-and-forth American League Championship Series.
Shohei Ohtani awaits. Good luck.
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