75 things for NASCAR's 75th anniversary: Greatest Modern Era drivers

This is it: the final week of the 2023 NASCAR Cup Series season, the stock car series’ 75th anniversary campaign. To celebrate, Ryan McGee has been presenting his favorite top-five things about the sport on a weekly basis.

The five best-looking cars? Check. The 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 | Biggest scandals | Weirdest announcements | Greatest fights | Greatest rivalries | Greatest pre-Modern Era drivers

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Five greatest drivers of the Modern Era

What a celebration this has been. For 15 weeks, the final few months of NASCAR’s 75th anniversary season, we have gifted you with my 75 things that I love most about stock car racing’s preeminent series in the form of top-five lists. It’s been a time of mostly friendly but also very touchy debate with those of you who have been kind enough to run these best-of laps with us since summer’s end.

But now the checkered flag is in view, reminding us to finish up before this weekend’s showdown to crown the newest Cup Series champion. That’s why it feels only fitting to spend this final list with a group of gentlemen who know exactly how it feels to hoist that Cup, as they did it over and over again.

So, grab a bottle of champagne, start your hat dance and get ready to thank the boys back at the shop as we present our top five greatest Modern Era NASCAR drivers.

Honorable Mention: Davey Allison, Alan Kulwicki and Tim Richmond

All three racers are in this spot for the same reason: that we were robbed of the chance to see what they could have accomplished had they been given more time on this Earth. Richmond died in 1989 due to complications from AIDS while Kulwicki and Allison were killed only 3½ months apart in a pair of 1993 aircraft crashes, right after they had battled for the Cup Series title that Kulwicki ultimately won in ’92. The three combined to win 37 races and one championship, despite averaging only 193 career starts between them.

Dale Earnhardt was asked so many times how different the sport would have looked had those three had longer careers. The Intimidator always said the same thing, especially when it came to Allison, “I don’t think Dale Earnhardt would have as many wins and championships as I do. Maybe I would, but I would have liked to have raced them for it.”

5. David Pearson

If this list was about nothing but pure talent, the Silver Fox might be ranked No. 1 with a bullet. But, as discussed in our top-five what-ifs list a few weeks ago, Pearson never ran a full schedule during NASCAR’s Modern Era, choosing along with his Wood Brothers team to focus on the big track races that also featured bigger paychecks. As a result, he made only career 574 starts, but won 105 of those, a winning percentage of 18%.

His three Grand National titles came before the so-called Modern Era kickoff of 1972, but 45 of his wins came after ’72, as did his 1976 Daytona 500 win, all four of his Southern 500 victories, two of his three World 600 wins and his Triple Crown win of ’76. He also added 366 top-10 finishes (64% of his starts!) and 113 poles.

My favorite personal Pearson moment: When Darlington Raceway flipped the front and backstretches in 1997, I was standing at the start-finish line for a ceremonial last lap on the old configuration, to be run in a pair of Pontiac pace cars driven by Darlington and South Carolina legends Pearson and longtime rival Cale Yarborough. Each car had sponsor execs riding shotgun. When the green flag was waved, Yarborough rolled off slowly, waving to the crowd. Pearson caught a tire and laid down some smoke as he dropped the hammer. Cale, realizing what Pearson had done, stood on the gas to try to catch him. As the crowd realized what was happening, they went crazy. Half a minute later, Pearson flew by us at 150 mph as people dove out of the way. As he got out of the car, ignoring a visibly rattled Pontiac exec, a Darlington staffer said, “Man, what were you doing?” Pearson pointed at Cale and said, with zero humor, “I wasn’t going to let that little sumb—h beat me.”

4. Jimmie Johnson

I never thought it was possible for someone to be as talented of a racer and as public of a figure as Johnson and yet remain so misunderstood and underappreciated, but that’s exactly how his career went down. He’s a desert rat who grew up as blue collar as one could be and fought his way up the auto racing ladder, landing a prime ride despite a resumé largely devoid of NASCAR success.

Then all he did was win 83 races, sixth all time, including two Daytona 500s, four World 600s, four NASCAR All-Star Races, four Brickyard 400s and a pair of Southern 500s. He matched Yarborough’s record of three consecutive Cups, a mark long believed unreachable, and then added two more to that streak and four more overall, equaling another supposed-to-be-unreachable record of seven championships, pulling up alongside Earnhardt and Richard Petty, with whom he now owns Legacy Motorsports.

Oh by the way, he also won those seven Cups via three different points systems and four variations on the Chase/Playoff postseason format, so many alterations that NASCAR was accused of trying to “Jimmie proof” the sport. He also went from the freeform Gen 4 car shapeshifting “Twisted Sister” car bodies through Gen 5 “Car of Tomorrow” rectangles and into the Gen 6 that fell somewhere in between. He won in them all. A lot.

Yet all he accomplished was written off to genius crew chief Chad Knaus or he was unjustly classified as boring. Johnson never cared about that. He was too busy winning.

My favorite personal Johnson moment: He’d given me his phone number while I was working on a story, but I’d never used it. While at the beach with my family, my then-elementary-school daughter and I went to Lowe’s and bought a little DIY No. 48 wooden race car kit and she built. She begged me to text him a photo of her with the car. I told her no, explaining that he had given that number to me in confidence and we weren’t to abuse that privilege. The next morning, I woke up and my phone had a text from Johnson that read, “This is awesome!” I was confused. Then I scrolled up. In the middle of the night, she had sent him the photo. He’s asked about her ever since.

3. Jeff Gordon

Do I recognize the fact that I just said Johnson was unfairly underappreciated within the same countdown where I have him ranked behind someone with three fewer championships? Yes, I do. But while these rankings are about winning, they are also about having an impact on the direction of the sport as a whole (see: the same reasoning that landed Lee Petty on our pre-Modern Era list last week). When you factor that in, Gordon has the edge.

If not for Gordon, you likely wouldn’t even know who Johnson is, seeing as how it was Gordon who rolled the dice on Johnson and that thin NASCAR resumé to sign the fellow Californian as the driver for his new co-owned team. In fact, it was Gordon who changed the lives of every single Cup Series driver who raced with him and has raced after his retirement from driving in 2016. Before Gordon, every racer had a nice car and nice bit of money in the bank. By the time he was done, they had a mansion, a garage full of luxury cars and their own private airplanes.

Gordon’s success as a NASCAR outsider brought in millions of new fans and dozens of Fortune 500 companies. During a reign that led to four Cups and 93 wins, Gordon also made NASCAR cool, helping the sport navigate the “Young Guns” era that his success inspired, but then also guiding them through the perilous months after Earnhardt’s death. Now he continues to keep his hand on the wheel as the vice chairman of the team where he won all those races, Hendrick Motorsports.

My favorite personal Gordon moment: To me, the day that he moved to the next level was his second of his three Daytona 500 victories, the 1999 event when he battled with Earnhardt all day and then iced the event via a game-of-chicken move with Rusty Wallace, using the limping and lapped car of Ricky Rudd to set a pick and seize the lead. As he walked into the media center later that evening, he squeezed me on the shoulder and said to a group of us, with a nod to the constant chatter about his blow-dried hair, model wife and rainbow-colored car, “You think they can still say I’m soft now?” No sir, they could not.

2. Dale Earnhardt

He was such a legend that he had more nicknames than you list. The Intimidator. The Man in Black. Ironhead. One Tough Customer.

Earnhardt is the answer to the question: What if you took all of that stuff I just wrote about Pearson, Johnson and Gordon and used it to come up with one guy? He was unquestionably fearless, like Pearson. He was bluer than blue collar and had to make his own breaks, like Johnson. And you want to know who Gordon leaned on as a mentor when it came to changing the entire business model for a modern-day NASCAR driver? It was Earnhardt.

Meanwhile, he had the Pass in the Grass, the time he hung out the window of his car midrace at Richmond to clean his windshield, the time he flipped his car at Daytona and drove away, the time he came from 18th to first at Talladega, the time he won the pole and nearly won at Watkins Glen with a broken sternum, and the time he bent steel with his bare hands and then jumped over a skyscraper while defeating Thanos. OK, that last one didn’t actually happen, but for a second you didn’t doubt it, did you? Earnhardt’s seven championship equaled a record and his 76 wins still rank eighth all-time, all with that awful asterisk that comes with the darkest day in NASCAR history, leaving us wondering what he might have still accomplished had he not died at the end of the 2001 Daytona 500.

My personal favorite Earnhardt moment: When I was a young TV producer 23 years ago, I cooked up a “Top 10 drivers of the 20th century” project for ESPN, where we had a panel of writers vote and then did feature stories on their top 10 picks. Earnhardt was fourth and we set up an interview shoot at the brand new Dale Earnhardt Incorporated “Garage Mahal” in the gold-laden dining room. We had just started setting up when The Intimidator suddenly threw the door open and shouted, “What the hell is taking y’all so long?! You gotta get ready right now! I’ll be back in five minutes!” We scrambled like crazy and did an hour’s job in five minutes. When he came back and saw us panting and sweating, he laughed and said, “I’m just screwing with y’all. Let’s eat lunch.” Then his chef brought in a ridiculous meal and he prodded me the entire time to find out where he was ranked. Perhaps all of that is why when I watch that interview back now, my 20-something voice sounds like it’s about to crack.

1. Richard Petty

There are those who will always argue that Pearson was better. Or that Earnhardt had more talent. Or that Petty won so much only because he always had the best equipment. Or that he won so many times only because he started so many more races than anyone else. Or that … blah, blah, blah. It’s become the cool thing to do to put someone other than Petty atop any greatest drivers list. They are all wrong. Even Earnhardt told me that on that very day we had lunch, saying to me of our greatest 20th century list: “If y’all don’t have Richard Petty as the No. 1 stock car driver then you’re wasting everyone’s time.”

The King of Stock Car Racing won 200 times, won seven championships across six different points systems (including a five-year span where he won four Cups via four different points systems), won seven Daytona 500s and still holds the records for most wins at three current active tracks (Martinsville, Richmond and North Wilkesboro) and two that still might find a way back one day (Nashville and Rockingham). He also owns the career marks for poles (123), second-place finishes (157) and laps led, of which he leads second place Yarborough by nearly 20,000 laps. Twenty-seven wins in one season, 10 wins in a row, 22 back-to-back wins, the list goes on so long that you should just read what I wrote in 2017 for his 80th birthday.

Petty’s career has never been just about all of those untouchable numbers, though. It’s as much about what he has done off the track as what he accomplished on it. He no doubt leads world history in autographs signed, his disarming smile and mustache enlisting countless people to become NASCAR fans. He invented modern merchandising during his 1992 fan appreciation tour and has said yes to media requests almost to a fault. As the late Benny Parsons once said to me, immediately following an admittedly jealous “If I had been able to drive the cars Richard did” rant: “The reality is that all of us who thought we could beat him never beat him much. He was better. There can be only one King in the kingdom and Richard is The King. Always will be.”

My personal favorite Petty moment: In 2009, I tagged along with The King as he did the Memorial Day weekend double, flying from Concord, North Carolina, to Indianapolis and back for the Indy 500 and Coca-Cola 600. Our helicopter landed on the golf course along the Indianapolis Motor Speedway backstretch, and when we hopped out there were two golf carts waiting. He looked at me and said, “You need to get in that one cart and go get your credentials.” I asked him what he was going to do. He said he’d meet me inside. Then he pointed at his own face, the one with the mustache, STP wayfarers and the Charlie 1 Horse cowboy hat with all the feathers and stuff on it. “I brought my credentials with me.”