There often comes a time in a man’s life when passion must overtake your bread and butter. For someone as accomplished as Burt Reynolds, you’d never expect the man to have a calling as higher than acting itself. That’s where you’d be wrong. Reynolds, who forged a long-lasting legacy on Hollywood’s storied big screen had always been a racer at heart. And then NASCAR came calling.
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Reynolds left a trail of his intentions to dive into motorsport with movies like Stroker Ace and Smokey and the Bandit throughout his acting career. In 1981, he put his thoughts seriously into work when he partnered with former stuntman Hal Needham to form his own NASCAR racing team.
Christened ‘Skoal Bandit Racing’ and inspired by the title of a movie Reynolds appears in, the team entered the #22 entry driven by Stan Barrett for half of the 1981 season before switching to the #33 car for Harry Gant. The partnership of Reynolds, Needham, and Gant went on to score nine illustrious wins during NASCAR’s Winston-Cup era.
Farewell, Stroker Ace.
RIP Burt Reynolds, thank you for giving us one of the all-time great #NASCAR movies. pic.twitter.com/5M7dJJN7Zw
— Xfinity Racing (@XfinityRacing) September 6, 2018
While Gant was never able to win the elusive Winston Cup title, under the stewardship of Reynolds he finished his career-best second on points in the 1984 season. Speaking of his love for American Stock Car racing, Reynolds had said back in 1981, “When Hal Needham and I put this new race car idea together, we tossed around all kinds of notions.”
“But it was obvious from the beginning that we would wind up with a stock car and that it would be a ‘bandit’,” he added. The team ended its operations in 1989 with Reynolds in charge and officially stopped functioning in 1990, with crew chief Travis Carter buying the team and renaming it to Travis Carter Enterprises.
Today, the likes of Michael Jordan are revered as a celebrity team owner who has made a meaningful difference in NASCAR. But it must be said that Reynolds was the trailblazer who set the wheels of celebrity ownership in stock car racing in motion.
Richard Petty himself aptly summarized what he meant for the sport. “He had his own signature look, style, and charisma. He made himself stand out, and the times I met him, he was as nice as a person you could meet and talk to. He will be missed by many,” Petty said when the Michigan native passed away in 2018.
Another Hollywood-NASCAR crossover is hard to come by in the modern day and age of the sport, with figures such as Reynolds often found far and beyond.
