The stage was the Charlotte Motor Speedway. The occasion was the NASCAR All-Star race. The prize was $200,000. And battling that out was fan favorite Darrell Waltrip and a young Rusty Wallace.
Advertisement
Waltrip had defended his lead over Wallace for 8 laps. But as the white flag was in sight, Wallace made a move with which he got the lead, yes, but he also ended up spinning out Waltrip. Wallace won the race and the big prize money.
But it was then followed by a brawl in the pits between the crew members of the two drivers and then a quote from Waltrip for the ages. “I just hope he chokes on that $200,000. That’s all I can say,” he said of Wallace, as per Speedsport, while the young driver made a case for himself, saying, “I went in that last corner for the win and I didn’t lift.”
“I went for it and I got the goddamn money.”
But Wallace’s celebration wasn’t celebrated among the fans as most of them booed the race-winner. After all, he had spun out Darrell Waltrip of all people. In fact, the situation was so dire that Wallace was assigned security guards for his house.
“They thought the fans were going to kill me that night because they were so mad at me because I spun Darrell Waltrip out,” he said.
Of course, both Waltrip and Wallace ended up becoming good friends in the years to come. But Wallace emphasized that both were “mad as hell at each other” on that night in Charlotte.
Darrell Waltrip lost out on the All-Star race in 1989, but won the Daytona 500
For most of his career, Waltrip missed out on winning the biggest race there is in NASCAR, the Daytona 500. But in 1989, he ended that dry run, and he did so in a peculiar way, using the fuel mileage.
“We decided when we went back to green with 55 to go that we were going to go for it,” Waltrip said as per FOX. “We’re going to try and stretch the fuel and see if we could make it or not because we knew no one else would.”
But panic began to seep in with 5 laps to go in Waltrip’s mind as he started to scream on the radio to his crew chief, who asked him to remain calm as they were now committed to this strategy. In the end, Darrell Waltrip crossed the finish line in the first place, winning his career’s first and only Daytona 500.
Not long after that he would lose the $200,000 to Rusty Wallace in the All-Star race, but for Daytona, he won big, both in prestige and prize.
