The 1973 Talladega 500 was an eerie race by many accounts. Larry Smith, the 1972 Winston Cup Series Rookie of the Year, suffered an early crash and was pronounced dead upon arriving at the infield care center. Laps later, Bobby Isaac drove his car to the pit road in the middle of the race and got down to walk home. The reasoning for the second occurrence is as supernatural as it gets.
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The Hall of Fame driver had mentioned to people close to him that he heard voices that were asking him to quit the race. He also later told his wife that the voice had also told him that he must retire from racing altogether.
Completely shaken, Isaac did just that. A lot of people today attribute the strangeness to the legend that the superspeedway sits on an ancient native American burial ground.
Buddy Baker, who finished that race in second place, said in an interview years later, “He said voices told him to get out of the car. That wasn’t like him at all. I don’t know what the problem was. Maybe he just decided that was it. I know if I heard someone tell me something in a race car, I’d look to see who was in there with me. But when you hear that, it’s time to quit.”
Isaac did not secure a victory that season. He eventually returned to racing in 1974 and ran 19 times over three years but never reached victory lane.
The voice that he heard could have been a premonition of sorts. This was all but confirmed when he collapsed getting out of his car after an event at the Hickory Motor Speedway in 1977 and died of a heart attack the next morning.
A brief look at the iconic career of Bobby Isaac
The Catawba native ran 308 Cup Series races over 14 years. He won 37 of them and was crowned as the 1970 Grand National Series champion. He holds the record for the most poles in a single season with 20 and also won the Most Popular Driver Award in 1969. The major part of his recognition came after he passed.
Isaac was inducted into the NMPA Hall of Fame in 1979, the International Motorsports Hall of Fame in 1996, and the NASCAR Hall of Fame in 2016.
He was named as one of NASCAR’s 75 Greatest Drivers in 2023. Coming back to the day of his panicked retirement, there are others who believe that it was the death of Smith that rattled him.
However, it is interesting that Isaac did not know of his fellow driver’s fate until and after he’d got out of his car. A case could be made for all this to be supernatural, but the more logical explanation is that the driver was hallucinating due to exhaustion.
