tool name
closeGrass-kickin'
Dale Earnhardt’s 1987 ‘Pass in the Grass’
a stunning moment in NASCAR chronicles
DAVID POOLE / The Charlotte Observer
Thursday, May. 17, 2007
Barney Hall was speechless.
This was a problem, of course, because at the time Hall was doing play-by-play for the Motor Racing Network at the 1987 running of The Winston.
Dale Earnhardt and Bill Elliott were battling in the final segment of the third annual edition of NASCAR’s all-star event, coming through the trioval at Lowe’s Motor Speedway.
“I was on the microphone, and I have listened back to the broadcast,” Hall said. “When it happened, there was dead silence. I was right in the middle of a sentence, but I just quit talking because I was watching. I just absolutely couldn’t believe what I was seeing.”
Dale Earnhardt Jr. was in awe.
“I was about 12, so I guess I was really too young to understand the impact it had on the sport,” he said. “But I knew it was awesome. I knew what I was seeing.”
H.A. “Humpy” Wheeler was positively giddy.
“It was the greatest save in NASCAR history, and maybe the greatest in all of motorsports,” the Lowe’s Motor Speedway president said. “Nobody has ever gotten a car that far sideways and saved it.”
Twenty years ago this week, Earnhardt’s legend and the mythology of what’s now called the NASCAR Nextel All-Star challenge galvanized in one remarkable moment.
The Pass in the Grass.
Half skill, half luck
First, and by now most race fans know this, there was no pass.
Earnhardt’s No. 3 Chevrolet, then carrying the blue and yellow colors of the Wrangler sponsorship that predated the black GM Goodwrench paint scheme, was leading when it ran off the asphalt.
What makes the moment so memorable, of course, is that Earnhardt was also leading when he drove back onto the pavement after skittering for about 150 yards across the infield grass, having been crowded down there by Elliott’s No. 9 Ford.
“I’ve always said it was about 50 percent skill and 50 percent luck,” Hall says.
The race was being televised by ABC Sports, and legendary sportscaster Keith Jackson was calling it. Jackson knew a lot more about college football than he ever did about stock-car racing, but he also knew what he was seeing was something unusual.
“In-CRED-ible!” Jackson said as Earnhardt got his car pointed toward Turn 1.
Frozen moment
A young artist named Garry Hill had been commissioned by Winston to make a commemorative painting of the key moment of The Winston in 1987.
“I was standing down toward the Turn 1 end of the track, sort of looking back up pit road,” said Hill, who lives in Mooresville. “Dale got off in the grass, and then he was back on the track and it was like, ‘How did he not wreck?’
Later, when Hill was working on the piece that became the first of an ongoing series of all-star paintings, he had photographs of the Earnhardt and Elliott cars to use to reproduce the correct logos and decals.
Hill, however, had only his mind’s eye to recall the actual event. Hall, the longtime voice of NASCAR on radio, apparently wasn’t the only one who froze in disbelief. As far as anyone knows, nobody got a still photograph of one of the sport’s signature moments.
Spicing up the race
The all-star race began in 1985.
First place was $200,000, and no NASCAR race had ever paid that much. Darrell Waltrip won at Charlotte, passing Harry Gant on the final lap and then blowing the engine in his Junior Johnson-owned Chevrolet after crossing the finish line.
The next year, NASCAR moved the race to Mother’s Day weekend and to Atlanta Motor Speedway. Tickets sales were, to be kind, slow. Elliott’s car, however, was fast. He led all but one lap and, quite honestly, the all-star race was almost a failed two-year experiment.
R.J. Reynolds officials met with NASCAR and the folks at Lowe’s Motor Speedway, which got the race back for 1987. Something had to be done to spice things up.
The 1986 race had only 10 cars – nine winners from the previous year and Geoffrey Bodine, who was the highest person in points who didn’t win in 1985. For 1987, a minimum field of 20 was set, with the most recent 19 winners plus the winner of a preliminary for the other teams.
For the first time, the race was also broken into segments. The field would run 70 laps, then 50 and then a dramatic 10-lap dash for the $200,000 top prize.
Elliott, however, did everything he could to make it all those changes moot. He dominated the first segment, then led all 50 laps in the second.
Then, things got completely crazy.
‘The race was on’
The rules stipulated that only green-flag laps counted in the 10-lap final segment.
Elliott, by virtue of winning the second segment, was on the pole. Bodine was outside of him for the double-file restart. Kyle Petty, driving the Wood Brothers Ford, was third with Earnhardt beside him.
Bodine knew the best way to take the lead from Elliott would be to do it on the start. As it turned out, he got a little unexpected help.
“The caution car turned off at the last minute,” Elliott said. “It was in my way when the green flag dropped and Bodine beat me to Turn 1.”
Bodine tried to get to the low lane to solidify his hold on the lead. “When he tried to cut down, Earnhardt and I got together and Bodine spun,” Elliott said. Elliott checked up momentarily to save his car, and Earnhardt zipped inside to take the lead.
“From then on,” Elliott said, “the race was on.”
Bodine kept his car off the wall. He came to pit road to get fresh tires for the restart.
“I pushed my radio button and asked who ran into me,” Bodine said. “(Team owner) Rick Hendrick said, ‘Earnhardt.’ I was seeing blue and yellow. I was on a mission.”
As the field formed up again, Earnhardt was now to Elliott’s inside on Row 1. Elliott said every time he tried to take the lead, Earnhardt blocked the move.
Bodine had restarted at the rear of the field. He was mad at Earnhardt, even though it had actually been Elliott who’d hit him. Elliott was now mad at Earnhardt, too.
Earnhardt? He was leading.
‘That was a slick move’
Elliott got a run coming off Turn 4, and this time, he wasn’t going to let Earnhardt cut off his momentum.
“The way the trioval is shaped at Charlotte, you can give a guy the inside or not,” Elliott said. “If you want to cut the corner, you can.
“I was already up to his left-rear wheel when he turned left to try to cut me off. Instead, it turned him into the grass. I tried to give him the benefit of the doubt, but from then on, he was ticked off because it looked like I was trying to spin him, which I wasn’t.”
Racing tires aren’t meant to grip grass. Earnhardt chose not to care.
“He never lifted,” Hall says. “That’s what blew my mind. If anybody else had hit the grass, he probably would have cut the wheel. Earnhardt just let the car keep going straight.
"That’s what saved him. When I saw him after the race, Earnhardt said, ‘That was a slick move, wasn’t it?' ’”
Hall finally managed to start talking again, calling a race that still had seven laps to go. Earnhardt had fended off Elliott with a miraculous save, but that didn’t change the fact that Elliott still had a fast car.
On the next lap, Earnhardt took the inside line off Turn 2. Elliott said he knew what Earnhardt was planning for the next turn at the 1.5-mile track.
“I tried to stay square with him instead of giving him the opportunity to get into my left rear,” Elliott said. “I knew he was going to spin me. He didn’t pull over and let you by for any good reason.”
Earnhardt crowded Elliott’s Ford toward the outside wall. Earnhardt maintained he never touched Elliott, but Elliott cut a left-rear tire and always said he cut it because Earnhardt crumpled in his left-rear fender. Either way, Elliott had to make a pit stop.
Earnhardt led the rest of the way. Terry Labonte finished second. Tim Richmond, running for the first time in 1987 after missing the first few months of the season because of illness, was third. Bodine rallied back to fourth.
Elliott finished 14th.
“Had the last segment started like it should have,” Elliott said, “they wouldn’t have known which way I went.”
Elliott: We were robbed
The race was over, but Bodine was still mad.
“We crossed the finish line and I body-slammed him,” Bodine said. “Rick came on the radio and said, ‘No. It was Elliott. It was Bill Elliott who hit you.’ ”
Bodine said from that point on any gesturing NASCAR officials might have seen him make were efforts to congratulate Earnhardt.
“They didn’t buy it,” Bodine said.
Elliott wasn’t done, either. He blocked Earnhardt’s car in the exit of Turn 1, then turned into the No. 3 Chevrolet on the backstretch. Elliott turned his car toward Earnhardt’s again as they came back to pit road. Their crews, who’d been side-by-side on the pit lane, were shaking fists and slinging verbal salvos, too.
“That is probably the maddest I’ve ever been in my career,” Elliott said. “I waited for him on the backstretch and gave him a love tap, because I was fed up with his crap. He bent the fenders on my race car, and I had to go back and fix it. I was tired of it. This was as far as he was going to push me.”
Elliott said he later told Winston Cup director Dick Beaty that Earnhardt “had just stolen $200,000 from my race team.”
Fines all around
One week after The Winston, Cup teams would return to the Charlotte track for the Coca-Cola 600. NASCAR wasn’t about to put up with any more shenanigans, so Earnhardt and Elliott were fined $2,500 and placed under $7,500 bonds that would be returned over the next seven races, provided there were no further incidents.
Bodine was fined $1,000 and had a $4,000 bond for the next four races.
The penalties were announced at a news conference, which was well-attended.
“It’s just too bad we didn’t have more tickets to sell that week,” Wheeler said. “We didn’t have as many seats then as we do now.”
Large billboards sporting the faces of Earnhardt and Elliott that were used in the all-star prerace show were displayed at the track during 600 week. They were vandalized, with someone splashing paint all over them.
For the record, no receipt with Wheeler’s name for the purchase of that paint has ever been located.
