Food City 500 - Notable Races

Notable Races

• 1968: David Pearson won after a lengthy duel with Richard Petty and Leeroy Yarbrough in a race prominently featured on the television series Car & Track.
• 1971: Pearson won after tagging James Hylton into the wall; Pearson edged Richard Petty after Petty erased a two-lap deficit.
• 1972: Mechanic (and later car owner) Junior Johnson saw the first of a plethora of Bristol wins over the ensuing two decades as Bobby Allison drove his Chevrolet to an easy win.
• 1973: Driving Junior's Chevy, Cale Yarborough led all 500 laps, a feat duplicated by Cale at Nashville in 1978 and by Jeff Burton at New Hampshire International Speedway in 2000.
• 1974: Chevrolets swept the top ten finishing spots led by Yarborough.
• 1975: Richard Petty posted only his second career Bristol win.
• 1977: Cale led all but five laps in a race where five other drivers (including Janet Guthrie) needed relief help.
• 1979: After Cale crashed out with Buddy Baker, rookie Dale Earnhardt took his first win.
• 1981: Darrell Waltrip drove Johnson's Buick and edged Ricky Rudd, who was driving Waltrip's former car, the DiGard Racing Oldsmobile. Joe Millikan got into a wreck with Benny Parsons and said, "I lost my cool," to which car owner Bud Moore vowed, "I'll straighten out Millikan's cool."
• 1984: Waltrip posted his seventh straight Bristol win and the eighth straight for Junior Johnson.
• 1986: Rusty Wallace posted his first career win.
• 1989: Wallace survived a chaotic race with multiple crashes and a wildcard victory bid by Greg Sacks.
• 1990: A spirited event ended in a wild finish; Sterling Marlin was spun out by Ricky Rudd on the final lap while Davey Allison held off a last-lap charge from Mark Martin to win by inches.
• 1991: Grasping for a solution to pit road crashes emminating from numerous incidents in 1990 (and never considering revoking the pit closure rule that was the ultimate cause), NASCAR had banned tire changes under yellow; for Bristol this was replaced with staggering of pitstops based on qualifying line - all "odd" cars (qualified first, third, etc.) would pit first under yellow while "even" cars would pit a lap later; the cars were denoted "odd" and "even" with stickers on their windshields after qualifying; restarts would be double-file based on "odd" and "even" stickered cars. More "even" cars wound up in contention, and this created chaos. Rusty Wallace was able to pass cars under caution to move into his proper restart line, and this helped him come back from two laps down on two separate occasions. The lead changed 41 times, a short track record, as Wallace edged Ernie Irvan at the finish. Sterling Marlin suffered burns in a fiery melee and needed relief help in subsequent weeks from Charlie Glotzbach.
• 1993: Wallace dominated days after defending race (and series) champion Alan Kulwicki died in a plane crash.
• 1994: An ill-timed yellow trapped Geoff Bodine a lap down and put Dale Earnhardt into the lead en route to the win. Bodine had begun dominating the race in the car former owned by Kulwicki and running Hoosier Tires; with the Hoosiers Bodine was able to skip tire changes that Goodyear-shod cars had to make.
• 1995: Jeff Gordon took the win, his third in the season's first six races; the race saw notable performances resulting in top-five finishes for Darrell Waltrip and Bobby Hamilton.
• 1997: Gordon punted Rusty Wallace sideways on the final lap for the win.
• 1999: Wallace ran away at the end, while John Andretti rallied to finish fourth; Andretti's Petty Enterprises Pontiac was impounded after the race as NASCAR had a disagreement with the engine's compression ratio; the engine, though, cleared on reinspection.
• 2000: Rusty Wallace scores his 50th Sprint Cup win.
• 2001: Elliott Sadler edged Andretti for his first win, and the first 1-2 finish for the Wood Brothers and Petty Enterprises since 1977.
• 2002: With NASCAR running high downforce on the cars via big rear spoiler and low airdam clearance, and running very hard tires, Kurt Busch pitted on Lap 325 and never visited the pits again as he edged Jimmy Spencer for the win, his first in Winston Cup. Rusty Wallace was incensed at the manner with which Busch won the race (by not pitting when others did and thus winning on old tires with no drop in speed) enough that he lobbied NASCAR to cut downforce and go to softer tires in later years to force pitstops.
• 2005: Slight contact between Bobby Hamilton Jr. and Ken Schrader on lap 332 triggers a 14-car wreck much like those seen at Daytona and Talladega. While Kevin Harvick wins, 22nd-place Bobby Labonte finishes 32 laps down, something rarely seen since the increasing level of competition beginning around 1990.
• 2007: The Car of Tomorrow debuted. After Joe Gibbs Racing dominated the race Kyle Busch drove a Hendrick Chevy to the win, then pointedly ripped the poor handling and raceability of the COT in victory lane.
• 2008 Dale Jarret's last race.
• 2010: Jimmie Johnson finally conquers Bristol by winning there for the first time, and scores his 50th Sprint Cup win.
• 2011: After track president Jeff Byrd's death in late 2010, Food City and Bristol Motor Speedway agree to name the race in memory of Byrd in a one year only deal.