BILL ELLIOTT BY THE NUMBERS
NASCAR major-circuit starts: 828
Seasons: 37
Victories: 44
Top-5 finishes: 175
Top-10 finishes: 320
Career earnings: $46.3 million
Laps run: 238,924
Miles run: 309,147
Laps lead: 11,413
Poles: 55
Average start: 14.9
Average finish: 16.4
Source: Racing-reference.info
BILL ELLIOTT TIMELINE
Feb. 29, 1976: First Winston Cup Race, Darlington (finished 33rd)
Feb. 19, 1978: First Daytona 500 (finished ninth)
Nov. 20, 1983: First victory, Riverside, Calif.
Feb. 17, 1985: Wins Daytona 500
May 5, 1985: Wins Winston 500 at Talladega, coming from two laps down after repairing a broken oil fitting.
Sept. 1, 1985: Wins Southern 500 at Darlington and with it the first Winston Million bonus. First NASCAR driver to appear on cover of "Sports Illustrated." He won 11 races that year, but lost the series championship to Darrell Waltrip.
May 1, 1987: Sets fastest one-lap qualifying speed record at Talladega (212.809).
1988 season: Wins his first and only Winston Cup Series championship, with six victories including first short-track victory (Bristol).
1991 season: With Coors sponsorship gone, Elliott leaves family-based Melling racing and joins Junior Johnson. Won six times with Johnson in four seasons.
1995 season: Begins own team, assuming sole ownership a year later.
2001 season: Following winless struggles on his own ("'98 was mediocre and '99 went in the toilet," he said), joins Evernham Motorsports. Wins for the first time since 1994 (Atlanta Penzoil Freedom 400).
2003 season: Withdraws his name from consideration for "Most Popular Driver" Award, having won the fan vote 16 times.
Nov. 9, 2003: Wins 44th and final race, at Rockingham
July 7, 2003: Runs last race, Coke Zero 400 at Daytona, crashes, finishes 37th
When they bring Bill Elliott out of the hills and hollows of North Georgia and put him on display in the NASCAR Hall of Fame Friday, more than a slow-talking, reluctant celebrity of speed will be inducted that night.
So much of that ceremony in Charlotte, N.C., will belong to the Elliott family tree and the small town in which it was rooted. And in celebrating the whole of his story, stock car racing can allow itself a wistful backward glance at the vanishing humbleness of a sport that has scrubbed the grease from beneath its nails, gotten itself a manicure and bought a nice corporate suit.
Elliott, 59, never can be separated from his origins. One of the great, lyrical nicknames in sport — “Awesome Bill from Dawsonville” — took care of that.
“Most definitely, “ he said, when asked if Friday won’t be as much about family and about place as about himself. “They all were so much a part of what we did early on, they definitely were the reason I’m in this Hall of Fame.”
When Elliott won the first of his first of 44 big-league races — in distant Riverside, Calif. in late 1983 — Dawsonville threw him a parade around the courthouse on his return. Local drivers brought their heaps and turned a slow, loud lap in the wake of the high school marching band.
The Elliott brothers — driver Bill, engine-builder Ernie, gear-man and tire-changer Dan — weren’t certain what to make of the fuss at first.
“Knowing Ernie, I don’t think he was too happy there was a parade because it took away from the time you need to be working on the cars and getting ready for Daytona,” Dan said. “At the time you didn’t think much of it, but today you think how much you appreciate what the people did.”
Thenceforth, whenever Elliott won a race, or even earned the pole, Gordon Pirkle sounded a siren he eventually mounted atop his eatery in the heart of town, the Dawsonville Pool Room. That thing blew up a storm during Elliott’s peak, especially when he won one-quarter of his career races in a single season (11 in 1985).
“All the talk in Dawsonville in the ’80s and ’90s, everywhere you went, it was about Bill Elliott and the Elliott family,” Pirkle said.
“And,” he said, “You couldn’t say Bill Elliott on the TV without saying Dawsonville. His hometown got mentioned more than any other driver I’ve ever known. “
The original siren — pronounced “sigh-REEN” in these parts — rests in the Charlotte hall. Pirkle replaced it with another, and it blared again this past season when Bill’s 18-year-old son, Chase, became the youngest champion ever of a NASCAR series. Chase won three times on the Triple A-level Nationwide (now Xfinity) Series on the way to a points title.
It had been so long since between siren blasts that a few startled residents, new and old, called the town police when Pirkle revived the tradition. Was it a tornado? An attack? No, just another Elliott going faster than the rest. A real blast from the past.
In their family blood
The Elliott brothers can trace their presence in Dawsonville back to the mid-1800s. They trace the fascination with automotive excess to their daddy, George.
In his time, very fast cars, wrapped often in the disguise of a rust bucket, ruled his back-country roads. They were the property of the home-brewed-alcohol entrepreneurs of the day, whose runs to Atlanta and back required outlaw speed. Those cars fired George’s imagination.
That wasn’t limited to his generation. Dan, when recently flipping through the pages of a Dawson County heritage book he found at a flea market, was drawn to the story of one Bobby Ray Darnell. Bobby Ray died in 1958, so the tale went, in a crash while delivering a load of moonshine to Marietta in his 1950 Ford with an early Corvette engine. There being no church large enough to hold the crowd of mourners, the funeral had to be held in the high school auditorium.
George Elliott channeled his native resourcefulness through a variety of legal enterprises. A feed mill, a building-supply store, a Ford dealership, a salvage yard, some real estate. These businesses supported his one overarching pleasure: to go racing.
It was a family obsession, and it was determined early that Bill would be the one behind the wheel. Dan and Ernie drove some, but it was the youngest brother who had the gift. “He was level-headed; he was pretty much a natural at it,” Ernie said.
He was the Elliott capable of taking a car to the very edge of calamity — still holding the one-lap Sprint Cup (the Winston Cup) record of 212.809 mph at pre-restrictor plate Talladega. They had run even faster in testing, at more than 216 mph. He never looked or sounded like taking a car to the brink made his heart beat even a tick faster, but Elliott says today: “You got them butterflies, and they were more like buzzards.”
With his brothers’ machinery, he was the Elliott who came from nearly two laps down — turning laps nearly 5 mph faster than the field — to win at Talladega in 1985. The same Elliott who won in Atlanta earlier that year just two weeks after suffering a broken leg.
Producing records and building an indisputable Hall of Fame biography would have been outlandish dreams when the Elliotts started racing. They didn’t come from a time or place that produced overnight sensations. Before attracting some sustaining patronage from Michigan businessman Harry Melling and landing Coors as a big sponsor, the Elliotts spent six years (1976-81) running a part-time schedule, siphoning money from the car dealership in order to scratch the racing itch. “The mentality was: If I got money in my pocket, I’m going racing,” Dan said.
What kept the family going over that period? “Not knowing any better,” Bill said. “I think my dad really kind of drove us to do it. We just felt like it was a good thing to do, a good place to be. We were just trying everything we could to be a part of it.”
“We were three stubborn kids raised by two stubborn parents,” Dan said.
Transition period
Later in his career, Bill would go off and race for others — Junior Johnson, Ray Evernham — but his greatest successes were born in partnership with his brothers. Together they built the team that won the 11 races in 1985, and a then-unheard of million-dollar bonus for winning three of the four major races. Two years later, as the team became more competitive on the short tracks, they won their single series championship.
In the process, Elliott became a sort of reticent folk hero. Bill and Ernie squinted and squirmed in the harsh light of fame. They had little use for anything that didn’t result in their car going faster. But their story of building this powerful race team out of their own garage, well away from center of power in the Charlotte area was irresistible. The working class always recognizes one of its own.
“And you know where the biggest fan base came from?” Dan posed. “During the heyday of the fan club the biggest membership was from Pennsylvania. Go figure. I guess we were entertaining.”
“That was our time in history, and it worked really good,” Ernie said. “Bill and I discuss this all the time. For me personally I was able to participate in a sport that I loved in the best time there ever was.”
The family’s shop still stands outside Dawsonville, off a stretch of Georgia 183 known as the Elliott Family Parkway. Ernie, however, leases his portion to others while contemplating spending more of his time in Montana. Dan putters in another building — a visitor recently found him working on a transmission project for a friend overseas. Bill jokes that he is now known mostly as “Chase’s Dad.”
Their best moments are now the property of museums, both in Dawsonville and Charlotte.
Chase, however, may be pumping new life into the family name. He has the combination of driving skill and an easy relationship with the camera that plays so well in today’s racing. “That (latter quality) is a part I struggled with because back then you had nobody to teach you the things you needed to know,” Bill said. “We’ve been through so much, so there are a lot of things I can help him through. I had no one who could help me through it.”
By Chase’s hand, the Elliott story is undergoing a major revision. He is a champion at 18. He already is in the fold of the most powerful team around — part of the Hendrick Motorsports stable of drivers. The future spreads out before him like a smooth two-lane blacktop, with no posted speed limit.
The Dawsonville siren will still sound for an Elliott, even if it signals a changed and never-so-humble-again era.
