Racing at Talladega is like a lot of things. It evolved to what it is. It didn’t happen overnight. It’s like watching a baby grow. When you’re with it every day, you don’t notice that it’s grown, but if you come back and see it a year later, you think, “Oh my God, that kid has grown a ton.”
Go back to 1985, when Bill Elliott made up two laps. Nobody said that was a great race. Cale Yarborough and I were running first and second at that time, and we were running five mph slower than Elliott.
People remember him coming back and winning that race. People remember the finishes, but I don’t think a lot of people remember the racing part of it. We romanticize the old races a lot of times, and that’s part of it, too.
There have been some great races at Talladega, like Ronnie Bouchard winning that thing for the first time (in 1981), making that move at the end. It always seems to come down to the end, but now there seems to be a big crash at the end.
We got to this point in a lot of ways — through restrictor plates, the aero advancements, the cars, the rules and how they’ve evolved to create parity. Everybody runs the same speed. Nobody can get away from anybody. It’s not like it used to be.
There are a lot of little things that got us to this point, and I don’t think you can take them away. I don’t think you can take the plates away or take the aero away. That would be just going back in time, and I’m not sure that’s the place you need to be with the sport.
And while all that was going on, the drivers changed … and the way the drivers approach the race. They can run as hard as they want to or as easy as they want to and still be able to stay in the draft. They don’t have to worry about their equipment breaking because it’s so much better than it was years ago. It’s just a different kind of racing.
I hear so many people say they should knock the banking out of Daytona and Talladega. Why should you change the race track because it’s the only constant that’s been there for 60 years? You change the car.
We didn’t change the football field or the ball. In our sport the field stays the same, but we keep changing the ball. The cars are constantly evolving. Does that make the playing field obsolete? In golf, the technology they have today has changed the way they play the golf courses.
Racing is more of an engineering sport than a mechanical sport. There’s not a magical bullet to fix it. There was not a magical bullet that killed what people remember. There are a lot of little bitty things stacked on top of each other that created what we have today.
