1,000 Greatest Drivers: Bobby Allison
His outsized impact on teams easily compensates for only winning one title.
I probably worked harder on this entry than any of the other ones as I really wanted to do him justice since he just recently passed away. Trying to summarize Allison’s long, successful, and very complicated career into my usual 500 words is probably a fool’s errand, like trying to make a 1.5 hour movie about Infinite Jest. There was no way I could cover every single team transaction for him like I would normally want to do because there was so much to cover. I ended up having to cut out any mention of his owner-driver stints or even the fact that he owned a team at all, but I feel everything I included was more important. In the text, I didn’t really have room to explain why I don’t hold Allison only winning one title against him, but it should be pretty obvious. He simply didn’t stay at any one team long enough to build up the chemistry to maximize the chances for championships, and he had a lot of dumb luck and bad breaks in his career, like building up the Richard Howard/Junior Johnson team and allowing Cale Yarborough to coast off what he built to win three straight titles. It’s also easy to imagine Allison winning the same two titles at Holman-Moody that Pearson did since Allison tended to outperform Pearson when he was there. Although he didn’t deserve the 1970 title in any way, according to the Greg Fielden book I own, he would have won it if he finished 25th or better out of 26 cars in this race at Richmond (so it’s basically his version of Mark Martin’s 1990). He lost the 1982 title mainly because of three straight engine failures. Change a few things and he could easily have five championships, but nobody talks about him as a goat candidate anymore, when considering all the adversity he faced they really should. In fact, I tend to see more people arguing that Davey would have matched him had he lived, which I don’t agree with at all. His career seems weirdly undervalued, but I’m not sure I had enough room in the text to describe my case mainly because there were so much career details to cover. This was my best attempt.
Oh, and the driver ratings for drivers who peaked in the ‘70s and ‘80s are almost entirely meaningless and most of the time I don’t even want to report them.
