1,000 Greatest Drivers: Davey Allison

His early tenure at Yates is wilder than you likely realize.

I hardly had the heart to get this done, but I did so. I visited my mom in the rehab center again and while she drank some ginger ale and water that I brought her, she refused to eat her lunch, has almost entirely lost her appetite, and is now rarely speaking, although she definitely still hasn’t lost the ability to speak. I mostly sat with her silently holding her hand and stuff and I was definitely bawling at times, although I have been continuing to read both her missal and a biography of Leonard Cohen that she wanted me to read to her. It was probably not advisable for me to go down there today because we’ve had our snowiest winter in a long time, the sidewalks were only partially plowed, and the visibility was low due to probably around a foot or so of snow in the last day or two on top of the large amount we already had, but I needed to see her. And I was told that she was entered into long-term care on February 5 and Medicaid will take all but $50 out of her bank account starting in March. She can still cover her home equity line of credit for that month, but I don’t know about any future months so I’ve got to scrape up enough money from my RotoBaller gig and the Substack and my data entry work for Shane Holmes to cover the housing loan, her life insurance, and her credit cards, although the credit cards are obviously the lowest priority. I got turned down for Temporary Assistance because I was making too much money even though I was making less than my mom made from her own Social Security. I probably wouldn’t have restarted the Substack so quickly if I didn’t need to increase my income quickly. And it really sucks that I need to clean out her hoarding when we have almost five feet of snow outside for her ever to be allowed to come back home where I think she’d be happier and healthier, although I did finally return the dumpster and I have thrown out a lot of stuff, but not nearly enough…

In the past, I have been sharply critical of Davey Allison mainly as a reaction to the overblown narratives of what a lot of fans thought he would have done had he lived. I called him overrated primarily because he was a dominant superspeedway driver but seemed to back into most of his wins on all other track types and also because he got a top-tier ride from day one at age 26 when almost none of his contemporaries got top-tier rides that early or that young, which I think inflated Allison’s record to some extent, but I’ve started to think I overstated my case as I’ve learned more about the early years of Yates before Larry McReynolds got there and it was a total mess. I was primarily critical of Allison for his 1989 and 1990 seasons (particularly the fact that he finished 13th in points in 1990 even though he had a faster car than Mark Martin who finished 2nd, as the #6 team literally borrowed a car from the #28 team for the Atlanta race). However, now that I have read that his 1988-1989 crew chief Tony Price resigned from Yates after immigration agents started investigting him and also realizing that Yates himself filled in as interim crew chief before Davey actually threatened to leave the team unless Yates got a “real crew chief”, I’m feeling a bit more warmly towards those seasons and I understand more fully why he underachieved the speed of his cars. I’ve never seen anyone ever mention the Tony Price stuff (there’s barely even an online record indicating that he was Davey’s crew chief) and it surprises me that that story has never really gotten any attention in a Scene Vault or nascarman video or something. Nonetheless, after reading all that, I fully renounce anything I said about him being overrated in the past, but I still think other non-champions were better.