1,000 Greatest Drivers: Richie Evans

While most minor league NASCAR drivers are overrated, he is not.

This was to some extent hard to research because as with most of the minor league drivers from the first half of NASCAR history, the vast majority of his races have never been properly archived so it’s very difficult to determine what his actual win count is or how many wins he had per season. Even the counts that I have on my master driver list which I obtained from the Third Turn a couple years ago differ from what the Third Turn says now as apparently the official Modified tour schedules had vastly fewer races than I thought they did, so apparently most of Evans’s wins were in unsanctioned or loosely-sanctioned races that didn’t count towards the Modified championship. For a lot of these drivers, there’s more hearsay and hype than there is actual substance. I wouldn’t say this for Evans because I was able to find over 300 verified wins for him, but I would especially say this for the likes of Ralph Earnhardt, Hershel McGriff, and Red Farmer. If I ever buy Richie Evans’s biography someday, that could help me clarify this a lot better but this definitely might need tweaking. I know there are people who would say Evans was better than any Cup driver at the time. While that’s hard for me to agree with, I still gave him numerous E- seasons and he did beat Cup drivers head-to-head at times, especially when he won the 1979 and 1980 modified races at Daytona (until today, I didn’t even know there were modified races at Daytona). I thought it would be difficult to determine his best race, but when I saw that he beat Neil Bonnett, Bobby Allison, Darrell Waltrip, Harry Gant, and Geoff Bodine in that race, it actually wasn’t very hard at all. That probably wasn’t much worse than the average Cup field in 1979. I definitely acknowledge his greatness, but the recordkeeping of that era is too vague and blurry for me to have a good sense of how to evaluate his seasons. This is my best attempt.