1,000 Greatest Drivers: Terry Labonte

La-bon-tay!

If you don’t get the subtitle, I’m gently teasing the venerated race broadcaster Paul Page, who was extremely knowledgeable when it came to IndyCar racing but occasionally also announced IROC and NASCAR races in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s for ABC until they eventually gave both of those responsibilities to Bob Jenkins. Because Page was an outsider to NASCAR, he was pretty awkward when covering NASCAR races, particularly because he consistently mispronounced Terry Labonte’s last name. He certainly wasn’t the only one as Eli Gold always used to mispronounce Joe Nemechek’s name, but it stood out to me probably because Labonte was a much better driver than Nemechek, just like how Page was a much better announcer than Gold. La-bon-tay became something of an inside joke between me and some of the other people on the auto racing Discords where I post, but I don’t mean to demean Page here, who I do think was great in the IndyCar booth. I just thought it was funny.

Obviously, I have decided to write about Terry today because it is the 25th anniversary of the night Dale Earnhardt spun him out at Bristol. Although we couldn’t have known it at the time, that was pretty much Terry’s last moment of relevance in NASCAR. He did get a win and a top ten points finish in 2003, but that season was exceptionally weak and the win was exceptionally lucky, so I decided not to rate any of his years after 1999. I remember a quote that Labonte’s crew chief Andy Graves said after the race, “We got run into by two over-the-hill washed-up ex-Winston Cup champions”, the irony of course being that that was the moment when Labonte himiself became one. And while Earnhardt certainly declined from his peak after his 1996 Talladega crash, I don’t think he ever quite became over-the-hill or washed-up before his death in 2001, while Labonte was already there. Regardless, I don’t deny Labonte his legend status even though I find his ‘90s quite overrated.