Ned Jarrett was never a full throttle, give 'em hell kind of driver. His driving style, like his personality, was smooth and steady. Yet peel back the pages of time and watch Gentleman Ned win 15 races in 1964 and 13 in '65.
Look a little deeper and discover that in '65, Jarrett's last full season on the circuit and a year in which he won his second NASCAR driving title, he actually won two races by 22 laps each. That's right, the man actually won by 22 laps, twice.
The '60s were a fascinating era for stock car racing, a time when guys like Jarrett and Junior Johnson often won by astounding margins, racing on mostly small tracks in crossroads towns and burgeoning Southern cities that no longer host NASCAR's top stock car circuit. Jarrett and Johnson won 13 races each in '65, and their 26 combined wins made up nearly half of the season's 55 events.
Jarrett acknowledges that multi-lap wins were sometimes unappealing to fans, but often, he points out, contenders fell out of otherwise exciting races late due to mechanical problems, leaving Jarrett or some other driver to take a big win.
Thirteen different drivers won during the '65 season, but an average of just two cars were on the lead lap at the finish of the 55 races, and 14 cars on average failed to finish. And here's the kicker: Twenty-three events were won by one lap or more.
"In my days of racing, when we were seeing those multi-lap wins, you couldn't drive those cars as hard as they would run, from start to finish, like the drivers today have to do," says Jarrett. "To stay on the lead lap and stay in competition, you have to drive the car as hard as it will go, all the time. You couldn't do that back in my days of racing because a big percentage of the time you wouldn't be there at the end of the race. That's what made David Pearson and Richard Petty so successful; they knew how hard you could drive the car and expect it to be there at the end of the race."
Although the sport had changed in significant ways a decade after Jarrett retired, when Pearson and Petty were at their peaks, the so-called modern era had yet to completely envelop stock car racing. The '75 season had eight different winners, but, still, an average of just two cars were on the lead lap at the conclusion of Winston Cup's 30 races that year. The average number of DNFs had risen from 14 a decade earlier to 17. A full one-third of events were won by drivers who lapped the field, including two six-lap wins and one by seven laps.
Flash forward to the 2001 NASCAR Winston Cup season. Nineteen drivers reached Victory Lane, and five were first-time winners. An average of 18 cars were on the lead lap at the conclusion of the 36 races, as no driver won by lapping the field.
Parity clearly rules Winston Cup racing, and many are of the opinion that the sport is better and more exciting because of it.
"If you want to talk about some boring races, go back to the good-old days because there were races when Richard Petty and David Pearson would check out by three or four laps," says Jeff Burton, driver of Roush Racing's No. 99 Ford. "So the good-old days are now, make no mistake about it."
Statistically, Winston Cup racing has been building to this point for a couple of decades, with multi-lap wins becoming less common and a growing number of cars finishing races on the lead lap. Nonetheless, the extent of the sport's parity last season left many surprised, including Sterling Marlin, who has been around stock car racing's big leagues since his days as a youngster helping his dad, Coo Coo Marlin, compete in NASCAR.
"It just shows how much the competition has improved in Winston Cup racing because you never know on a given Sunday who can win the race," Marlin says. "Looking back to last year with 19 different winners, that's pretty wild because we usually have 10 to 12 guys who can win each year. To me, having 19 winners last year was a real shocker."