1978 World 600

1978 World 600

Race details
Race 12 of 30 in the 1978 NASCAR Winston Cup Series season
Map of Charlotte Motor Speedway
Date	May 28, 1978 (1978-May-28)
Location	Charlotte Motor Speedway (Concord, North Carolina)
Course	Permanent racing facility 1.500 mi (2.414 km)
Distance	400 laps, 600 mi (965 km)
Weather	Temperatures reaching up to 84.9 °F (29.4 °C); wind speeds up to 8 miles per hour (13 km/h)[1]
Average speed	138.355 miles per hour (222.661 km/h)
Pole position
Driver	David Pearson	Wood Brothers Racing
Most laps led
Driver	Darrell Waltrip	DiGard Motorsports
Laps	144
Winner
No. 88	Darrell Waltrip	DiGard Motorsports
Television in the United States
Network	CBS
Announcers	Ken Squier

The 1978 World 600 was a NASCAR Winston Cup Series racing event that took place on May 28, 1978, at Charlotte Motor Speedway in the American community of Concord, North Carolina.

By 1980, NASCAR had completely stopped tracking the year model of all the vehicles and most teams did not take stock cars to the track under their own power anymore.

Summary

Zsa Zsa Gabor served as the celebrity grand marshal; sharing time in the spotlight with NASCAR team owner Robert Yates and Buddy Parrott. There were 40 drivers on the starting grid; all of them were born in the United States of America. A live audience of 125,000 enthusiastic NASCAR fans would see a total of 43 changes in the first-place position along with 32 laps under a caution flag. The entire race from green flag to checkered flag lasted for four hours and twenty minutes.

During the first 100 laps of this 400-lap extravaganza, David Pearson, Darrell Waltrip, and Donnie Allison were fighting it out for the lead. The final laps would become a constant battle between Donnie Allison, Darrell Waltrip, and Benny Parsons for the first-place finish. Waltrip would eventually defeat Donnie Allison by a time of two seconds on a stopwatch in his 1978 Chevrolet Monte Carlo vehicle. Joining him on victory lane would be his wife Stevie. As a couple, they embraced each other to the admiring fans; who were unaware that Darrell Waltrip would become a championship performer during the 1980s. Jerry Jolly would acquire the last-place finish in the race due to problems with his suspension on lap 20. The lowest driver to actually finish the race was D.K. Ulrich.^[2]

After the race, Cale Yarborough would only be 30 points behind Benny Parsons in the overall championship standings. The number of points for Dale Earnhardt and Ron Hutcherson were never recorded into the NASCAR data banks for future storage.^[2] The entire prize purse for this race was $310,491 ($1,122,678.43 when adjusted for inflation); Waltrip received a then-incredible amount of $48,608 to take home to his family ($175,757.6 when adjusted for inflation) while Jerry Jolly had to take home a meager $1,090 ($3,941.24 when adjusted for inflation).^[3] Roland Wlodyka would end his professional driving career with the NASCAR Cup Series after the end of this racing event.^[4]

Racial controversy

Willy T. Ribbs was expected to be at this NASCAR Cup Series event being one of the greatest African-American race car drivers of all time. After failing to appear at two special practice sessions, he was sacked and replaced with then-obscure driver Dale Earnhardt; who back then specialized in short track racing and was not yet a serious championship contender.^[5] A lot of traditionalists chided the opportunities that Ribbs received; getting into the higher levels of NASCAR simply because he was black.^[6]

28 years later, the breakout success of former Formula One driver Juan Pablo Montoya would become just as controversial to traditional NASCAR fans as Ribbs' antics that occurred around the 1978 World 600. He was basically promoted from the Busch Series in 2006 in time to compete at the 2006 Ford 400 simply because he was Hispanic and born outside of the United States. Montoya's maiden venture into the highest level of professional stock car racing would end after getting in contact with Indiana-born Ryan Newman and crashing his Dodge Avenger on lap 251 of the race; finishing the race in 34th place and his car in flames.^[7] With his first top-ten finish at the 2007 Kobalt Tools 500, Montoya would take the skills that he would learn on foreign road courses and apply them to the mostly oval tracks of the NASCAR Cup Series schedule.^[8] His experience in Formula One racing, however, didn't transfer over into the final races of the NASCAR Cup Series season; where he developed a reputation for finishing poorly.^[9]

On September 16, 2013, it was announced that for the 2014 racing season Montoya would compete in the IndyCar Series, ending the 7-year-long racial controversy that has affected the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series.^[10] American-born driver Kyle Larson took over the #42 machine for the 2014 NASCAR Cup Series season.^[11] In the 2014 Daytona 500, Larson was spun in turn 4 from contact with Austin Dillon; causing major damage to several more cars including Marcos Ambrose, Kasey Kahne, Michael Annett, Jamie McMurray, Brian Scott, and Casey Mears.

Finishing order

* Driver failed to finish race

References