CONCORD, N.C. – Twice in a four-year span at Bristol Motor Speedway, Terry Labonte piloted the No. 5 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet to the white flag with a rearview mirror full of Dale Earnhardt’s legendary black No. 3.
In 1995, Labonte also took the checkers, albeit, while spinning across the front of Earnhardt’s car. In 1999, he never made it out of turn two.
So, when asking Labonte about the Last Great Coliseum, it's best to be specific.
“I always get asked about the race at Bristol and my response is always, ‘Which one?’" the 67-year-old, two-time Cup Series champion says. "(Earnhardt) won one of them, I won one of them.”
This time around, it's not his triumph he's asked about.
It likely, rarely is.
A cage-rattling move, a canceled hunting trip and a John Andretti joke
It’s Wednesday afternoon and Labonte is en route to his hometown of Corpus Christi, Texas, capping a busy week of travel. Still, he graciously fields a phone call, already knowing he’ll be asked the same questions he answered on that fateful, Tennessee night in 1999 and again every so often since Earnhardt’s second Bristol bump-and-run left his car crippled against the inside wall with the seven-time series champion cruising to victory.
On Saturday, the NASCAR Cup Series returns for the Bristol Night Race, 25 years after the moment and scene was etched into the 0.533 miles of high-banked concrete that is at the heart of NASCAR’s one, true stadium venue. And it’s also one that is preserved for eternity as much by Earnhardt’s postrace comments as the crash itself.
“Didn’t mean to really turn him around, meant to rattle his cage a little,” Earnhardt sheepishly grinned into the camera and into living rooms across the country.
Labonte was not grinning.
“It didn’t surprise me,” Labonte says. “It was like, ‘Yeah, OK, that’s Dale.’”
Nicknamed “The Iceman” for his characteristically cool demeanor, Labonte now admits that moniker may not have made it out of Bristol intact that evening had it not been for a mechanical failure.
As he sat in his race car against the fence, he waited, lying in ambush like a wolf in a rooster’s paint scheme – the yellow and red Kellogg’s Corn Flakes variety, to be exact. As Earnhardt came back around after taking the checkers, Labonte timed it out and slammed the car into reverse, intending on a T-bone revenge maneuver befitting a demolition derby and one that almost certainly would’ve sent both pit crews charging into an all-out melee.
Instead, the transmission gave way and Labonte’s car mustered only a couple inches of movement before expiring. Earnhardt cruised past, himself, the thousands in attendance and the millions watching at home none the wiser.
“I thought to myself, ‘You might be going to victory lane in that number three but the number five is going to be buried in the side of it,’” Labonte recalls with a chuckle. “People always compliment me and say, ‘Terry, you were so cool in that moment. But if that transmission wouldn’t have blown, it probably would’ve been one heck of a fight.”
There would be no physical altercations that night but the two mutually and silently canceled a planned hunting trip for later that year.
RELATED: See all of Terry Labonte's victories for Hendrick Motorsports
“We just didn’t talk about it,” Labonte says.
And they may never have talked at all. But racing has a way of encouraging the burying of hatchets. The racing gods, with an assist from John Andretti, intervened at Darlington.
“It never fails, whenever you have something like that happen … we go to Darlington the next week and (Labonte and Earnhardt are) parked in the garage beside each other,” Labonte remembers. “Then, we qualify next to each other, one in front of the other. Then we go to driver introductions, and we walk out there and I’m standing there and I turn around and there’s Dale, standing right behind me.
“John Andretti was standing between us and John looks at me, looks at Dale, and said, ‘Boy, I’m standing in the wrong place.’ We all kind of just laughed and that’s what really kind of broke the ice between us.”
A Bristol barometer for Hendrick Motorsports
When thinking about Terry Labonte and Bristol Motor Speedway, it’s difficult not to immediately think of one of his last-lap run-ins with Earnhardt.
But those two thrillers merely bookended one of the most successful stretches in the decorated history of Hendrick Motorsports and Labonte’s career.
Labonte arrived at Hendrick Motorsports in 1994, just in time for the team to finish its ascent to the pinnacle of auto racing, a perch it's held ever since current company vice chairman and NASCAR Hall of Famer Jeff Gordon gave Rick Hendrick his first Cup Series title in 1995. And the parallels between series success and speed at the half-mile Tennessee short track are striking.
Gordon won his first race at Bristol in the spring of 1995 on his way to that breakthrough championship. It was the start of a run of four straight Cup Series crowns for Hendrick Motorsports with Labonte claiming the second of his career in 1996 followed by back-to-back big trophies for Gordon in 1997 and 1998.
Certainly, the two had great race cars just about everywhere.
But maybe nowhere more so than Bristol. In that four-year window Gordon and Labonte combined for five wins, 11 top fives and 14 top 10s in 16 combined starts at the World’s Fastest Half Mile, including a pair of 1-2 finishes (spring of 1996 and 1998) with Gordon coming out on top both times.
In seven consecutive starts from the spring race in 1995 through the spring race in 1998, Labonte finished seventh, first, second, fifth, third, seventh and second. Gordon meanwhile in eight events from the spring of '95 through the fall of '98, went first, sixth, first, second, first, 35th, first and fifth. He led 188 laps before crashing in that 35th-place effort.
“It was always one of my favorite tracks. I just liked it from the first time I went there,” Labonte says. “We had a setup that worked good. It was something that we kind of hit on, I guess. When you have that, you kind of know what you need in the car, the feel you’re looking for. You always worked hard in practice to try and get what you need. You’ve got to be good at Bristol on long runs and you’ve got to be pretty good in the short run too.”
For the most part, Bristol has always been a barometer of success for Hendrick Motorsports.
In the organization’s 14 championship-winning seasons, Hendrick Motorsports drivers combined to claim nine of the company's 12 wins at Bristol with Chase Elliott adding a win in the All-Star Race during his championship campaign in 2020. Those 14 years produced 32 top-five finishes and 52 top 10s.
Counting Elliott’s All-Star win, Hendrick Motorsports has visited victory lane in Tennessee in nine of the 14 seasons in which it went on to claim a title.
The more Bristol changes, the more it stays the same
If the organization is to make it 10 out of 15, one of the four current drivers – Elliott, Kyle Larson, William Byron or Alex Bowman, who are all still alive in the NASCAR playoff hunt – will have to first find a way to prevail Saturday night.
A lot has changed at Bristol since the Earnhardt-Labonte duels. The track has been covered in resin and even dirt amid decades of rule package changes and car design overhauls.
Now, it’s Goodyear throwing the curveball to teams with a softer tire that wears quickly. Teams were caught off guard in March as the race devolved into a war of attrition and tire saving. Drivers and crew chiefs can expect the same package this weekend but whether the effect will be the same with more time to prepare and a night start time is anybody's guess.
March’s race was a polarizing one, indeed. As for Labonte, he was glued to his television in gleeful disbelief with what he saw.
“I watched the whole thing and thought to myself, ‘That was one of the best races I’ve ever seen,’” he says. “I thought it was awesome. Now, I may have been one of the only ones that thought that, but I loved it. I thought it really kind of told the story when the old guys, the veterans, knew how to take care of the car, take care of the tires and ended up at the front.”
It was a relatively successful day for the Hendrick Motorsports contingent as Bowman finished fourth, Larson fifth and Elliott eighth with the trio combining to lead 27 laps. Larson has a win in the Bristol Night Race to his credit as well, claiming the checkered flag in 2021 during a 10-win championship campaign.
“It’s still Bristol. It’s a tough, fast racetrack,” Labonte says. “It’s still hard to pass. It’s a track you have to be patient at and at other times, you’ve got to be aggressive. And it’s always easy to get caught up in someone else’s wreck.”
Labonte looks back on 40 years of Hendrick Motorsports
Should one of Hendrick Motorsports’ drivers prevail on Saturday and/or go on to give Rick Hendrick his 15th championship in 30 seasons, it will add yet another piece to the legacy of the most successful organization in NASCAR history.
Labonte is very much a part of that with his photos, race cars and trophies littered all around the Concord, North Carolina, campus. He spent 11 full-time seasons with Hendrick Motorsports, claiming 12 of his 22 career wins, one of his two championships and one of his two Bristol Night Races with the team.
But even before arriving in the mid 90’s, Labonte was there. His first career championship came with Hagan Racing in 1984, the same year Hendrick Motorsports – then a tiny one-car operation called All-Star Racing – debuted with Geoff Bodine.
Just two years later, Labonte's team switched manufacturers from Chevrolet to Oldsmobile and sold its cars to owner Hendrick. It was a move he knew immediately was a big mistake.
“I can remember when they ran their first race, when they won their first race with Bodine at Martinsville in 1984,” Labonte remembers. “I won the championship driving for Hagan Racing and in 1986 we sold all of our cars to Rick and I was so mad about it. I said, ‘We’re doing what?’ I was told, ‘We’re switching to Oldsmobile and I’ve got these five or six cars and we’re going to sell them and Hendrick Motorsports is going to buy them.’ I said, ‘That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen.
“They asked me what I would do with them and I said, ‘Park them out back. Those are great race cars and you’re going to sell them to someone who builds better engines that we can!'”
A decade later, Hendrick’s racing savvy and willingness to put forth the resources required helped Labonte reach even loftier heights in his own career. As the organization’s 40th anniversary season slowly winds to a close, it’s difficult not to think of Labonte and the part he played in pushing Hendrick Motorsports over the hump and sustaining one of the most dominant four-year spans in the history of auto racing.
Certainly, that includes the Bristol race he won. And the one he didn’t.
“It’s an amazing story, to see those guys be here for 40 years,” Labonte concludes. “I can remember over the years racing, seeing people come in and they might run a year or two and they might skip around awhile, and they might go away. But for someone to come in like Rick did, be here for 40 years and be competitive all those years and win that many championships, it’s special.”