“Honestly, I worked with a lot of talented race car drivers – Davey Allison, Dale Jarrett, Ernie Irvan and obviously, Dale Earnhardt – and I’ve watched a lot of talented drivers but there’s just no telling what Tim Richmond could’ve done. I don’t want to take anything away from Jimmie Johnson or Jeff Gordon or anybody else, but I’m telling you, Tim Richmond had to be the most talented race car driver in terms of raw talent that I’ve ever seen in my entire racing career.”
Larry McReynolds, FOX NASCAR analyst and former crew chief
Editor’s note: This is the seventh in a 40-part series highlighting 40 of the greatest wins in the history of Hendrick Motorsports to finish its 40th anniversary season. A new installment will be released each day from Nov. 22, 2024 through New Year’s Eve. Votes were taken from Hendrick Motorsports employees as well as representatives of the NASCAR Hall of Fame and Racing Insights with all unanimous selections being ushered in automatically. The remaining wins were deliberated and decided upon by a small panel.
CONCORD, N.C. - In the years that have followed Tim Richmond's untimely death in 1989, tales of his racing prowess and larger-than-life, off-track personality have elevated him to folk hero status within the NASCAR community.
Even today, a look around a race-day crowd is sure to reveal a few Tim Richmond t-shirts.
His speed in a race car and "Hollywood" persona was enough to loosely inspire the character of Cole Trickle, played by Tom Cruise in the movie, "Days of Thunder". And though, unfortunately, Richmond's rocket ride into the highest stratosphere of stock car racing came without a storybook ending, his legend lives on through some grainy VHS recordings preserved on YouTube and the stories of those who were there.
That includes Larry McReynolds, a long-time crew chief and NASCAR analyst for FOX since 2001. McReynolds worked on teams for which Richmond drove in both 1981 and 1983. And even with over 40 years in NASCAR under his belt on pit crews, atop the pit box and in the broadcast booth, McReynolds maintains that went it comes to simple ability, Richmond should remain near the top of any list.
“Honestly, I worked with a lot of talented race car drivers – Davey Allison, Dale Jarrett, Ernie Irvan and obviously, Dale Earnhardt – and I’ve watched a lot of talented drivers but there’s just no telling what Tim Richmond could’ve done," McReynolds said via phone interview. "I don’t want to take anything away from Jimmie Johnson or Jeff Gordon or anybody else, but I’m telling you, Tim Richmond had to be the most talented race car driver in terms of raw talent that I’ve ever seen in my entire racing career.”
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| RACE FACTS | |
|---|---|
| Date: | July 20, 1986 |
| Venue: | Pocono Raceway |
| Winner: | Tim Richmond |
| Hendrick Motorsports win: | No. 8 |
| Laps led by winner: | 48 |
| Starting position of winner: | 5th |
| Top 10: | 1. Tim Richmond; 2. Ricky Rudd; 3. Geoff Bodine; 4. Darrell Waltrip; 5. Bobby Allison; 6. Terry Labonte; 7. Dale Earnhardt; 8. Kyle Petty; 9. Tommy Ellis; 10. Rick Wilson |
| Did you know? | Photos of the finish determined Richmond’s margin of victory to be around four inches. Prior to institution of electronic scoring in 1993, NASCAR finishes were measured in distance, not time. Tom Higgins of the Charlotte Observer reported that officials believed it to be the closest finish in the modern era (1972 and after) at the time. |
If ever there was one race to exemplify all the things that made Richmond great, perhaps it was most on display on July 20, 1986 at Pocono Raceway, a place that was so integral in his development as a stock-car driver. Even in a career full of "Tricky Triangle" triumphs, the '86 Summer 500, that turned into the Summer 350, may stand above the rest.
While these days you can spot Tim Richmond merchandise in a race crowd with relative ease, it probably would've been hard to detect on that day because seeing much of anything was an issue.
A blanket of thick fog and mist rolled out onto the 2.5-mile track nestled into the Pocono Mountains in Long Pond, Pennsylvania and it was enough to delay the start of the race. Intermittent precipitation plagued the area throughout day as well and even when the haze lifted and the track dried enough for NASCAR to deem racing safe, trying to make out car numbers and colors from the grandstands was a chore at best.
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By then, race fans likely already knew to expect Richmond, who had already won the season's earlier event at Pocono and then-Hendrick Motorsports teammate Geoff Bodine, to be near the front and they were. Bodine started outside of pole sitter Rick Mast while Richmond fired off from the fifth position.
Ben White, author of "Hendrick Motorsports: 40 years" said simply this of Richmond, "He was magical at Pocono." By the end of his career, Richmond registered four of his 13 career Cup Series wins there and in 1980, then-track president, Joseph Mattioli III, helped convince Richmond to make the jump from open-wheel racing to stock cars.
When the green flag dropped, it was evident almost immediately that again, the Hendrick Motorsports stable would be a force. Bodine snatched the lead away from Mast on the second lap and would go on to lead a race-high 52 circuits while Richmond was just behind, leading 48.
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"That’s the kind of guy he was. He was funny, he had a great sense of humor and he was so talented but he just got off the wrong path and unfortunately, we lost him.”
Geoff Bodine
A standard Pocono race seemed to be developing with pit cycles and strategy dictating track position. But as the event stretched over 100 laps, calamity began to ensue.
A caution waved on lap 115. Then, on lap 122, Jim Sauter spun out. Ahead, Richmond was in the middle of a three-wide battle with Bodine and Neil Bonnett but lost control in the middle groove, sliding down the track and slamming into the right front of Richard Petty's car before coming to a rest in the infield grass.
Unable to gain traction, Richmond instead backed out, driving all the way back to pit road in reverse. It that move seems familiar, it inspired a scene in, "Days of Thunder".
Richmond made it to the service of his crew where, Dick Bergren, pit road reporter, called the No. 25 Folgers Chevy, "...one beat up race car," adding, "There's damage on the right side, the left side, just about everywhere a car can be damaged."
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But the team, under the direction of legendary crew chief Harry Hyde, went to work and by the time the fenders were pulled back out, Richmond had lost just one lap.
And fortunately for the No. 25 team, the chaos was far from over.
Just five laps later, a massive crash erupted involving Bobby Hillin, Jr., Bonnett, Gant, Morgan Shepherd, and Benny Parsons. By the time Dale Earnhardt wrecked and brought out yet another yellow flag a couple of laps later, Richmond had worked his way back onto the lead lap.
With fog and rain still hovering and with darkness quickly closing in, NASCAR informed the teams that the race would end at lap 150 instead of the scheduled 200.
Only seven cars finished on the lead lap amid the crashes that day and that helped Richmond make up ground in a hurry, arriving at Bodine's bumper to battle for the lead with two laps remaining. After applying pressure through turns one and two, Richmond finally clawed alongside Bodine coming out of three and back to the finish line to take the white flag.
Richmond cleared to the lead with a dive into turn one but undeterred, Bodine fought back, getting back to the inside in turn two. The Hendrick Motorsports teammates remained side-by-side through three but the battle allowed third-place Ricky Rudd to close quickly and coming off the final corner to the checkers, he used a massive run to get to the inside of Bodine.
At the line, Richmond and Rudd were nearly in a dead heat with Bodine fading to third.
“It came down to him and I racing for the win. He’d pass me down the straightaway and I’d pass him back in the corner,” Bodine remembered. “That last lap, he passed me and I got back under him. Now I’m going into turn three inside of him and anyone else would’ve slid him up and went on to win the race but I didn’t drive that way. Plus we were teammates. I never saw Ricky Rudd catching us because I was busy racing with Tim.”
After a few anxious moments, NASCAR declared Richmond the winner and he celebrated in victory lane. His margin was about the length of a credit card.
"Ricky and I really didn’t know. We went down into Turn 1 and kind of looked like ‘Did you win or did I win?’ and he did the same thing," he explained in a postrace interview. "I’ll tell you what, that’s fun winning them like that. That’s a NASCAR finish.”
It marked the third of seven wins for Richmond that season who seemed to be only scratching the surface of his NASCAR potential. But in 1987, he missed the first 11 events due to health issues before returning and winning his first two races back at Pocono and Riverside. He'd make six more starts that season, which turned out to be the last of his career and in August of 1989, he succumbed to complications of AIDS. He was 34.
In 37 races across two seasons, Richmond won nine times for Hendrick Motorsports and capped his career-best season with a third-place finish in points in 1986. And yet, he lives not only through statistics but through tales still passed down from friends and contemporaries. Stories like the ones Bodine and Reynolds both tell when asked about Richmond.
“We were at Riverside California the last race in 1981 with the 37 car and that son of a gun, I won’t say he broke it, but a shifter broke,” McReynolds recalled. “He begged us, ‘Please, just lock it into third gear.’ And we told him, ‘OK, we can, but you’ve got to take care of the thing back down that long back straightaway or you’ll blow it up. So, we locked it in third gear and that rascal was in the rev limiter all the way down the straightaway. You could hear it from pit road.
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"He didn’t care what you did to the race car, what the set up was, just make me go fast. And it didn’t matter if it was a super speedway, a short track, an intermediate track, high banks or no banks and he’s absolutely one of the best road racers we’ve ever seen.”
“One time we’re at North Wilkesboro for a race and we all drove (Chevrolet) Monte Carlos back then,” Bodine recalled. “It was raining during practice and Tim came up to me and asked, ‘Hey, do you mind if I sit in your car? I have this book I want to read and I don’t want to get wet.’ We didn’t have the fancy haulers back then, so I said, ‘Yeah, sure.’ And after a while it quit raining and we practiced or whatever. I didn’t think anymore about it.
“On our way home, my wife at the time, Kathy, went to turn on the radio and it didn’t work. And then I got to thinking, Tim had told us that morning that the radio in his car wasn’t working. Tim wasn’t in my car reading, what Tim did was take the radio out of our car, put his broken radio in and then put the good radio in his car. My wife cussed him out good for that one.
“But that’s the kind of guy he was. He was funny, he had a great sense of humor and he was so talented but he just got off the wrong path and unfortunately, we lost him.”