Present and future collided at historic 1976 Daytona 500

Great rivalries are built with intense, head-to-head competition. Most often, there is a hero and a villain. But what happens when there are a pair of heroes?

You get the 1976 Daytona 500.

When the green flag waved over the 18th edition of the “Great American Race,” racing titans Richard Petty and David Pearson had battled one another 420 times at NASCAR‘s top level. Petty won 93 of these matchups, with Pearson running second 27 times. Pearson held his own, winning 80 of those races and Petty finishing second 30 times.

In a sport where Petty once described second-place as the first loser, a slim advantage is enough to brag about.

The difference between the two was even more pronounced in the Daytona 500.

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In his 13 Daytona 500 races, Petty had five wins. Pearson challenged him twice with top-five finishes, but Pearson had not yet won the biggest race in motorsports. Pearson had three Firecracker 400 victories in the Daytona summer event — but Petty was always his shadow, finishing second in each.

The two just couldn‘t shake one another.

If one is lucky, they get to watch the drama play out live. And the 1976 Daytona 500 had a number of future NASCAR racers doing just that.

Jack Roush was one of 125,000 fans in the grandstands that afternoon. It was the first NASCAR race Roush had ever attended, and he was standing in the Wood Brothers‘ pits, cheering for their driver Pearson.

“I was in sensory overload, so taking it all in was almost more than I could stand,” Roush said. “But it came down to the final lap, and Richard Petty caused a wreck between himself and David Pearson. Richard spun off into the infield and stopped. David came chugging around the corner with a crashed race car, went on, and took the checkered flag.”

Six cautions waved during the first 174 laps. The final green waved with 22 remaining and Pearson in the lead. After overcoming a lost lap earlier in the race, Petty was now on Pearson‘s back bumper, determined this would be his sixth Daytona 500 win and his 178th overall.

In the 1970s, cars were wide and created a lot of aerodynamic wake — and it was widely accepted that in close duels, the slingshot pass was the way to win a superspeedway race.

After leading 11 circuits around the track, Pearson relinquished the lead on Lap 188 and then tucked closely behind Petty, waiting to make his move.

On the final lap, Pearson perfectly executed the slingshot pass on the backstretch. But Petty did not win five previous 500s without a trick or two of his own: He tucked into Pearson‘s wake entering Turn 3 and then crossed under Pearson exiting Turn 4.

Petty believed he had the momentum to sweep in front of Pearson. He was wrong. Petty hooked his back bumper on Pearson‘s nose and sent both into the wall.

As Petty pirouetted down the frontstretch, Pearson slid to the entrance of the pits and kept his car running. It appeared Petty would have the momentum to slide across the start/finish line.

PHOTOS: Pearson’s career in pics

And as all this unfolded, Mark Martin, 17, was sitting in the grandstands watching rapturously.

Martin‘s first Daytona 500 attendance came in 1973, watching Petty lap the field twice. He immediately became a fan of “The King.”

“Of course, we went back the next year in ’74, ’75 and ’76. I was actually in the stands right at the start/finish line in ’76 when my man Richard Petty and David Pearson tangled off Turn 4,” Martin said. “I could not believe my eyes what happened.”

Four years later, Martin would make his first NASCAR Cup start. Twelve years later, he would be the first driver hired by Roush in the Cup Series.

Martin had one of the best views from the stands. But if he looked down next to the fence, Martin might have seen a 20-year-old Rusty Wallace being shooed away from the fence by security.

Wallace was trying to get an even closer look.

“I first started grasping the fact that I wanted to race in NASCAR was when my dad took me to my very first Daytona 500, and that’s the race that Richard Petty’s crashing and David Pearson’s crashing, and I think Pearson goes across the line, wins the race,” Wallace said. “And I’m like, ‘I can’t believe that.‘ I was right up against the fence until the police would run me off, and I listened to cars go by and shoot dirt and stuff in my eyeballs, I’m like, ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe how fast these cars are.‘ It just blew me away.”

•   •   •

Rivalries are most often rancorous. That was not the case between Pearson and Petty. Neither driver showed any anger after the race, but in the heat of the battle, Pearson felt his temperature rise.

Despite a quick flash of temper immediately after contact from Petty, Pearson kept his cool. More important, he kept his car running. Driving through the frontstretch grass and then back onto the track he rose above the rest to claim that keystone win that was missing from his personal record book. It would be the only Daytona 500 win of his career.

And perhaps a touch of bragging, too, when it was all said and done.

“David passes Richard on the last lap, and then the crowd roars something awful, and I know that something has happened,” Pearson‘s car owner Leonard Wood recalled. “It was right off of Turn 4, where I couldn’t see. And I saw Richard’s car coming backwards up against the wall, and then I couldn’t find David. I looked down to the inside, and he’s spinning around down in the grass, down on the inside. Keyed the radio and says, ‘The blank hit me.‘ So anyway, so Richard comes spinning and looks like he [is] going to slide right across the finish line in the grass, but he stopped about 50 feet short.

“Somebody asked David and says, ‘Was you mad?‘ He said, ‘No, but I was getting ready to be if I hadn’t won that race.‘ ”

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Richard‘s son, Kyle Petty, was not as calm.

“Those guys had run so many races nose-to-tail, first and second, lap after lap after lap,” Kyle said. “You knew it was going to come down to whoever was in the right position because they would just exchange the lead, exchange the lead. And it’s like musical chairs. And you knew as it came down to three or four laps to go that you were going to be in the right seat when they went into Turn 3.

“And my dad, as he did it, he made the move, and he thought he was clear and he thought David was going to do one thing and David didn’t do it. And that’s one thing my dad always said about that race was he didn’t do what I thought he was going to do. And that comes from racing somebody. You just begin to try to think the way they think. So, they crashed.”

Kyle and the crew ran into the infield to push Richard‘s car across the line, which was and is against the rules, but since Richard had a lap on third-place Benny Parsons, he was still credited with second — the 58th time he and Pearson finished 1-2.

Kyle Petty was ready to lead the crew into Victory Lane to fight the Wood Brothers‘ crew.

Until he was stopped in his tracks by a command from the King.

“In a loud way but not screaming, he said, ‘Stop. Come here‘. … and he says, ‘This race is over. Next week is Rockingham. Take this car, load it up, and we’ll go to Rockingham and we’ll get him there.‘ And we all pushed the car back into the garage area, and nobody ever said a word.

“There was no confrontation. There were no bad feelings. It was over with. And as far as he was concerned, it was. And if it was over for him, it was over with for us.”

Richard was true to his word, winning his 178th race the next week in the Carolina 500 at North Carolina Motor Speedway. Pearson broke an oil pump and was not around for the finish.

But on that spring afternoon in Florida, the biggest race of the 1976 season was in the books, and for the moment, Pearson held a record over Petty. The Daytona 500 was Pearson‘s 34th speedway win; Petty had 32.

The team loaded up the trailer and headed off for a bite to eat before heading back to the shop.

They were not alone.

“When that race was over, we left and went across the street,” Wallace recalled. “And there was a restaurant over there, and I’ll be a son of a gun if an old flatbed truck is sitting there with the winning Daytona 500 car parked on it with the whole front end mashed in, David Pearson’s car. I couldn’t believe that it was out there all by itself, sitting in a parking lot.”