Bobby Allison, the NASCAR Hall of Fame driver who won 84 top-level events and became one of stock-car racing’s most popular figures while enduring family tragedy and career-ending injuries, died on Saturday at his home in Mooresville, N.C. He was 86.
NASCAR released a statement from Allison’s family announcing the death.
Allison won the 1983 Winston Cup championship for most points in a season. He was voted by fans as the Cup Series’ Most Popular Driver from 1970 to 1973 and 1980 to 1983.
He was a three-time winner of the Daytona 500, NASCAR’s season-opening and most prestigious race, and was inducted into the International Motor Sports Hall of Fame in 1993 and the NASCAR Hall of Fame in 2011. NASCAR named Allison one of its 50 greatest drivers when it presented him with its Award of Excellence in 1988.
His 84 victories tie him with Darrell Waltrip for fourth place on NASCAR’s career list for premier races, behind Richard Petty, David Pearson and Jeff Gordon.
In addition to his victories at Daytona, in 1978, 1982 and 1988, Allison won the Southern 500 at Darlington Raceway four times, the Coca-Cola 600 at Charlotte Motor Speedway three times and the Winston 500 at Talladega Speedway three times, all of them major events. He finished fourth in the 1970 Indianapolis 500.
But the Allison family was struck by tragedy. Bobby’s younger son, Clifford, was killed in a crash during practice for the 1992 NASCAR Busch Series race (now the Xfinity Series) at Michigan International Speedway. His son Davey died when the helicopter he was piloting crashed while trying to land at Talladega in 1993.
Bobby Allison himself experienced a brush with death when his right rear tire exploded during the Winston 500 in May 1987. His car became airborne and tore up part of a fence separating the Talladega speedway from the grandstands before landing back on the track. But pieces of the car wound up in the stands, resulting in minor injuries to several fans. Allison was bruised but unhurt. After a three-hour delay to repair the fence, the race resumed, and Davey Allison won it.
Bobby Allison’s career ended at age 50 when he crashed on the first lap of the Miller High Life 500 at Pennsylvania’s Pocono track in June 1988. His car struck the outside barrier, then was hit on the driver’s side by another car. He incurred neurological damage along with multiple other injuries, and, in the years to come, experienced memory impairment and mobility problems. He had no recollection of his favorite race, the 1988 Daytona 500, when he edged out his son Davey in a 1-2 finish.
Robert Arthur Allison was born on Dec. 3, 1937, in Miami, a son of Edmund and Katherine Patton Allison, known as Kittie. (There are varying accounts of the number of children they had; the Encyclopedia of Alabama lists 13 siblings, with only eight surviving to adulthood.)
“I was a race fan ever since I was a kid,” Allison wrote in his autobiography, “Bobby Allison: A Racer’s Racer” (2003, with Tim Packman). He told how his maternal grandfather took him to a race at the Opa-locka Speedway, remembering it as “wild and the greatest thing I had ever seen in my life — at the age of 10, anyway.” He added, “From then on I bugged my grandfather, dad, anyone in the neighborhood to take me to the races.”
After graduating from high school, Allison tested engines for a high-speed boating company in Wisconsin, then was hired as a mechanic for a NASCAR team in Charlotte, N.C. He competed in a few races in South Florida, then joined with family members, including his brother Donnie, and the Miami-based driver Red Farmer, to build a garage headquarters in Hueytown, Ala., near Birmingham.
At first, Allison competed in short-track racing, run on courses of a half mile or so, drawn by purses that were more lucrative than those in South Florida. His first victory in a premier series race came in 1966 in Oxford, Maine.
His entourage at Hueytown expanded into what became known as the Alabama Gang.
The 1979 Daytona 500 is remembered as a turning point in NASCAR’s national exposure, especially after a brawl between Allison and Cale Yarborough. Yarborough’s duel with Donnie Allison for the lead ended with both their cars spinning out of control and coming to rest on the grass. Bobby Allison, who had been lapped, pulled up to find out what was happening, leading to fisticuffs between Bobby and Yarborough.
The race, won by Richard Petty, and the fight were televised nationally by CBS on a day when the East was hit by a snowstorm, keeping many people up north glued to their living room screens.
“It was one of the high points of NASCAR,” Petty told The Tampa Bay Times in 2019. “It put NASCAR on the nationwide map. People thought racing was a Southern sport deal, and they saw the rednecks come out there at the end. It was the perfect storm, the snowstorm, everybody watching, how the race ended.”
Over the years, the Allison family headquarters in Hueytown became a tourist attraction.
“People come from miles around just to drop in on the Allison shop and say hello,” The New York Times observed in a 1974 profile of the NASCAR world.
Allison and his wife, Judy, divorced in 1995 but reconnected in 1999 and were remarried the next year. She died in 2015. His children also included two daughters, Carrie Hewitt and Bonnie Farr. Complete information on his survivors was not immediately available.
In his later years, Allison visited NASCAR tracks to promote a safety campaign conducted by the freight-carrying railroad CSX to raise public awareness of the potential hazards of highway-rail grade crossings and of trespassing on railroad property.
“Racing has been good to me in a lot of ways,” he once told The Orlando Sentinel. “It’s been very unfortunate in other ways. The way I look at it, life, not racing, has presented me with some difficult times. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the sport. My feeling about life and death is this: Life is a gift and death can come at any time. You can’t do anything about it.”
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