1,000 Greatest Drivers: Cale Yarborough

Arguably NASCAR's most dominant driver ever... but not quite its best.

In the circles where I’ve hung out lately, I feel Yarborough’s reputation has taken a bit of a hit because his biggest distinction for decades was being the first driver to win three straight titles and then Jimmie Johnson went on to win five. While I do rate Johnson higher than Yarborough at this point mainly because he faced better competition, I definitely don’t think Yarborough was very far behind. Ranking second in all-time laps led despite only making 560 starts is really impressive and his average percent led is the highest of any mega-legend. From what I have read in my Greg Fielden books, Yarborough seemed to have more come-from-laps-behind wins than any driver in NASCAR history although admittedly he did benefit sometimes from his teams’ cheating and he seemed to always come out on top whenever there was some scoring error, usually at Bobby Allison’s expense. What impresses me most honestly is that Yarborough made more last-lap passes for the win than any driver in NASCAR history (7) and was never passed on the last lap himself. And we all know how close we came to making it 8… Granted, I don’t think Yarborough really lost anything from the 1979 Daytona 500 as it increased the popularity of the sport and he benefited from that and he won four Daytona 500s anyway (I think it likely plays a significant role in how people regard Donnie Allison though…) While I do think boomer-era race fans probably overrated drivers of this era, zoomer fans have likely overcompensated too much in the other direction with their desire to act like all the drivers competing back then were nothing more than “janitors and plumbers”. As a millennial, typically I take a middle position: the people older than me overrate him, but probably not by as much as the people younger than me underrate him.