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Another great one NASCAR Classics. I attended nearly every event on the 1976 NASCAR GN schedule. This season was DOMINATED by 2 drivers. Cale (with his unique sounding, bulletproof chevy with 180 degree headers) & Pearson winning the Daytona 500 & most of the superspeedways.
This win for Cale Yarborough and Junior Johnson had to have been sweet retribution after what can only be described as a disastrous SpeedWeeks, when the #11 Chevrolet struggled with a McLaren engine, and after being lapped twice in it's qualifying race, changed engine suppliers, and then blew an engine on the very first lap of the Daytona 500, resulting in Cale becoming the first driver ever to finish last in the Daytona 500 twice (he'd also finished last in a 48-car field in the 1962 Daytona 500). So this win, Cale's third in the Firecracker 400, had to have been one of the sweetest of Cale's career, given what had happened earlier that year during SpeedWeeks and the Daytona 500.
@@OccasionalNASCARRaces Of course, one significant difference was that, in 1976, the Daytona 500 was not the first race of the season. In fact, Cale had finished second to David Pearson at that year's season-opening race at Riverside, so he had quite a number of points in the bank heading to the Daytona 500 (in fact, since Pearson wasn't running the full schedule, Cale was the defacto championship leader entering the Daytona 500 that year), while in Stewart's case, his last place finish in the 2002 Daytona 500 was the first last place finish by an eventual champion in a season opener.
