DONNIE ALLISON’S 1977 ROCKINGHAM VICTORY

BY DONNIE ALLISON, AS TOLD TO BEN WHITE

There are times during a driver’s career when everything during a race weekend seems to go as it should. One of those race weekends for me came on Oct. 23, 1977, at North Carolina Motor Speedway. Today, the track is known as Rockingham Speedway and it’s located near Rockingham, North Carolina.

I was driving a Chevrolet for team owner Hoss Ellington at the time. The first time I drove for Hoss was in August 1975 at Talladega and I remained with him until March 1980 at Atlanta. While at Rockingham that weekend for the American 500, the car came off the trailer running and performing really well. We won the pole position for the race that weekend with relative ease. With some research, after 46 years, I found we were able to lead 374 of the race’s 492 laps. There were nine cautions for 74 of those laps.

Cale Yarborough was driving Junior Johnson’s Chevrolet then and I do remember beating Cale off of pit road every time but twice. The first time I got underneath him for the lead. The second time he ran me all over the race track and I passed him on the outside going into Turn 1. I know that surprised the heck out of him. That’s the most vivid memory I have of that race as I think back on it, other than the fact I had a dominant car by a lot that day.

Another part of running so well that day was the fact that Hoss and I had really good chemistry between us. Hoss was a former driver and he was just one of the guys. My relationship with Hoss was a buddy relationship. My racing relationship was more with the guys on the crew. (Shelton) Runt Pittman, my crew chief, was the one that called all the shots.

We had a good season in 1977. We also won at Talladega that year with Darrell Waltrip’s help as a relief driver. We never had a bad season anytime I drove with Hoss. Maybe the only time it happened was 1980 when we started to have some falling out and didn’t stay together. We only ran a few races together that year, which was Daytona, Rockingham and Atlanta and then we parted ways.

That particular race in 1977 at Rockingham, the car felt good all day. The key to that win was I was running an extremely low rear-end gear in my car. The reason I was running that gear was I was running a spare superspeedway engine. Runt was also our engine builder and he had the Rockingham engine on the dyno (dynamometer) testing it a few days earlier and the engine blew, and he couldn’t get it back together in time for the race. He called me and told me what had happened. I told him that running the superspeedway engine would be all right. We would have to turn more RPMs, which meant having to run a lower rear-end gear.

I could control my engine speed with my foot. Runt said I could turn the RPMs at 7,800 and I said, “OK.” I broke that rule one time. I told him in Victory Lane I didn’t look at the RPM gauge when I passed Cale on the outside coming off of pit road. He said that was OK because we won.

I think that track suited my style of driving. It seems like when you’re driving tracks and you’re in the middle of your career, you don’t really think about those types of things. I never thought about that back when I was racing. Later on, people talk about how well you ran at certain tracks. There are race tracks that you have to really stay after it with the throttle, those being Rockingham, Atlanta, Charlotte – all those race tracks where the driver has to stay after it with the throttle and I believe I was always pretty good at that.

It turned out to be one of those great days when everything came together as it should have. A lot of days that doesn’t work out when you’re racing hard for a win.

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