A CHAMPIONSHIP PEDIGREE Logano, Allison and Byron Won Titles with No. 22

BY BEN WHITE

The No. 22 car has won a total of 4 championships throughout NASCAR’s history, including NASCAR’s inaugural Cup Series champion, Red Byron, in 1949.

Car numbers have played a crucial role throughout the history of NASCAR, and some numbers have enjoyed considerably more success than others.

Richard Petty ran No. 43 with Petty Enterprises for all seven of his Cup Series titles while Dale Earnhardt carried No. 2 and then No. 3 during his seven championship seasons with team owners Rod Osterlund and Richard Childress.

For three other series champions, one number stands out.

During the NASCAR Cup Series’ inaugural season of 1949, Red Byron won the championship using No. 22 on the cars fielded by businessman Raymond Parks. The Alabama native won two races that season and had four top-5 finishes in six starts.

Thirty-four years passed before the number returned to championship status in 1983 when Bobby Allison earned his lone Cup Series title while driving for team owners Bill and Jim Gardner. Allison ran No.88 when the DiGard team campaigned the Gatorade sponsorship from 1976 through 1982, but when the sponsorship changed, so did the car number.

Allison’s championship year featured six wins and 25 top-10 results.

“Gatorade was a longtime sponsor with DiGard and they won a lot with them (32 races),” Allison said. “Darrell Waltrip also drove for them but when they went away in 1983, we changed the car number to 22. Fireball Roberts had it in the 1960s and he won with it. It was available so DiGard Racing took it. Plus, I had used No. 22 years earlier in the Cup Series (1970) and had won some races with it.”

Then, another 35 years passed before the No. 22 became a champion again. Joey Logano, driving the No. 22 Team Penske Ford, earned his first Cup Series title over Martin Truex Jr. by winning the final race of the season at Homestead-Miami Speedway.

“I’ve worked my whole life to get here.,” Logano said in 2018. “I’ve spent 10 seasons fighting for this. Wasn’t sure we were going to get it, but man, Todd (Gordon, crew chief) made a great adjustment there at the end. He has a no-quit attitude and I was going to pass (Truex) no matter what.”

Then, after a very hard-fought season in 2022, Logano collected his second NASCAR Cup Series championship with No. 22. The title came when the Team Penske driver beat Ross Chastain in the Championship 4 finale at Phoenix Raceway.

Logano said there was never any doubt he would win Cup Series title No. 2.

“I knew all along that we were going to win the championship,” Logano noted. “I told the guys that we were the favorite from Daytona (the season opener) and we truly believed it. That’s the difference.”

All told, the No. 22 has won 87 races in 1,635 Cup Series starts. Roberts has 30, Logano has 29, Allison 17, Ward Burton five, Byron two, Kurt Busch two and Dick Brooks one.

BY MIKE NEFF

The history of NASCAR is filled with colorful characters and remarkable stories. As the sanctioning body celebrates its 75th anniversary, it is a good opportunity to look back at the names, places and events that have shaped the sport.

It all started in the 1940s on the dusty dirt tracks scattered across the Southeast. It progressed through the development of superspeedways, purpose-built race cars, corporate involvement, a safety crisis and the social media explosion to the uber competitive sport that we have today.

It is a commonly held belief that the first auto race occurred when the second automobile was built. It might not have happened quite that quickly but the competitive nature of human beings has always shown through and, when you have people who modify machines to perform better than originally designed, they are going to want to find out who built the best version.

In the hills of Appalachia, moonshine was a way of life dating back to the founding of the country. The practice of distilling accelerated during prohibition. The basic premise that the whiskey was not taxed, immediately set up a competition among the people making the hooch and the people responsible for collecting the taxes or stopping the creation of the illegal liquor.

In order for the moonshiners to evade the revenue officers, they modified their cars to be faster and handle better than those driven by the authorities. It wasn’t long before the moonshiners decided to get together and see who had the fastest car.

As the races became bigger and more popular, individuals started promoting them and promising prize money for the winners. This immediately presented opportunities for unscrupulous characters. There were few to no rules for the cars and, routinely, these promoters would put on the race, collect the gate and skip out before the checkered flag, leaving the winners begging for their winnings.

In the mid-’40s, “Big Bill” France, a racer and businessman who lived in Daytona Beach, Florida, mounted an effort to bring organization and structure to the sport of stock-car racing.

After a meeting at the Streamline Hotel in December 1947, the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing was incorporated. It took a year to put the Strictly Stock division together but in 1949, some 12,000 fans attended the first race in Charlotte, North Carolina, and the rest is history.

That first year of the Cup Series saw eight races make up the entire schedule. The following year was a 19-race schedule that laid the groundwork for the early years of the sport. The barnstorming years ran from 1949 through 1971.

After the first two years, the average season had 48 races per year. 1964 saw the most races in a single season with 62. Richard Petty was the champion that year for the first of his seven titles. Three years later, while securing his second championship, Petty set the record for the most wins in a single season. He visited Victory Lane 27 times out of the 48 races he contested that year.

1972 was the beginning of what is known as the Modern Era of NASCAR. R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. approached Junior Johnson, one of the early superstars of the sport, to discuss sponsorship for his team. Early in the discussions, Johnson realized the dollars being tossed around were far bigger than just a race team.

The end result was R.J. Reynolds becoming the title sponsor of NASCAR’s premier series and rebranding it to the Winston Cup Series. A couple of the changes, besides the huge increase in money behind the sport, altered the sport for decades to come.

Dirt-track racing was dropped from the schedule. The final dirt race was run in Raleigh, North Carolina, until the series returned to dirt in 2021. Races were also removed from small short tracks. Race tracks shorter than a half mile were dropped from the schedule and still have not returned, other than the exhibition race at the iconic L.A. Memorial Coliseum.

Early in the Modern Era, NASCAR racing slowly evolved into a business. Purpose-built race cars and sponsorships became commonplace but, for the most part, things were still very local and regional.

That changed as the end of the 1980s and beginning of the ’90s rolled around. Corporate sponsorship came to the forefront with national companies recognizing that NASCAR was at the doorstep of an explosion in popularity. Dale Earnhardt was the blue- collar champion of the sport who, by the mid’90s, became the second seven-time champion in NASCAR history.

Jeff Gordon was the newcomer and he became the de facto poster boy for corporate involvement in the sport. As the sport’s popularity skyrocketed, International Speedway Corp. and Speedway Motorsports Inc. grabbed the reins of facility ownership. Their leadership built race tracks across the country, elevating NASCAR racing to a national sport.

The increased popularity was a boon for the sport, the race teams and the competitors. The money being invested in speed was pushing the envelope faster and faster on the asphalt stadiums around the country. Unfortunately, while speed increased at a rapid rate, the safety aspects of the sport, while moving forward, were not moving at a pace consistent with the speeds of the cars.

The end result was multiple competitor fatalities at the turn of the century. The discussion of safety intensified but the event that changed the sport, and safety, forever was the death of Dale Earnhardt on the final lap of the 2001 Daytona 500.

That fateful day turned the entire focus of the sport to safety and, thankfully, there has not been a fatality in NASCAR, at the national level, since that race.

As the sport marks its 75th anniversary, the technology and methodology of putting cars on the race track has changed dramatically. The seventh generation car is now a predominantly single-source supplier vehicle. Every team gets its parts from the same manufacturers and customization is all but non-existent. The result is that driver skill and strategy are now at a premium and the parity from the top teams to the bottom teams has never been closer.

The sport dipped in popularity during the mid- to late-2010s, but the last couple of years have seen a rebound in television ratings and overall popularity.

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