With 25 days until the 2013 Daytona 500, Mac’s Motor City Garage remembers a NASCAR great who never got his due: Tim Richmond.
Richmond ran a series of numbers, including 2, 12, 99, and 27, before landing a top-flight Rick Hendrick ride and the number 25 in 1986. No one could know it at the time, but by then Richmond’s career was nearly over. Still, he scored seven wins in 1986 and another two wins in only eight starts in 1987 as he was consumed by AIDS.
His racing career ended in apparent disgrace, but today we know the real disgrace was the total ignorance of the public at large, and NASCAR in particular, about the disease. Richmond’s fierce insistence on privacy only fueled the confrontation. It was just a sad, bad deal all around.
Water under the bridge.
Better to remember Richmond as the one guy who was never intimidated by the intimidator, Dale Earhnardt, Sr. Week after week they traded metal, then traded laughs afterward. Better to remember how he drove the road courses: in a perpetual slide, steering the car with the curbing.
Richmond passed away on August 19, 1989 at age 34. In 1998 he was voted one of the 50 greatest NASCAR drivers of all time, and in 2002 he was inducted into the International Motorsports Hall of Fame.
This. You said is just right. Thanks for sharing. Richmond was the best.
Before the stockers we saw the talent in Tim when he ran the short track beasts called Supermodifieds at Lorain County and Sandusky Speedways …gone too soon.