re: NASCAR.. Who's The Goat? Earnhardt,Petty,Or Other?

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Pre-Winston Cup, EVERYone raced multiple times a week. That was the system.

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Sure, but Petty raced a lot more than the people that couldn't afford to do it on that level.

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So, explain his success before and after the parts distribution gig. Petty won 57 races after MoPar got out of racing.

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He had the best car and the best engines. He was great, but I think people just see the number 200 and don't understand the context. He went an extremely long time after the rest of the sport caught up before win 200. And the still raced almost a decade after that. The man just lived to drive that car.

Even with an edge, there are still lots of things outside of your control in racing.

Earnhardt and Pearson are 1A and 1B and you can make an argument for both.

Dale won 7 titles, took the sport to levels never seen before and since, and was synonymous w/NASCAR and aside from David Pearson, is the greatest driver to ever wheel a stock car.

Pearson won 3 titles and 105 races. The 3 titles he won were won in 3 of the 4 years that he ran the full schedule. Now imagine if he'd have run the full schedule for 9-10 years? You'd be talking about someone with 8 or 9 titles and close to if not north of 300 wins. He was known as The Silver Fox for a reason. Dude was a bad motherfricker and smooth as silk.

My top 5:
1A: Earnhardt, Sr.
1B: Pearson
3: Gordon
4: Petty
5. Yarborough.

(DW, Bobby Allison, and Jimmie are honorable mentions)

ETA: Thanks to Bucky a page back for clarifying that Pearson ran the full schedule 4X. I always thought he ran it 3X. Learned something today

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I firmly believe that the three most iconic drivers in the history of NASCAR were Richard Petty, Dale Earnhardt, and Jeff Gordon.

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Can't argue this.

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Gordon was better than Dale

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Let's not get crazy. He was on par w/Dale. But I will cede that he had more natural raw talent than Dale. That can't be ignored.


Gordon was great. Historically great. And had he not fricked his back up he would have won 2-3 more titles and 110+ races( He has 93) .

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Was an Earnhardt fan, but the best Nascar driver ever was David Pearson.

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Petty regularly ran nearly all the races during his career. And there were 50-60 races per year in the 60s. Few teams ran the full schedule then as they did not have the factory backing the Petty's did.

When Pearson retired from racing a "full" schedule, he had more championships than Petty while starting racing Nascar a year later.

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This is why Pearson is the best ever.

The Pettys had no more money than Holman Moody, etc. But they were the only … check the records … well-funded team that CONSISTENTLY ran the full race schedule because that’s what they chose to do because racing is what they did.

And if you check the records, even they skipped a race or two along the way and not just for the various factory boycotts. Because what was demanded in those days was insane, and it’s why only a handful of the major teams ever attempted running all the races, and again nobody but the Pettys ever did it CONSISTENTLY. (That’s the important distinction.) Other teams like Cotton Owens, Holman Moody, K&K did it a time or two and said, “No mas.”

Joe Weatherly drove for like nine different owners in 1963 to win the title because Bud Moore who had his main ride said, “I ain’t doing that.”

The Pettys were certainly good and they put in the hours of work to survive that grind and deserve credit for that, but it must also be acknowledged that their competition in many of those races on the dirt bullring tracks NASCAR used to go to back in the day was Soapy Castles and Big John Sears. And the Pettys were basically the Rockefellers financially compared to those folks.

They didn’t have more money than everyone else in the grand scheme of things, but they had more money than the independents they were running against at Asheville Weaverville. Because the Pettys and the ragtag independents were the only ones fooling with those races.

I can agree for the most part, but a lot of people on here just say "the Pettys only won because they had more money", and that's their whole story. They busted arse, did the work, and reaped the rewards for it. In other sports, that's called "paying the price". In the case of the Pettys, it's seen as a negative.

Lee Petty started in NASCAR as a self-employed mechanic, so they sure as hell didn't have a shitload of cash in the beginning.

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Joe Weatherly drove for like nine different owners in 1963 to win the title because Bud Moore who had his main ride said, “I ain’t doing that.”

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It was a different world back then.