Through his first 163 starts in the NASCAR Cup Series, Lake Speed went winless. But in his 164th start, on March 27, 1988 – exactly 32 years ago today – he drove the very car he owned into victory lane at Darlington Raceway, the 1.366-mile trap of a track that brings talent to the surface, though sometimes even that isn’t enough. Rusty Wallace never won at Darlington. Neither did Tony Stewart. But Speed, five races into his age-40 season, conquered the track too tough to tame.
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It’d prove to be his only Cup Series victory; in the 238 starts he made after Darlington, he failed to win. Speed is for sure one of NASCAR’s one-hit wonders, but tread carefully when referring to his lone day in the sun as some sort of fluke. Within the context of this race and the underlying numbers that defined his career, his victory on a “driver’s track” made all the sense in the world.
“I can believe it, but I’m sure glad it finally happened,” Speed told ESPN in his postrace interview. “Two years ago, everybody thought I was gone. Look at me now.”
To understand how this win came to be, let’s consider three important points:
1. Speed was one of a few drivers to comprehend the Hoosier tire advantage
The 1988 season was the high point in NASCAR’s cold war between tire companies Goodyear and Hoosier. The differences were clear: Goodyear’s tire was harder and more reliable, while Hoosier’s was softer – meaning more grip, and ultimately faster lap times; Neil Bonnett, riding on Hoosiers, scored the company’s first Cup Series victory a month earlier at Richmond – but believed to be less reliable by a country mile. The majority of the field, leery of a tire failure and an ensuing crash at Darlington in an era where driver injury was common, chose Goodyear.
Not Speed. He was one of a few driver-owners in the sport, his team woefully underfunded compared to behemoths like Richard Childress Racing and Hendrick Motorsports. He recognized the opportunity for a competitive advantage – a market inefficiency, if you will – by giving Hoosier a whirl, but he didn’t make the leap blind. He’d finished sixth at Richmond and second at Rockingham on Hoosiers, but tested with the new tire at Darlington in advance of the race.
The test went off without a hitch and while other teams saw an unreliable tire on a chaotic track, Speed didn’t. He qualified eighth, but those smart enough to do the math understood he was the day’s wild card.
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“Before that race in the drivers meeting, (Dale) Earnhardt said, ‘OK, Speed, how long will it take you to lap me in this one?’ Sure enough, I waved as I went by him,” Speed told ESPN.com in 2010.
Speed led over 243 of the event’s 500 miles. Just two other drivers – Alan Kulwicki and Davey Allison – finished on the lead lap. Earnhardt finished four laps down.
2. His toughest competition that day eliminated itself
Ken Schrader’s track-record qualifying speed of 162.657 mph bested the previous Darlington record set by Geoff Bodine by over 3.5 mph, and his pole-winning mark was nearly 2 mph faster than second-place qualifier Earnhardt. Schrader’s Hendrick Motorsports car was a shaved bullet, the creator of optimism within the Hendrick camp and the talk of the ESPN telecast before engines fired.
All that curiosity lasted exactly 17 laps.
In a charge and subsequent battle between Hendrick stablemates, Bodine passed Schrader for the lead on lap 15. Schrader attempted to retake the lead with a desperate heave, but nearly wiped himself out in the process. Once Earnhardt and Kulwicki closed, Schrader found himself in the thick of it – Earnhardt got past and Schrader drove across Kulwicki’s nose, wrecking himself and seventh-place qualifier Rick Wilson, among others.
This was the first of several blows to the race’s top competitive tier. Rusty Wallace, who qualified fifth, suffered an engine failure with over 120 laps to go. So too did Ricky Rudd, who started 10th in his Kenny Bernstein-owned car, the second of 11 engine failures he’d suffer that season. Mark Martin led 59 laps but lost his car’s handling as the track got tighter.
Often when an aberration takes place, misfortune finds the most likely winners; Speed, on this day, was both lucky and good.
3. Lake Speed was an underrated and above-average talent saddled, too often, with middling equipment
Speed was 30 years old when he became the first American to win the World Karting Championship, defeating, among others, an 18-year-old prodigy named Ayrton Senna. Perhaps, the open-wheel path would’ve better suited Speed, but the do-it-yourself nature of stock-car racing appealed to the Jackson, Mississippi, native.
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He never drove elite equipment on a regular basis – the closest he came was in 1993, when he served as a stopgap for Robert Yates Racing after Davey Allison’s death and Ernie Irvan’s hiring; he scored two top-five starting spots and a seventh-place finish at Michigan in three starts. His best season-long effort was in 1994, when driving for Bud Moore, he averaged a 16.8-place finish and ended the year ranked 11th in points.
An estimate of his Production in Equal Equipment Rating (PEER) can help find the signal among the team-dependent noise, though. If Speed wasn’t producing results at an above-average clip, he turned in above-average production for his age:
With a career production rating over average (PROA) estimate of plus-0.042, he performed slightly above average over the course of his 402 Cup starts, a production line on par with the recently retired Jamie McMurray, his closest modern-day comparison. Speed, however, drove eight years deeper into his life, retiring at age 50.
Speed hit an estimated PEER above 2.000 three times – at ages 35 (1983), 36 (1984) and 39 (1987). He drove for Hoss Ellington in ’83 and ’84, while driving for himself in ’87. Through his age-40 season, 32 percent of his starts saw Speed suffer a race-ending mechanical malady, suggesting he never had equipment on equal footing with his production ability.
The advantage created by Hoosier’s tire in 1988, one sought and confirmed by Speed, might have made up for the other lingering shortcomings. It was an advantage which allowed the underrated talent an opportunity to showcase his skill, for just one day, on one of the most revered racetracks in NASCAR history.
(Photo of Lake Speed: ISC Archives / CQ-Roll Call Group via Getty Images)
