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NASCAR Sprint-Cup Series
CUP: Pearson Bounces Back To Bristol
David Pearson will once again go racing...
Mike Hembree  |  Posted March 12, 2010   Charlotte, NC
David Pearson is the all-time wins leader at Darlington. (Photo: Getty Images)
One of the many remarkable things about David Pearson’s quarter-century NASCAR career, one that will land him in the NASCAR Hall of Fame next year (a year too late in some estimations), is that he was never seriously injured.

Richard Petty, the only driver to win more races than Pearson (200 to 105), broke virtually every bone in his body at least once in a series of brutal and often spectacular accidents. Pearson was in a few bumpups, but he typically was expert at avoiding apocalyptic wrecks.

His worst, in his view, occurred July 25, 1965 at Bristol Motor Speedway, a track Pearson is scheduled to revisit March 20 for the speedway’s Scotts EZ Seed Showdown, a 35-lap exhibition race for retired stock car racers.

Pearson’s race day in that Bristol summer lasted only eight laps. He was driving a Cotton Owens-owned Dodge, and he wound up in an altercation with, ironically, the Wood Brothers Ford, then driven by Marvin Panch. Quite a few years later, Pearson and the Woods would hook up to form one of the best driver-team partnerships in NASCAR history.

Pearson and Panch locked their front wheels together during the crash, causing both drivers to lose control of their vehicles. Pearson hit the outside wall at near full speed. It was another piece of proof that short tracks also can produce teeth-rattling wrecks.

Pearson wasn’t hurt, but he was stunned. When his senses returned a few seconds later, he looked in the floor of the car and discovered that his shoes – they were loafers, not today’s designer racer footwear – had been knocked off.

“They were sitting there in the floorboard side by side just like somebody had placed them there,” Pearson said. “I’d always heard that when people were killed in car wrecks that their shoes were knocked off, so I had to make sure I wasn’t dead.”

He wasn’t, of course, but he finished last that day, one of the few times that happened in his career. The next day, there was surviving evidence of the force of the hit.

“I pulled my shirt off, and it looked like I still had the seat belts on,” Pearson said. “That was the hardest I ever hit.”

Pearson, who won five Sprint Cup races at Bristol, is 75 years old but looks 55. He hasn’t been in a race car for two years, when he built a short-track vintage racer and won 14 of 14 events. He won’t call himself a favorite in the Bristol charity race, but folks will know he was there, he said.

“I won’t be last. I’ll put it that way,” he said.

He had signed on to race in the event last year but withdrew after persistent back problems flared up.

Also scheduled to race in the special event are Harry Gant, Rick Wilson, Cale Yarborough, Charlie Glotzbach, Dave Marcis, Tommy Houston, L.D. Ottinger, Jack Ingram, Phil Parsons, Jimmy Hensley and Larry Pearson, David’s oldest son.

The race will share the Saturday bill with a 300-lap Nationwide Series event.

Mike Hembree is NASCAR Editor for SPEEDtv.com and has been covering motorsports for 28 years. He has written several books on NASCAR, including "NASCAR: The Definitive History of America's Sport" and "Then Tony Said To Junior: The Best NASCAR Stories Ever Told". He is a six-time winner of the National Motorsports Press Association Writer of the Year Award.

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