SPEED will carry the announcement tonight of the list of the 25 nominees for the 2011 class of the NASCAR Hall of Fame. While we know they started over with a clean sheet of paper, you have to assume that the 20 folks who didn’t make it in last year will once again be on that list.
Where it gets interesting is the who the other five will be. I personally hope there will be more non-drivers added to the list. Some names that pop to mind are Dale Inman, Ralph Moody, Smokey Yunick and some others. I would like to see the list have more folks on it that worked on or owned these cars.
The No. 1 guy, to me, that has to be included this year is Dale Inman. You can talk about Petty and Earnhardt having seven championships as drivers. Folks, Dale Inman has eight championships as a crew chief. He won seven with Richard Petty and one with Terry Labonte. To me, Dale is a guy that is more than deserving to be nominated and also selected for the NASCAR Hall of Fame, maybe as early as next year.
Now for the list of five to be inducted into the 2011 NASCAR Hall of Fame class, I think the No. 1 selection has to be David Pearson. The man is second on the NASCAR all-time win list with 105 wins. His winning ratio pretty much matches Richard Petty’s. I truly believe they can go ahead and start on the Pearson sculpture for the NASCAR Hall of Fame.
Following that, you have a trio of drivers with fairly equal records. They are together in the win column. Two of the three have three championship rings and the third one has a single championship. Naturally I am talking about Darrell Waltrip, Cale Yarborough and Bobby Allison.
Now, I really don’t think that all three will go in together. The biased side of me, because he truly is one of my best friends, hopes that DW will make it in. The numbers really are staggering. Between the three of them they have 251 wins and seven championships. They’ve all won our Super Bowl, the Daytona 500, so my point is they all have pretty strong numbers.
Now with that said, I just hope we don’t forget about the pioneers of our sport. I just hope we don’t forget about the Lee Pettys, Rex Whites and Ned Jarretts of the world. These guys also have some pretty good numbers. The first class of the NASCAR Hall of Fame was perfect. They got that one right. That class truly was the Mount Rushmore of NASCAR.
Now, I just think we have to look back to the history of our sport. We have to look at the guys that were pioneers in our sport and also laid down Hall of Fame numbers. I know I am not alone in saying that I honestly believe selecting this class will be tougher than selecting the first five. It’s not a committee I would want to be on.
You also have names like Sam Ard that weren’t NASCAR Sprint Cup drivers, but still laid down NASCAR Hall of Fame numbers. For instance, Sam won NASCAR Nationwide championships decades ago and set records that are just now starting to be broken by Kyle Busch.
That’s one of the things I love about this Hall of Fame. NASCAR has been adamant that this Hall covers all NASCAR sanctioned series. I think it is exciting for some of those guys to realize that they have a legitimate shot for a place in the Hall down the road.
