Where is ... Terry Labonte? (cont'd)

Labonte raced at the Cup level for 29 years. His most serious injuries were sustained during the 1982 season finale at Riverside, Calif. The now-defunct road course cost Labonte extensive facial cuts, a broken right foot, broken left ankle and fractured ribs, and he briefly considered retirement.

He also broke his left hand during a 1996 practice session at Phoenix, but went on to claim the second of his two championships that season. Then, in August 2000, his then-record streak of 655 consecutive starts was broken at Indianapolis Motor Speedway due to complications from a concussion he'd suffered a month before at Daytona. The streak began in January 1979.

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Terry Labonte

Ricky Rudd surpassed Labonte's mark in 2002.

Still, all in all, Labonte is one of the lucky ones. He was able to walk away from the sport. It was, as they say, time.

"I turned 50 in November," Labonte said. "As bad as you would like to keep doing something, I feel very fortunate to have been in a sport that I can compete as long as I did. I just felt I was old enough I should probably retire. I don't feel any different than I did three or four years ago."

For the last two seasons of his career, Labonte ran limited schedules of 14 races in 2005 and 17 in '06. His best effort was a third-place effort last year on the road course at Sonoma, Calif., where he led 17 laps.

The limited-race transition helped ease Labonte into retirement. According to him, quitting the sport cold turkey more than likely would have meant a more difficult period of adjustment.

"I adjusted, I guess, pretty good to [running a limited schedule], pretty quickly," Labonte said. "I think it worked out good for me, because I think I might've had a little bit of a hard time to just walk away completely. This way, I was able to still be involved, run the races that I wanted to and have some time off, too."

Now that Labonte is retired, don't expect him to make any spot starts here and there any time soon. He might do so, and he might not.

"I don't have any plans to [race again]," Labonte said. "I haven't really given it a lot of thought. I've actually had a couple of people call wanting to know if I'd run a few races in their cars. I really don't have much desire to right now.

"I might wake up next week and change my mind or something. I might not mind running a race or two, maybe. I don't know ... maybe the road courses or something. I can't see myself going to a lot of places. I might get the urge to run a race or two, but I really don't think so right now."

Labonte had an amazing career. Fresh off the Texas short tracks, he finished fourth in his very first Cup event, in September 1978 at Darlington. Surely, this was going to be an easy gig.

"No it wasn't," admitted Labonte, who was 11 laps down at the checkered flag. "I had no idea where I was. I looked at the scoreboard to see how many laps were left, and I never thought about looking at my car number up there. I never realized I was running up that high. The race seemed like it took all day, because they had so many wrecks and everything.

"I thought, 'This isn't going to be as hard as I thought.' But ... it actually never got any easier."

The first of Labonte's 22 wins also came at Darlington, two years later in the track's famed Southern 500. That was all well and good, and it was plainly evident that Labonte was well on his way.

Labonte was nevertheless shocked when team owner Billy Hagan predicted in the press box after the win that within five years, the team would be champions of NASCAR. It was a tall order just to win one race, and here the boss was vowing to win the championship.

"I'm sitting there, and I'm like, 'Wow ... OK. We just won our first race, and he's told these people in five years, we're going to win the championship,' " Labonte said. "We won the championship in 1984, and I thought to myself, 'You know what? That guy, he had a vision.' He had it figured out."

It would be 12 more years before Labonte would win his second title, in 1996. After leaving Hagan, he had a relatively disappointing tenure with team owner Junior Johnson from 1987-89. Labonte went winless from 1990-93, and there were more than a few who thought his best years were behind him.

They weren't.

Labonte joined Hendrick Motorsports in 1994, and reeled off three wins that year. He was back. Two years later, Labonte held off Hendrick Motorsports teammate Jeff Gordon for the championship.

"Both [championships] were very special," Labonte said. "The first championship, naturally, meant an awful lot to me. But the sport wasn't as big then. It was a big deal to me, and I thought, 'As good as our team is, I think we're going to win next year, too.' That was really a special championship.

"But the other one in '96, to go 12 years between championships and come back with another was incredible. That one was 10 times bigger, the sport had grown so much and changed so much. ... The second one might've meant just a little bit more, just because I went through a span of four years and didn't win a race. It might've meant, maybe, a little bit more personally than the first one. But they were pretty close."