Weekend That Was: Bristol

BRISTOL, Tenn. -- To fully understand where NASCAR might be headed with the Car of Tomorrow, a little reminiscing about the Car of Yesterday is in order.

And for that, who better to do the reminiscing than Darrell Waltrip and Junior Johnson? They were together as driver and car owner for six years, from 1981 through the 1986 season of what was then known as the Winston Cup Series. They won 31 races together, including one remarkable streak of seven victories in a row at Bristol Motor Speedway.

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"A lot of drivers will tell you that coming here and just finishing seven races in a row is hard to do. Just staying on the lead lap here for seven races in a row was pretty hard to do," Waltrip said prior to Sunday's running of the Food City 500 at Bristol. "I don't even remember every one of [the wins]. I just remember coming here and going, 'Well, this is the week the streak comes to an end. We can't just keep doing this.' And every time we would come away with the win. That was pretty special."

In 1981, during their first season together, Waltrip won 12 of 31 starts and also recorded 21 top-five finishes, 25 top-10s and 11 poles. Waltrip said he began to understand why the cars he was driving were so much better than the ones he was driving against not long after he began his employment under Johnson, prior to the first in their string of victories at Bristol.

"I hadn't been driving for Junior for very long -- and you, of course, knew his history and his background [as a moonshine runner]," Waltrip said. "So it's a Saturday and the car's running good and we don't have that much to do and so he says, 'Darrell, let's go for a drive.'"

Waltrip wasn't so sure he wanted to go at first.

"Where we goin'?" he asked.

"Up in the mountains," came Johnson's reply.

So off they went.

"He was not lying. We head off over toward Kingsport or somewhere in there. We're on rock roads and dirt roads. And I'm like, 'June, the Feds ain't never going to find the still up in here.' We finally pull up to this old house and a barn out in the middle of nowhere, and I'm still like, 'This is the coolest place to hide a still that I've ever seen right here.'" Waltrip said.

"But we open up the doors to the barn and it's a machine shop. And there's this old feller in there working on a cam shaft. ... I'm still thinking that down below maybe there's something going on that I don't know about. I was still thinking there might be a still in there, but that wasn't the deal. That was the secret place where Junior had our cam shafts made. The old man could make a cam shaft that no one else could make. That day was a real eye-opener for me." (Continued)