All-Star Race has evolved from 1984 marketing pitch

Jerry Long, president and chief executive officer of R.J. Reynolds, stood up at the end of the 1984 Winston Cup Series banquet in New York and announced a five-year, $11.25 million increase in sponsorship of NASCAR's premier series, a move that stunned the crowd there to celebrate Terry Labonte's championship season.

Long's presentation included three major marketing efforts. First, there would be a $250,000 increase to the Winston Cup points fund, beginning in 1985. Second, the company would offer a $1 million bonus to any driver who could win three of NASCAR's four major races -- the Daytona 500, Winston 500 at Talladega, World 600 at Charlotte and the Southern 500 at Darlington -- in the same season. And finally, the company would sponsor an all-star race comprised of race winners from the previous year, with the winner taking home $200,000.

• All-Star Race format
• All-Star Race history

It's unclear who was specifically responsible for the brainstorm that became The Winston, but it's certain that T. Wayne Robertson had a major hand in the project. A former show car driver for Winston, Robertson moved up through RJR's marketing department to take over the top position as overseer of the corporation's sponsorship of both NASCAR and the PGA Tour. It was under his leadership that stock-car racing went from a regional curiosity to a national obsession.

"He cared about people," former Lowe's Motor Speedway track president Humpy Wheeler said after Robertson was killed in a freak boating accident in 1998. "Because he worked his way up from show car driver, he respected everybody. He knew how to move among people as good or better than anybody I've ever known."

The idea of an all-star race was nothing new. During Speedweeks in the early 1960s, Daytona International Speedway hosted a series of exhibition sprint races called the American Challenge Cup, featuring many of NASCAR's top drivers. And Anheuser-Busch had sponsored a pre-Daytona 500 race for pole winners since 1979. But the idea of a mid-season event, similar to baseball's All-Star Game, was something new and intriguing.

Especially when it came with a purse guaranteed to make it the richest race per mile in motorsports.

"We just made the Indy 500 a heat race," Darrell Waltrip said in an article published in Grand National Scene after the banquet. "It's the best thing that's happened in our sport."

Ricky Rudd agreed.

"I think it's great for the sport," he said. "In my opinion, money gets the attention of people and this sure ought to get a lot of attention from a lot of people." (Continued)