One for the ages: Gant wins four in a row in '91 (cont'd)

Gant's amazing month continued at Dover where, once again, he captured the Busch race, then followed that up with a dominating victory on the Monster Mile in the Peak Antifreeze 500. He was more than a lap ahead of the field at the checkered flag, leading 326 of the 500 laps including the last 240.

"I'm thinking about finding some extra money and sending Harry Gant over to Atlantic City for me, or let him get me some lottery tickets," said Geoffrey Bodine, who finished second. "He's really on a roll. I'm telling you, that boy has got it."

Harry Gant

Cup Statistics

Starts	474
Wins	18
Top-5s	123
Top-10s	208
Poles	17
Avg. Start	12.5
Avg. Finish	15.9
Years / Top 10	8
Best Rank	2*

* 1984

A 14-car accident on Lap 69 thinned the list of contenders, and Allison seemed to have things well in hand, leading the first 114 laps before his engine went sour. That left the battle to be fought between Gant, Bodine and Rusty Wallace. However, Wallace was sidelined by an accident at the three-quarters mark and Bodine couldn't keep pace with Gant's Oldsmobile.

"We originally built it to be a short-track car," Gant said. "We'll probably run it until we wreck it."

Perhaps Gant didn't realize how prescient those words would turn out to be. Riding a three-race winning streak into Martinsville and the Goody's 500, Gant collided with Wallace while racing for the lead on Lap 377, bending his right-front wheel, smashing the brake ducts and tearing up the sheet metal on the No. 33 Olds.

In the television booth, Benny Parsons flatly declared that Gant would not win the race. He couldn't have been more wrong.

After several stops in the pits for repairs, Gant's damaged mount returned to the track in 12th place. However, he focused his anger on the task instead of the target.

"I was upset, but it was hurting my driving at the time," Gant said. "I ran about 10 laps about as mad as a bull. Rusty was behind me, but I wanted him to be in front of me.

"I calmed down after about eight or nine laps. I didn't want to run the tires too hard or blow the car up. I started to calm down, run some consistent laps and pick my way through there."

Driving like a man possessed, Gant began to click off laps more than a second faster than leader Ernie Irvan, and when he went by third place Terry Labonte, Labonte was certain he had been passed by the eventual winner.

"He went by me like a freight train," Labonte said, "and I knew he was going to win the race."

Gant followed Brett Bodine around Irvan with 60 laps remaining, then traded the lead with Bodine eight laps later before pulling away to a 1.13-second advantage at the stripe. The win made Gant the third driver in modern NASCAR history to win four consecutive races, the others being Darrell Waltrip in 1981 and Earnhardt in 1987.

"I don't know what we're going to do with Harry," Ricky Rudd said. "I don't think putting him a lap down to start the race would do it. Two or three laps down might be more like it."

Once again, the old man in the Oldsmobile was tough to beat.

"The car has just run super," Gant said. "And the team has just done a super job during the week and at the race track. We don't practice as much as a lot of people. If you practice too much and think about the streak or something else other than winning the race, you'll out-think yourself and get into trouble."

All good things must come to an end, and for Harry Gant, the end to his winning streak would come at North Wilkesboro. In this case, it wasn't from a lack of trying. Gant led 350 of the 400 laps and appeared to have the fifth win well in hand when a broken brake lining doomed his chances. On Lap 391, Earnhardt caught and passed Gant on the outside and was never headed, winning by 1.47 seconds.

"Well, we did the best we could," Gant said. "I had the field covered all day. But, on that last pit stop, I felt the brakes going.

"I didn't want to say anything [about it] because I thought I could make it. But with 10 laps to go, I had no brakes. I had nothing. I was out-running them [in the straightaways] and coasting through the corners for a while. But then I got into some lapped traffic and it was all over."

Gant started on the pole for the first time in four years and easily was the class of the field early on, getting into lapped traffic within the first 25 laps of the race. By the halfway point, only 12 cars were still on the lead lap.

From Earnhardt's point of view, Gant "looked unstoppable. I thought I would just try to stay in range of him and save the tires and see if I could get him there at the end. And that's pretty much what happened. If Harry hadn't had a problem, I think he'd have won it hands down."

Gant's winning streak came to an end, but his ability to win races wasn't diminished. He followed his successful 1991 campaign with wins at Dover and Michigan in 1992. With his win in the Champion Spark Plug 400 in the Irish Hills at 52 years, 7 months and 6 days, Gant remains the oldest driver to win a race in NASCAR's premier series.