Rusty Wallace won the only NASCAR Cup Series of his career in 1989, and it has to go down as one of the most unlikely titles in the sanctioning body’s history.
That’s not because Wallace was an undeserving driver who stumbled into a championship through the misfortunes of others. Nor was it because he raced consistently yet unspectacularly and harvested just enough points to steal the title.
Rather, it’s because Wallace, who drove hard for the championship, won it despite fighting a brief legal war with his team owner while at the same time being vilified by fans, who strongly booed him race after race.
For any driver, being in a confrontational situation with his owner and the open target of fan disapproval week after week can’t be good for his psyche. Which, in turn, would appear to negatively affect his results.
After all, what driver is in a good place when he feels disliked by his boss and racing fans? Under such a situation, driving competitively by itself seems an arduous task, much less driving for a championship.
But despite his circumstances, Wallace was determined to win the championship.
In 1989, Wallace was in his fifth full season with owner Raymond Beadle, a long-time drag racing competitor whose popular organization was known as “The Blue Max.”
Wallace joined Beadle after two seasons with Cliff Stewart of High Point, N.C., with whom he won the Rookie of the Year title in 1984.
Beadle began his NASCAR operation in 1983 and almost immediately gained a certain amount of notoriety because his driver was the charismatic and flashy Tim Richmond.
Richmond was popular because of his looks, but he was also admired for his natural driving skills. As long as his oft-abused car held together, he could compete with the best of them.
He won two races in his first two years with Beadle but was winless in 1985, which might have been one catalyst that propelled him toward employment with powerful Hendrick Motorsports in 1986.
That opened the door for Wallace, who undoubtedly realized that victories, much less a championship, were unlikely with Stewart’s modest organization.
With Beadle, Wallace had the advantage of a seasoned team led by crew chief Barry Dodson.
That certainly was one reason that in 1986, Wallace won the first two races of his career at Bristol Motor Speedway and Martinsville Speedway.
Two more victories followed in 1987, at Watkins Glen International and Riverside International Raceway, before the 1988 campaign clearly showed why Wallace and the Beadle team were championship-worthy.
Wallace drove to six victories for the season, including a string of three in a row, at Charlotte Motor Speedway, North Wilkesboro Speedway and Rockingham Speedway late in the season, which put him within 79 points of championship leader Bill Elliott as the season moved to its final race at Atlanta Motor Speedway.
To win the title, Wallace had to race for the victory.
Which he did. He won the pole and led the most laps, 166, of the Atlanta Journal 500 to win easily over Davey Allison.
However, Elliott, utilizing a cautious style, cruised to 11th place and won the championship by a mere 24 points.
It was a given that Wallace would be a championship contender in 1989 and he certainly didn’t disappoint. By May, he had won three times, was fifth in points and part of the scrap for the championship.
But things changed dramatically on May 21 at Charlotte.
The Winston, NASCAR’s All-Star race, was conducted on that day. It was to be Wallace’s Waterloo.
Fighting for the victory with Darrell Waltrip, Wallace was in second place on the last lap when he moved up and tapped Waltrip’s rear end. It was not unintentional.
Waltrip immediately went into a long, smoking slide off the track and the way was clear for Wallace to take the victory.
Naturally, Waltrip and his teammates were irate.
“I hope he chokes on that $200,000,” Waltrip said, referring to the winner’s purse. His crew scrapped briefly with Wallace’s in the garage area.
A mighty chorus of boos rang down from the grandstand after the race. But it didn’t end there. It continued a week later at Charlotte’s Coca-Cola 600 and thereafter.
At each successive race, whenever Wallace’s car went onto the track or his name was mentioned over the PA system, choruses of catcalls rang from the grandstand.
Naturally, Wallace was upset. He thought all fans, even those he counted among his own, had turned against him and made him universally despised.
“After that race, I thought I might have lost every fan I had,” Wallace said in a conversation we had that season. “I tried to accommodate them in any way I could. Autographs … you name it. But it seemed the more I tried, the more they booed. If fans don’t like you, they don’t like you. But I hoped I didn’t have to hide from them everywhere I went.”
In late June, Wallace called a press conference to confront a widespread rumor that he was dissatisfied with the Beadle team and wanted to leave.
“I’m tired of hearing all this stuff about how unhappy I am with this team,” Wallace said. “They haven’t disrupted our team yet, but they will. We don’t need people hounding us. And while pressure can be great, we don’t need any more of it.”
Wallace admitted he and Beadle were having contractual problems. Nevertheless, the NASCAR world was stunned when, on July 2, Wallace filed a suit against Beadle in Superior Court in Charlotte.
“Raymond thinks we have a contract and I think we don’t,” Wallace said. “We just couldn’t come to terms. I asked him to let me out of the contract and nothing happened.”
Beadle said he wasn’t about to let Wallace out of the final year of their deal.
“When I play poker I know what I’ve got in my hand,” he said. “And I like the cards I have.”
Wallace said the legal action would not adversely affect his team. But in the second race after his announcement, at Talladega Superspeedway, he crashed after just 26 laps and fell to 165 points behind Dale Earnhardt.
By autumn, Wallace dropped the lawsuit and came to a unique agreement with Beadle. Wallace agreed to drive for Beadle through the 1990 season, after which he and his Miller Genuine Draft sponsorship would join Roger Penske.
Wallace made a season-ending charge that earned him the championship. In the final eight races of the year, he won once and finished out of the top 10 only twice.
At the season’s final event at Atlanta, Earnhardt cruised to an easy victory. Wallace needed to finish within 19 positions of him to claim the title.
A series of misfortunes put Wallace as far back as 33rd place, but he rallied well enough to finish 15th and win the championship by a razor-thin margin of 12 points.
“It was the greatest time of my life,” Wallace said. “I wanted to race Earnhardt. I wanted to win. But I had to do what I had to do. I had to compromise if I wanted to win the championship – and that almost didn’t work. But it did.
“Still … Man, I wanted to race.”
Wallace raced for Penske for the remainder of his career, which ended in 2005 with an additional 37 victories. He was elected to the NASCAR Hall of Fame in 2013.
But he never won another championship.
The title he won in 1989 was unique because of its circumstances — which he and the Beadle team overcame.
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Steve Waid has been in journalism since 1972, when he began his newspaper career at the Martinsville (Va.) Bulletin. He has spent over 40 years in motorsports journalism, first with the Roanoke Times-World News and later as publisher and vice president for NASCAR Scene and NASCAR Illustrated.
Steve has won numerous state sports writing awards and several more from the National Motorsports Press Association for his motorsports coverage, feature and column writing. For several years, Steve was a regular on “NASCAR This Morning” on FOX Sports Net and he is the co-author, with Tom Higgins, of the biography “Junior Johnson: Brave In Life.”
In January 2014, Steve was inducted into the NMPA Hall of Fame. And in 2019 he was presented the Squier-Hall Award by the NASCAR Hall of Fame for lifetime excellence in motorsports journalism. In addition to writing for Frontstretch, Steve is also the co-host of The Scene Vault Podcast.