Only Yesterday: Talladega’s Best Have Shined in the Restrictor-Plate Era

The great thing about racing is that there’s always a story behind the numbers. 

The statistics are a part of the story. Numbers don’t lie (though people can and do use them to perpetuate one). A win is a win, wins lead to titles, and all of those have their stories.

But sometimes the numbers tell a different story than the one we expect.

With Talladega Superspeedway on the horizon, it’s a great time to take a look into the drivers who have been the best of the best at NASCAR’s biggest, fastest oval. Since it opened in 1969, to the sheer terror of some of the drivers back in the day, Talladega has hosted the NASCAR Cup Series 113 times.

While a handful of Talladega races were held before NASCAR’s Modern Era, they’re not so much divided by the rules and points systems but rather by two distinct types of racing. These types are before restrictor plates and after restrictor plates, where engine horsepower was reduced by starving the engines for air, creating slower speeds and safer racing. As speeds crept over 200 miles per hour and showed no signs of leveling off, NASCAR made the decision to cover the air intake, reducing the oxygen component of the combustion engines.

The plates, which were replaced by tapered spacers in 2019, changed the racing. But to blame them (or give them credit) for everything is disingenuous. The cars themselves also underwent a drastic evolution in the early 1990s, and NASCAR made other changes that tightened the field into the seething, roiling packs that define today’s superspeedways. 

The sanctioning body did hold a test session without restricted engines in 2004, but not on purpose. Someone brought the wrong size plates; they were to be testing a larger plate and instead brought a smaller one. The test driver, Hall of Famer Rusty Wallace, proposed running the test without them to see what happened. What happened was Wallace hit a top speed of just under 240 mph and destroyed the tires on the car in one blistering lap. NASCAR wisely decided that that was unsafe.

Anyway, that’s a fun story, and while it might prove Wallace is crazy, it doesn’t really illustrate anything other than the fact that removing the engine restrictions safely would require drastically downsizing the engine capacity, a task that NASCAR has not been willing to undertake.

But a funny thing about the plate era, and one that I absolutely did not expect when looking at the numbers for Talladega, is that while it has been lauded by NASCAR, the drivers and the fans as being the great equalizer — giving almost anyone a chance to pull off a win — the drivers with the most ‘Dega victories recorded them largely with restricted cars.

I expected an even distribution of the drivers with the most wins across decades. History proves that false to a large degree. 

The all-time win leader with 10, Dale Earnhardt won twice with unrestricted engines and eight times with them. After Earnhardt, three drivers have recorded six Talladega wins: Dale Earnhardt Jr., Jeff Gordon and Brad Keselowski, all of whom never ran un unrestricted superspeedway race. You have to drop to the three drivers tied for fifth all-time with four wins apiece, Bobby Allison, Buddy Baker and Darrell Waltrip before most or all of the wins came without restrictor plates.

That’s a surprise, because in the two-decade pre-plate era, certain teams could find an advantage if they had the people and the money to pour into it. It was easier to lose ground with the fields more spread out, but it was also easier to make it up with the engine at full song. Bill Elliott making up a two-lap deficit under green would not happen with restricted engines.

Today’s tighter fields do keep the hounds closer to the fox in the lead, and horsepower is less of an obstacle for the lesser-funded teams who struggle to keep up on intermediate tracks, which could be reason enough for the top Talladega winners to all come from the plate era. Plus, they had a larger window of time to get there in that the plate era is nearing the 40-year mark, nearly double the amount of years Talladega saw races without them.

So what about the “anyone can win” ideal that draws in fans and teams alike?

History doesn’t really support it. Since NASCAR tightened the field up in the late ‘90s, surprise winners haven’t really been a common occurrence. One of Keselowski’s wins came for James Finch’s small operation. Ricky Stenhouse Jr. took the checkers once for JTG-Daugherty Racing, and David Ragan took a trophy to Front Row Motorsports.

And that’s about it.

But part of Talladega’s allure along with the crashes (and yes, some of you watch for the crashes, face it) is the illusion that any driver could find victory lane. But the fact is, that actually happening is as rare, and as impressive, as a driver posting six wins in a time when the Big One looms large and doesn’t discriminate in who it catches unaware.

Keselowski has the chance to make history in a small way, should he win on Sunday, moving into sole possession of second on a Talladega winners’ list that’s become surprisingly more selective at the top with restricted engines. 

But a lot of fans will be rooting for the improbable, with an underdog taking home the big win. And while the numbers are surprisingly skewed towards that not happening, someone unexpected might run up front and contend and make fans hope that the numbers might just lie after all.