Editor’s Note: NASCAR is celebrating its 75th anniversary. SPEED SPORT was founded in 1934 and was already on its way to becoming America’s Motorsports Authority when NASCAR was formed. As a result, we will bring you Part 56 of a 75-part series on the history NASCAR.
Longtime NASCAR Cup Series fans can be forgiven if the 2003 season left them believing the gates of Hades suddenly had been covered with ice. Sometimes, it seemed as if hell had really frozen over.
Consider some of what went on last year in the Winston Cup Series:
• After 31 years at the helm of NASCAR, CEO Bill France Jr. stepped down and turned over the reins of the sanctioning body to his son, Brian.
• After 33 years as the series’ primary sponsor, RJ. Reynolds announced it was pulling its Winston brand out of NASCAR, which allowed cell-phone maker Nextel to win a $75 million-per-year bidding war to sponsor what next year will become the Nextel Cup Series.
• After more than 40 years as NASCAR’s official fuel supplier, ConocoPhillips’ Unocal 76 brand announced it, too, was stepping aside, to be replaced by Sunoco.
• In an announcement that caught every one by surprise, General Motors decided to pull the plug on Pontiac’s involvement in Cup Series racing. Next year, Chevrolet will be GM’s lone brand in the series.
• NASCAR glamour couple of the late 1990s, Brooke and Jeff Gordon got divorced and Jeff sold his beachfront Florida home for $13.3 million. His furniture fetched another $2 million.
• Top teams, including Dale Earnhardt Inc. and Roush Racing, were hunting for sponsors even after the season ended.
• Perhaps even more astonishing, Jack Roush ended 15 years of frustration and near misses when one of his drivers, Matt Kenseth, finally won a Winston Cup Championship. Roush had come heartbreakingly close on several occasions, with his drivers finishing second four times and third six times, but until 2003, his teams could never seal the deal.
It was that kind of year. And that’s just for starters.
Kenseth and Ryan Newman took turns dominating the season, albeit in very different ways. Kenseth took the point lead in the season’s fourth race and never surrendered it, leading a record 33 weeks in a row en route to his first championship.
The affable Wisconsin native tied a more dubious record, joining 1973 champ Benny Parsons as the only other Winston Cup champion to win just one race during his title season. His was a quirky season: Kenseth had more top-10 finishes than anyone else, with 25, but fewer top fives than six other drivers.
Still, the NASCAR scoring system awards consistency and Kenseth was remarkable on that front.
Kenseth scored top-10 finishes in 10 of the first 12 races, including a second place in the rain-shortened Coca-Cola 600 at Charlotte Motor Speedway on Memorial Day weekend, which gave him a 160-point lead over Dale Earnhardt Jr.
After that, the race for the title was never in doubt. By late September at Dover, the margin was an incredible 436 points and Kenseth clinched the title during the penultimate race at Rockingham, N.C.
When asked how it felt to make history becoming the last Winston Cup champion, the unassuming Kenseth was, well, unassuming.
“I haven’t thought of my place in history yet because I hope I have a lot more to make,” he said. “I haven’t really looked back at it that but I have sure felt honored to be part of the group that have been Winston Cup champions and for our team to be part of that. There aren’t many people that even get the chance to race at this level let alone be successful and drive for a championship team.”
Only a blown engine and subsequent 43rd-place finish at the season-ending Ford 400 at Homestead Miami Speedway cut the gap to less than 100 points over runner-up Jimmie Johnson. Earnhardt, Gordon and Kevin Harvick rounded out the top five in points.
Sixth-place finisher Ryan Newman was the yin to Kenseth’s yang, fast most everywhere he went, but also the victim of the kinds of misfortunes Kenseth steered clear of. Newman won a series-high eight races and 11 poles, also a series high. He was a threat to win most every weekend. But he also had more than his share of rotten luck.
He was usually fast and sometimes furious, not a good combination over a 36-race season.
Twice, Newman was put on his roof, in savage crashes at Daytona and Talladega.
In successive weeks in the spring, he finished 39th at Talladega, 38th at Martinsville, 42nd in California and 39th at Richmond, where he was asked if anything like this had ever happened to him.
“I had a dog die once,” Newman dead panned.
Newman’s combination of blinding speed and rotten luck proved definitively that the race does not always go to the swift, at least not when it comes to Winston Cup.
For the rest of the field, 2003 was the year of the young guns: Johnson, Earnhardt and Harvick all showed flashes of potentially being champions and none of the top eight finishers in the championship was older than 32.
The definitive voice during the 2000 Cup Series season, however, belongs to Roush — a man who for the first time experienced the thrill of victory in NASCAR’s grandest arena, after 15 years spent suffering the agony of defeat, sometimes in the cruelest ways imaginable.
“I feel humbled by the thing that I’m a part of,” Roush said shortly after the season concluded. “It’s bigger than my frustration and it’s bigger than the competition that has been associated with it. It’s just large, and right now I’m kind of in awe.”