In RACER's Heroes V Issue: Silver Fox

Is David Pearson NASCAR’s best ever? Had he raced the full schedule during his potent partnership with the Wood Bros., chances are he’d be up with Petty and Earnhardt on championships earned. As it is, his win rate is without equal.

It was April 1976 and Buddy Baker’s Ford was dominating at Darlington Raceway, leading 205 of 367 laps in the Rebel 500. But as the laps wound down, car owner Bud Moore was on the radio, urgently warning Baker that David Pearson was in his rearview mirror and closing fast in his all-conquering Wood Brothers Racing No. 21 Mercury.

“He’d been telling Buddy all along, ‘He’s coming, he’s coming,’” says Wood Brothers co-owner Eddie Wood about the messages Moore was sending his driver. “And Buddy was, ‘Naw, I think I’ve got him. I’m OK today. I got it covered.’”

Baker, unfortunately, was guilty of a little bit of irrational exuberance. Not only did Pearson catch Baker on the frontstretch on lap 356, but as he pulled alongside him, Pearson lit a cigarette, blew smoke out the window at Baker and pulled away to victory by leading the final 12 laps. “The Silver Fox” had struck again...

It was vintage Pearson – messing with another driver in the heat of battle and, more importantly, waiting until the right time in the race to strike. Leonard Wood, Eddie’s uncle and Pearson’s chief mechanic during the team’s glory years, saw it often.

“He always made the comment, ‘If you run as hard as you can go all day, you’re going to make a mistake,’” recalls Leonard. “Back in those days, the cars would fall out a lot more, so he would bide his time and wait until about half-distance, when a lot of the cars had already fallen out. That’s when he’d start going to the front – if he wasn’t already in front, that is.”

And Pearson went to the front an awful lot in a career that saw him win 105 NASCAR premier series races and three championships in just 574 starts. Pearson’s 18.3 percent win average is better than that of chief rival Richard Petty, whose 200 victories in 1,184 starts gave him a 16.9 win percentage.

As smart and successful as Pearson was on the track, he never was wowed by the trappings of stardom and fame like so many drivers are. He was born in the South Carolina mill town of Whitney, near Spartanburg, and worked in the mills and at an Esso gas station before his racing career took off in the early 1960s.

Today, he still lives near Spartanburg in a modest red brick ranch house on a former peach farm that he bought in 1977. He turned 80 last December and has recently battled a variety of health issues, including an abdominal aneurysm in October and a mild stroke in December.

His circle of friends and family remains largely as it’s been for decades, and his leisure time activities including feeding his goats and mules, and restoring old cars. Simple pleasures.

For Pearson, racing was a way to make a living, not a way to become famous.

Read the complete story in The Heroes V Issue of RACER magazine, on sale now.

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