After walking away from a second-lap pileup at Charlotte Motor Speedway on October 6, 1974, twenty-nine-year-old driver Richard Childress told reporters he would have been killed if Marty Robbins had not driven his Number 42 Dodge Charger straight into a concrete wall at 160 miles per hour.
That split-second choice by a forty-nine-year-old Grammy winner allowed a cash-strapped independent racer from Winston-Salem, North Carolina, to survive the afternoon and eventually build Richard Childress Racing, an organization that would capture six NASCAR Cup Series championships with Dale Earnhardt.
At the start of the 1974 National 500, Childress was an owner-driver running his own Number 96 Chevrolet on a shoestring budget, often working on his own engines to stay on the circuit. On the second lap, a multi-car tangle left his car sitting broadside across the asphalt with the driver-side door facing oncoming traffic through a wall of tire smoke.
Coming out of the turn at full speed, Robbins saw the stationary Chevrolet blocking his path. Inspecting the black tire marks left on the banking afterward, a senior NASCAR official noted that Robbins had room to hold a lower line that would have cushioned his own impact, yet he jerked the wheel hard to the right and drove head-on into the outside concrete barrier to keep from T-boning Childress’s cockpit.
Rescue workers pulled Robbins from the crumpled magenta-and-gold Dodge and transported him to a Charlotte hospital with two broken ribs, a bruised chest, an injured tailbone, and deep facial lacerations that required thirty-two stitches between his eyes and across his nose. Even though his face appeared regularly on television and album covers, Robbins never complained about the scars, smiling from his hospital bed once doctors told him the other drivers were uninjured.
For veterans like Richard Petty, Cale Yarborough, and Bobby Allison, the wreck at Charlotte confirmed what they had gradually come to understand about the Columbia Records star since his Cup debut in 1966. In an era when full-time drivers guarded their turf fiercely against outside celebrities, Robbins never asked for special treatment and paid his own way without corporate sponsorship.
He hired legendary Spartanburg mechanic Cotton Owens to build and maintain his Dodges, writing personal checks from his concert tours to cover the garage bills. Even after suffering a major heart attack in August 1969 and undergoing one of the country’s earliest triple coronary bypass surgeries in January 1970, Robbins returned to the high banks as soon as his doctors cleared him.
Two years before the Charlotte crash, at the May 1972 Winston 500 in Talladega, Alabama, Robbins had won over the locker room with a display of blunt honesty. Frustrated by running near the back, he quietly knocked the NASCAR-mandated restrictor plate out of his carburetor before the race and began blowing past Petty, Allison, and Yarborough at speeds fifteen miles per hour faster than his qualifying laps.
When track officials tried to hand him the Rookie of the Race trophy after he finished eighteenth, Robbins refused the award and the extra purse money, confessing to inspectors what he had done because he just wanted to feel what it was like to pass the fastest men in the sport. Rather than banishing him, the garage embraced him as one of their own.
He proved his legitimacy again in the summer of 1974 by finishing fifth in the Motor State 360 at Michigan International Speedway, finishing ahead of dozens of full-time touring pros. Along the way, he also helped younger drivers quietly, including purchasing a race engine for a young Sterling Marlin and surrendering his cherished Number 42 to Kyle Petty in 1979 so the teenager could carry his grandfather Lee Petty’s historic number.
After recovering from the October 1974 wreck at Charlotte, Robbins kept entering superspeedway events whenever his touring schedule allowed, making thirty-five career Cup starts before running his final race at Atlanta in November 1982. One month later, on December 8, 1982, Robbins died in Nashville at age fifty-seven following his third heart attack and quadruple bypass surgery.
On May 7, 1983, NASCAR honored the singer at his home track by renaming the annual Cup race at Nashville Fairgrounds Speedway the Marty Robbins 420, where his widow, Marizona Robbins, served as grand marshal and Darrell Waltrip took the checkered flag. One month after that Nashville tribute, on June 5, 1983, Richard Childress stood in Victory Lane at Riverside, California, celebrating his very first Cup Series win as a car owner with driver Ricky Rudd and dedicating the trophy to the man who had steered into the Charlotte concrete nine years earlier.