|| *Comments on the 1973 Winston Western 500:* View the most recent comment <#31> | Post a comment <#post> Tweet 1. Rusty posted: 08.11.2006 - 4:30 am Rate this comment: (0) (0) Roger Penske's first win as an owner. 2. b4il3y posted: 09.01.2006 - 6:27 am Rate this comment: (1) (0) wow. 191 laps. that's hardcore at a road course. and the time of the race was almost 5 hours long. i dont know if i would want to see that now. 3. Anonymous posted: 10.30.2006 - 1:12 am Rate this comment: (1) (0) Cale Yarborough's return to Winston Cup after an abortive Indycar stint. 4. Anonymous posted: 12.04.2006 - 10:40 pm Rate this comment: (0) (0) Holman-Moody's last entry. 5. Destiny posted: 06.20.2007 - 11:01 pm Rate this comment: (0) (0) Mark Donohue's only win with a top ten or five. 6. DieselDan posted: 11.07.2007 - 1:08 am Rate this comment: (0) (0) Last win for a road course "ringer". 7. Petty43 posted: 12.25.2007 - 4:06 pm Rate this comment: (0) (0) fourth and final start for Bobby Unser 8. GhostDog posted: 09.14.2008 - 4:26 am Rate this comment: (0) (0) First of 12 career starts for Richard White and Harry Jefferson. First of 9 for Hugh Pearson. Last of 2 career starts for John Hren, of 5 for Bob Kauf, of 9 for Clem Proctor. Only career start for Gerald Thompson. 9. Biscuits in a Red Bull posted: 08.04.2011 - 6:49 am Rate this comment: (1) (10) This race proves, along with Montoya's 2 wins, that drivers with skill succeed at circuits (or road courses). Drivers with heavy feet and strong left arms succeed at bowls. 10. rob posted: 03.11.2013 - 7:22 pm Rate this comment: (0) (0) gerald thompson drove car no. 69. 11. saltsburgtrojanfan posted: 12.25.2014 - 4:15 pm Rate this comment: (0) (0) Caution 1: Lap 6-9: #79 engine failure Caution 2: Lap 133-135: #30 stalled on track Caution 3: Lap 159-161: oil on track 12. KW posted: 03.02.2016 - 2:17 pm Rate this comment: (0) (0) The Permatex 200 for sportsman cars was run as a companion event. The race was won by Jack Jeffery in a 69 Dodge Charger, followed by Harry Jefferson, Bob Foster, Dan Clark and Bob Johnson. 13. Rob McKeever posted: 03.02.2016 - 6:06 pm Rate this comment: (1) (0) Would love for the LMS National Championship events to be added to Racing Reference. It would be a research chore for sure but it would be nice to know if some of the old mainstays had wins in Kyle Busch's range or not, specially drivers like Jack Ingram who lasted into the Budweiser days. NASCAR recognizes the LMS champs as Busch/Nationwide/Xfinity champs but haven't counted the wins. They really need to rectify that. Call 1982-present "Modern Era" like Cup does if they need to but that is one area where NASCAR needs to rectify things. 14. 23andJoe posted: 03.02.2016 - 7:24 pm Rate this comment: (0) (0) One reason NASCAR hasn't counted the wins is because a lot of that data is missing - The Third Turn has much of what is available, but most races do not have full field rundowns, and for many seasons even winners or even the number of races run isn't available. NASCAR did a terrible job of recordskeeping for the pre-BGN* series. * Yes, the first two years of the 'modern' series were the Budweiser Late Models, but who remembers that? 15. RaceFanX posted: 03.02.2016 - 7:59 pm Rate this comment: (0) (0) I really don't think the Late Model Sportsman, or the pre-1985 modified tour, results still exist in full to be honest. It is however always interesting to look back and see how Buschwacking really did predate the Busch series. "Yes, the first two years of the 'modern' series were the Budweiser Late Models, but who remembers that?" (Raises hand) Those early years were weird. They had a combination race with ARCA at IRP in 1985. 16. KW posted: 03.02.2016 - 10:17 pm Rate this comment: (0) (0) I had raised a question on Jack Ingram's page about maybe the Hall of Fame publishing something with complete statistics of inductees a while back and Alex had responded that a lot of information did still exist it just hadn't been digitized. I'm not sure when that is likely to happen but I wish it would. I do expect that much of the info for Modified and Sportsman races from the 50's and 60's is completely lost, things can be pieced together from yearbooks and newspapers, but I don't think its possible to ever know if its complete. National Speed Sport and Illistrated Speedway published a ton of race results but generally not full field run downs and even then its sometime hard to tell if a race was a Modified race or a Sportsman and if it was NASCAR sanction or not. There is a lot on thethirdturn and at ultimate racing history and things can be pieced together from other sources. Any thing anyone digs up, I'd love to hear about. 17. Alex posted: 03.03.2016 - 5:42 am Rate this comment: (0) (0) The odds of all of those Modified and Late Model Sportsman results getting digitized anytime soon is pretty much zilch: there is too much there for the current staff to handle. 18. Anonymous posted: 03.03.2016 - 6:12 am Rate this comment: (0) (0) The other thing is that actually working out which races were part of the Sportsman or Modified National Championships can be kind of difficult in my experience, as well. Anyway, there are other major NASCAR series with more complete results that haven't been fully put up yet, like NASCAR West, and the 68-72 NASCAR Grand Touring/Grand American series, which doesn't exist on here at all yet, and I think it was kind of higher in the pecking order of NASCAR series then Late Model Sportsman as well (it ran 400 mile races and new model cars, while Late Model Sportsman didn't generally run anything longer than 300 and its cars had to be 3 years old or more.) 19. KW posted: 03.03.2016 - 8:14 am Rate this comment: (0) (0) We can always hope that someone with time and money will take an interest in compiling stats for the Sportsman and Modified divisions. If not maybe when I retire in 20 or so years I'll do it. 20. 18fan posted: 10.14.2016 - 5:31 pm Rate this comment: (0) (0) Ray Elder's 5th straight top 5 at Riverside. 21. Rob posted: 02.12.2017 - 1:55 pm Rate this comment: (1) (0) Wow. First six qualifiers were Mercury,Chevy, Plymouth, AMC, Dodge and Ford. I really miss when it was a battle of the brands. 22. Rob posted: 09.11.2017 - 7:35 am Rate this comment: (0) (0) The broadcasting duties of this race were handled by hall of famer Ken Squirer who masterfully made an interesting broadcast out of what was basically a five hour snoozer. 23. RaceFanX posted: 03.31.2018 - 2:25 pm Rate this comment: (0) (0) Mark Donohue and the Penske team outfitted their #16 AMC Matador for this race with four-wheel disc brakes, a rarity in NASCAR at the time. After Donohue lapped the field en route to victory here that setup quickly became standard among NASCAR teams and it remains that way today. 24. RaceFanX posted: 11.06.2018 - 3:42 pm Rate this comment: (1) (0) Donahue's win here made him IIRC the only driver to win a NASCAR Winston Cup race and a Can-Am race at the same track in the same year. Donahue came back in October and won here at Riverside in Can-Am at the wheel of Penske's legendary Sunoco-backed "Can-Am Killer" open-top Porsche 917/30. 25. JSPorts posted: 11.06.2018 - 4:12 pm Rate this comment: (0) (0) Donoghue started 6 Cup races, but outside of this win (in which he led 138/191 laps), here were his stats: 5 starts, best finish 15th, 4 DNFs, 0 laps led, 32.6 average finish. I think it's a good thing he stuck with sports cars, but that is a small sample size and perhaps he could've been a successful stock car racer had he attempted to cross-over on a more regular basis. 26. RaceFanX posted: 04.30.2019 - 2:03 pm Rate this comment: (0) (0) As of the end of the 2018 season Mark Donohue's victory going away here in the Penske AMC remains the last victory in the Cup series for any of the so-called "road course ringers." While several have won Busch and Truck series races in the years since (Ron Fellows, Boris Said, Justin Marks, etc.) and there were a few close calls in the 1990s-early 2000s none of visiting racers have managed to best the NASCAR regulars since this one. 27. RaceFanX posted: 09.24.2019 - 9:37 am Rate this comment: (0) (0) For the first five years of his NASCAR career Cecil "Flash" Gordon was a stalwart FoMoCo racer but for 1973 he made the big switch to General Motors. This race marked the debut for his brand-new #24 Chevrolet and while he went out with transmission failure here Gordon would remain in the GM stable throughout almost all of his remaining NASCAR starts. He'd race Chevrolets exclusively for the next six seasons before he started running a variety of different cars from GM. 28. zuel660 posted: 07.29.2020 - 1:18 pm Rate this comment: (1) (0) Finishing a respectable 15th was Gerald Thompson in a '73 Pontiac Grand Am. Unfortunately after losing a engine in their Daytona qualifier the following month, the team apparently packed it in due to lack of funding. If so, it was a shame, because the Grand Am made for a very cool looking stock car. 29. BiscuitsInARedBull posted: 10.02.2020 - 10:07 am Rate this comment: (1) (0) What a gruelling race this one would have been. The mighty Mark Donohue, imo one of the finest drivers ever to grace motorsport, scored an impressive maiden win for Penske. The first career top 5 for Jimmy Insolo, a first of two career top tens for Richard White (both would come in his first two career starts - 8th and 6th, both at Riverside in 1973), and the career-best finish of J. C. Danielsen (and only career top 10) all came in this race. Finally I want to formally apologise for plaguing yet another comments section on this website in my teenage years lol. 30. JSPorts posted: 10.02.2020 - 11:19 am Rate this comment: (0) (0) Donohue was a really talented driver. He won in Cup, USAC & IROC, and competed in 14 F1 races, too. He could've had much more F1 success if he hadn't tragically died in a practice crash for the 1975 Austrian Grand Prix. 31. rateus posted: 02.20.2021 - 6:41 pm Rate this comment: (0) (0) The two alternates for this race were Dean Dalton in a Mercury and Ron Gautsche in a Ford. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ *Post a comment:* Your comment may not appear immediately - all comments must be approved by the moderator. Name: Comment: