Without a doubt, one of NASCAR's best on a road course

By DAVID POOLE, Charlotte Observer — Sunday, August 13, 2006

Seventeen years ago today, Rusty Wallace won the Winston Cup race here at Watkins Glen International.

Early that morning, from his hospital room in West Palm Beach, Fla., Tim Richmond called his mother, Evelyn.

Evelyn Richmond had spent more than year sitting day by day by the side of her ailing son, whom she loved so dearly. She was sleeping when Tim called and told her that he wanted her to come to the hospital so he could talk to her.

Evelyn hung up the phone and dialed the number back. Tim didn’t answer, but one of his nurses did. Evelyn was told that Tim had gone back to sleep and that when he probably wouldn’t even remember calling his mom when he woke back up.

Evelyn decided that she’d wait until daylight to make her daily trip to the hospital to sit by her son’s bed.

About an hour later, Tim Richmond passed away.

Evelyn was haunted by her decision not to come when Tim asked her to, but nobody who knew how much of her energy, her very life itself, she gave to her son would ever blame her in any way.

By that morning, about 20 months after Richmond first learned that he had AIDS, the family knew the end was coming. It was, in many ways, ironic that the NASCAR world was in upstate New York when the sad day came.

Three years earlier, Tim Richmond had one of the greatest days of his life at Watkins Glen International. On Aug. 10, 1986, the Winston Cup circuit returned to this historic road course to race for the first time since 1965, and Richmond scored a victory during a streak that made him the biggest story in the sport that summer.

In the previous seven races, Richmond had won three times and finished second three more. He and crew chief Harry Hyde had finally figured out how to communicate with each other and their No. 25 Chevrolet was suddenly scary fast.

When Richmond won the pole here, it was the ninth straight time he’d started in the top 10. He’d extend that streak to 20 races by season’s end, and in the final 27 races of that year he started in the first two rows 22 times.

Richmond won The Budweiser at the Glen that year, beating Darrell Waltrip and Dale Earnhardt to the finish line. Afterward, he and Hyde and the team retired to the bar at the nearby Seneca Lodge to celebrate, reviving a tradition that had long been part of racing at this historic venue.

When Richmond won the Southern 500 at Darlington and the next race at Richmond later that year, he’d won six times and finished second four times in a remarkable 12-race stretch.

But at the end of that year, after fighting several bouts with what he thought was a bad cold or the flu, Richmond learned he had something far more serious. The world was just beginning to understand AIDS, and the diagnosis at that time was still considered a virtual death sentence.

Richmond missed the first half of the 1987 season, recovering from pneumonia that had led to his actual diagnosis. He won his first two points races back, at Pocono and Riverside, but by August of that year he was fighting the physical, medical and emotional battles that came with his illness.

When he showed up late for the drivers’ meeting at Watkins Glen on the morning of Aug. 9, some of his fellow drivers felt he was in no condition to race. The race was rained out that day, however, and Richmond ran all 90 laps and finished 10th in the race on Monday.

The next weekend at Michigan, Richmond nearly slept through his turn at qualifying and left the race early with a blown engine. He drove the No. 25 car straight to the garage and was gone to his motor home by the time most of his team got there.

He never raced in another NASCAR event.

Tim Richmond would have been 51 years old. He might have won a couple of championships. He almost certainly would have cemented his place in the sport’s history as one of its most talented and most popular drivers. He very well might have moved on to a career in Hollywood, something he always wanted to do. Maybe he would have found a wife and had a son who’d be growing up to be as charismatic and as talented as his famous father.

No one who ever saw Richmond race anywhere will ever forget seeing what he could do with a race car. And for certain, nobody who ever saw him run a road course, here or at Riverside, will ever doubt that they got to see one of the best at that discipline to ever compete in NASCAR.