By The Commish

In just a few weeks the Nextel Cup cars will return to the track at Daytona and our attention, once again, will be focused on racing. Inevitably a driver will slip below the yellow line that marks the “out of bounds” apron of the track and be penalized. And for those of us who remember when racing at Daytona was a matter of skill rather than applied bumpers, a moment of the 1999 Daytona 500 will inevitably pass before our eyes. In Daytona lore, it is known simply as "The Pass," and may be the best pure driving move ever made on that historic racetrack.

With fifteen laps to go, Rusty Wallace was leading the race with Dale Earnhardt in second and Jeff Gordon in third. Wallace’s teammate Jeremy Mayfield was hanging with the lead pack, as was Earnhardt’s teammate Mike Skinner in the Lowe’s car and his near-teammate, Ken Schrader, driving Andy Petree’s Skoal Chevrolet. Gordon was alone, as he had been nearly all race, working his way to the front and inevitably being shuffled back by alliances from other teams. He said after the race that "I felt about the loneliest out there today that I have ever felt" because no one would give him any advantage by drafting with him.

Coming low out of turn two, Gordon pulled up to within a hair’s breadth of Earnhardt's bumper, taking the air off his spoiler and making the back end of Earnhardt's car break loose momentarily. Gordon passed the #3 car and pulled even with Wallace, while Skinner made it three wide on the outside and Chad Little, in Jack Roush’s John Deere car, followed closely behind. For two and a half laps Gordon struggled to pass Wallace, but the Penske Ford held strong and Gordon had to fall back behind the leader.

With eleven laps to go, it was anyone’s race. CBS announcers Ken Squier, Ned Jarrett, and Benny Parsons were focused on the race for third place, as Skinner passed Earnhardt and made contact with Little, causing both cars to swerve and the #3 car to check up momentarily. Jarrett was predicting that Michael Waltrip, in the #7 Chevrolet, would come to the front. Parsons, catching the action out of the corner of the eye, said "I thought they would wreck but they didn't." Unless you were eagle-eyed, watching on television, you missed a moment of pure Daytona magic.

As Wallace and Gordon swept through turns one and two into lap 190, Gordon dived down below the yellow line to pass Wallace legally on the inside. The wounded car of Ricky Rudd, almost 30 laps down, was just ahead, limping around on the apron with accident damage, trying desperately to finish the race and secure a few more points. "I had been trying to set Rusty up for a few laps and I had a lot of momentum built up when I started under him," Gordon said. "Then I got out there and saw Ricky and thought for a couple of seconds I was going to have to get on the brakes hard. The split second that I was ready to lift off the gas I saw Ricky move just a little bit, and I think even Rusty thought, 'Oooh, this is going to be a little tight.'"

Tight was not the word for it. In the space of less than a second on my stopwatch, Gordon changed his car’s direction three times, somehow both missing Rudd and using the sidedrafts from both his and Wallace’s car to slingshot forward. Wallace, whose car had juked loose just an instant before and possibly made the slightest contact with the right side of the #24 car, slid about a foot or so higher in the low groove. With the kind of car control we rarely see in Cup racing today, Gordon, Rudd, and Wallace somehow avoided an accident that would have taken out most of the field behind them yet never lifted off their throttles. Gordon shot to the lead and did not relinquish it, even when Dale Earnhardt pushed him hard in the last ten laps. The Pass had won Gordon his second Daytona 500.

After the race, Gordon downplayed the skill part of his move. "Rusty was doing everything he should. He ran me down low. There’s a lot of apron there, and I utilized as much of it as I could. Then I got down there and saw Ricky Ruddy running real slow, and I thought, 'Oh, Ricky! I hope you see me coming, because I’m coming real fast.' It felt like I was coming up on him at a thousand miles an hour and I was getting ready to hold on tight. I was going to have to get on my brakes real hard or I don’t know what else could have happened. Just a split second before I got to Ricky he moved over a little bit."

Remarkably, the only still photos I have ever seen of The Pass are a grainy sequence from National Speed Sport News; it happened so fast, and in a part of the track that is so hard to see, that most people missed it altogether. Only after the race did the television broadcast find a view of the move from high above the frontstretch grandstand. It shows that at the last moment Rudd moved over about a foot, his left side tires kicking up grass and dirt. Wallace's car, still loose, had slipped just enough up the banking to provide Gordon room. By most estimates, there was less than a foot on either side of Gordon's car at over 185 mph as he made the pass coming out of turn 2.

A few veteran observers took note. Chris Economaki called it "pure brilliance in a race car," while Ed Hinton, a veteran motorsports writer not much given to hyperbole, described the move in his book Daytona: From The Birth of Speed to the Death of the Man in Black like this:
"Gordon's moves had come and gone before the naked eye like the jagged path of lightning across the sky….That sort of move, almost right up the rear of Rudd's car to get past Wallace, at that moment, would have even been attempted by only one other driver on the planet: Michael Schumacher of Formula One. After thinking about it awhile, the difference dawned on me: Schumacher wouldn’t have made it. He would have crashed. Having watched Schumaker, and the late Ayrton Senna, and the late Ronnie Peterson, and the late Jochen Rindt, and the great Le Professeur, Alain Prost, and Dale Earnhardt, and David Pearson, and A.J. Foyt, and Cale Yarborough, and Darrell Waltrip, and whole lineages of Allisons, Andrettis, and Unsers, it occurred to me at that moment on February 14, 1999, that Jeffrey Michael Gordon might just be the best racing driver, in any type of car, anywhere, that I had ever seen."

Of course, not everyone was as impressed. The Pass was called "really foolish" by a frustrated Wallace after the race. "It could have taken a lot of people out -- and killed some people too," he said. "It's something that can lose you a lot of respect from your competitors." Wallace, whose outstanding career never included a restrictor plate win, added, "I thought about just holding [Gordon] down on the apron and driving him right into the back of Rudd's car. I thought Gordon would maybe get out of the throttle a little bit, but he wouldn't. He was going. To do it over again, I probably would have held him down there and waited for the outcome." Instead, Wallace was hung out in the middle groove and ended up finishing 8th in a race he clearly thought he should have won. As Gordon told Sports Illustrated's John Giannone after the race, "[Rusty] could have very easily given me more room. He was the one pinching me down to the bottom. He saw that it was happening. But I'm sitting here with a Daytona 500 win and he's not, so of course he's going to be disappointed."

Even now, all these years later, to watch the replays of The Pass is to realize how fast and how brilliant a piece of driving it was—and how unlikely we are to ever see its like again. In a way, this was the end of finesse racing at Daytona. In 2000, when Gordon fell out early and Fords dominated, there were only four on-track passes for the lead of the race. In 2001, of course, there was little competitive racing until the end, where tragedy struck. After that, we saw the advent of reinforced bumper bars combined with an aerodynamic package that has led to the evolution of brute force restrictor plate racing, until we are now at the stage Dale Earnhardt Jr. facetiously labels "slam drafting." Reacting to the increased level of on-track contact, and perhaps to the changed nature of the driving field, which features more young drivers with less car control, NASCAR made passing below the yellow line illegal in 2002. Thus, unless the rules or car conditions change, we will never see another daring pass below the line for a win in America’s most famous stock car race. As we watch Daytona this year, we'll undoubtedly hear much more about slam drafting, the inevitable "Big Ones" that result from it, and how restrictor plates and the aerodynamic package makes skilled passing impossible. Maybe that's true. But when you hear those conversations, just remember: it wasn’t always that way. And we have The Pass to prove it.

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