The Big Three.
That's the term we've heard throughout the 2018 NASCAR Cup Series season, referring to collectively dominant performances of Kyle Busch, Kevin Harvick and defending series champion Martin Truex Jr. Between them, they have hoarded 17 wins in 27 races.
On Sunday evening, Brad Keselowski made his case for a Big Four, taking the playoff opener at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, his third victory in a row and for the year. Busch and Truex both finished among the top seven. Harvick finished 39th after a crash, his first non-top-10 since early July.
Certainly some of the chatter surrounding the trio's trouncing of the field has been complimentary. But a sizable percentage of the talk has included complaints of too much stockpiled by too few teams. These days, sports fans want parity -- at least, they claim that's what they want. But many of those same folks also pine for the way it was in the "good ol' days."
"Let me tell you about the good ol' days," Richard Petty recently said in response to midsummer complaining about the NASCAR haves having too much. "These days, every year we have at least 10 winners. Ten. Back in my day if we'd had 10 winners, that's when people would've been asking what was wrong. These three guys this year, they know who they have to beat. It's those other two guys. Back in the day, that's how it always was."
The King points to the smartphone that is recording his comments.
"Take that deal in your hand there and go look up the 1974 NASCAR season. You'll see what I'm talking about."
The 1974 NASCAR Winston Cup Series season had 30 races. All but three of those races were won by three drivers. Petty won 10. Cale Yarborough won 10. David Pearson won seven. The remaining three events were divided among two other drivers, Bobby Allison with two wins and Earl Ross with his only career win. More on that later.
It wasn't merely that those three won 90 percent of the races in '74. It was also about how they went about winning them. Yarborough and Petty combined to lead 6,630 laps, roughly divided at 3,000-plus apiece. Pearson, running only 19 of the 30 races, led an additional 1,167 laps. That's 7,797 total. The entire series ran only 10,548 laps. So the '74 Big Three led 74 percent of the laps run. Throw in Allison's 901 and it jumps to 82 percent. The remaining 1,850 laps were divided up among 34 drivers, 19 of whom led 13 laps or less.
Harvick, Busch, Truex and Keselowski have led 47 percent of the laps run this year. Are the rules different these days? Yes. But so is the parity. As in, parity actually exists now.
The holy '74 triumvirate set the tone in the season opener at Southern California's Riverside International Raceway. Yarborough opened his second season driving for Junior Johnson with the road course victory, followed by Petty and Pearson. They were the only cars to finish on the lead lap.
Five of the trio's wins came by one lap or more, with one of Petty's victories coming by two laps, at North Wilkesboro in April. When they had company on the lead lap, it was familiar. On 10 different occasions, the only cars to finish on the lead lap were some combination of Yarborough, Petty or Pearson. Riverside was one of three races where they were the only three on the lead lap.
"Those three teams had the best equipment, the most money and three of the best drivers," recalled Allison, who played the role of Keselowski in '74. He was easily the most frequent lead lap interloper and won twice, at the beginning and end of the season, driving for two different teams, including Roger Penske (just like Keselowski). As Allison talks about '74, he laughs.
"I say three of the best because none of them was the best driver," he said. "I'm pretty sure that was me. Especially when you figure that I won twice running up against those teams that had so much more than we did. If I'd been in their rides I would've run with them every week. You ask them. They'll tell you."
"Well, I don't know about that!" Yarborough responded. "But Bobby was always in the mix. He just wasn't in the mix with us as much that year. He had a hard time finding money and sponsors and even just a steady ride. A lot of people did. It was a strange year."
That's also a trait that '74 shares with 2018 and not a good one.
It was time of great financial uncertainty throughout the United States, let alone the garages of NASCAR. The nation was in the grips of an energy crisis, with mandated gasoline rationing and marching orders from then-President Richard Nixon that all professional sports reduce fuel consumption by 20-25 percent.
NASCAR founder Bill France announced he was shortening races, including the Daytona 500, while his son, still-new NASCAR president Bill France Jr., rolled out his latest brainchild, a new championship points format. It was the second new system in as many years and fourth in eight seasons.
It immediately drew public bemoaning from fans and drivers alike, all of whom said it was too complicated and rigged to reward the bigger teams over the little guys. There was also a slew of new tech rules unveiled throughout the season, including a push to small-block engines that forced smaller teams to shut down and bigger teams to gripe about costs and increasingly frustrating weekend inspection procedures.
1974 was only the fourth NASCAR season with red cigarettes as the title sponsor and third with a new streamlined 30-ish race schedule that had trimmed out all dirt tracks and leaned toward newer, flashier superspeedways. The Pocono Raceway had just opened and the Texas World Speedway had just been abruptly shuttered. Ontario Speedway in Southern California was still new, as was Michigan International Speedway and Dover Downs, all amid complaints that stock car racing was abandoning its roots.
Meanwhile, even with Yarborough in the midst of contending for a title, Johnson was struggling to find full sponsorship and admitting he might have to walk away because "I can't just keep pumping my own money into this thing."
Any of this sounding familiar?
"I say this all the time, whether anybody wants to hear me or not," Petty explains now. "There's nothing we're going through here that we hadn't already been through before at some point. Whether it's too little money to go around or too many changes all at once, or too few guys winning races."
Says Allison: "I would add to that, that instead of complaining about it all the time, use that energy to figure out how you can work through it. When Cale and Richard and David were whipping my butt, sure I complained about it. I was a professional complainer. But I was also a professional worker. And I worked my tail off and I beat them. So did Earl."
Ah yes, Earl. That would be Earl Ross, the only one-race winner in '74 and the only victor from that season who isn't a member of the NASCAR Hall of Fame -- and will likely never receive a vote. But on Sept. 29, 1974, in the season's 27th race, the 33-year-old nobody from Prince Edward Island held off the Big Three to win at Martinsville Speedway.
"I wouldn't say I held them off," Ross explained via telephone in 2009, five years before his death. "Richard Petty blew an engine very early on. Cale Yarborough was leading when he blew an engine. And I don't think Pearson was even entered in the race [he wasn't]. But we had been running in the top 10 that entire summer. We had always been in a position to win a race, should the opportunity present itself. And on that really, really hot day at Martinsville, it did."
It ended up being Ross' only career Cup Series win. The Carling Brewing Company, eager to get its Canadian cans into the hands of thirsty Americans, had tabbed the local racer to go south with its sponsorship. Carling approached Junior Johnson, who took the money, expanded his operation to two cars and boosted Ross to become only the second foreign-born Cup Series winner and the '74 Rookie of the Year.
So, yes, Ross was the Cinderella story of '74. But the only way he was able to break the Big Three blockade was by driving race cars prepared in the same shop as the cars of arguably the best among them, Yarborough.
"It wasn't like a bunch of guys showed up and beat the big boys driving a jalopy," Johnson once recalled of Ross' win. "I built his cars just like I built Cale's. And we didn't build no jalopies."
Before season's end, Carling decided to pull its sponsorship after finishing eighth in the standings, so Ross took his ROY trophy and went back home. 1974 would be his only full NASCAR season.
Petty won his fifth championship over Yarborough. But don't ask him how.
"That points deal was so complicated we scrapped it as soon as the season was over," he said.
One year later, 1975 felt like severe parity compared to the season before. A whopping eight drivers won races, though Petty won 13 and no one else won more than four. Not until 1980 did the list of winners finally crack double digits, when 10 drivers found Victory Lane.
In '83, it hit a dozen, where it hovered for roughly a quarter century. The average continued to grow during the Chase era before this year's relative anomaly. But even amid the talk of the 2018 Big Three, 10 drivers have won races this season, with five winning twice or more.
"There is so much about the sport today that is so different," Allison said. "But there's also a lot of about back then that wasn't as great as people want to say, that sure isn't as great as it is now. Going to the racetrack and knowing for absolute certain that only three or four guys can win, that can get old real quick."
Allison chuckles. "Unless you're one of those three or four guys."