There are few events in sports that excite fans more than seeing two drivers coming off Turn Four at Atlanta Motor Speedway charging wheel-to-wheel toward a flagman leaning out over the track, holding a coiled checkered flag as a 500-mile marathon boils down to a quarter-mile drag race.
Atlanta Motor Speedway has seen it share of those dramatic moments in the 99 Cup races the track has hosted. Since NASCAR adopted electronic scoring in 1993, two of the seven closest finishes, all of them .01 seconds or less, have come at Atlanta, where the Sprint Cup Series will run its 100th Cup race, the Kobalt Tools 500 on March 6-8.
It’s no surprise that one of those close finishes involved the late Dale Earnhardt, the all-time win leader at AMS. It came in the spring race of 2000. Earnhardt’s Richard Childress Racing teammate Mike Skinner led the most laps that day, 191 circuits, but fell out of the running with a blown engine.
As the laps wound down, Earnhardt led, but Bobby Labonte, now the active win leader at AMS with six victories, was charging hard at the end. As the duo approached the checkered flag, Labonte drove his Joe Gibbs-owned Pontiac to the inside of Earnhardt’s familiar black No. 3 Chevrolet, but Earnhardt held on to win by inches - .01 seconds according to the official clock.
It would be Earnhardt’s ninth and final win at AMS and the next-to-last of his 76 Cup victories, the final one coming at Talladega later in 2000.
When the Cup circuit arrived at Atlanta the next March, the sport was reeling from the loss of Earnhardt in a crash at Daytona. His black Chevys had been painted white, re-numbered 29, and a raw rookie, Kevin Harvick, had been given the intimidating chore of driving the cars.
With just a few laps remaining in his first Cup race at Atlanta, Harvick found himself in the same position as Earnhardt the year before – holding on to the lead while a challenger, this time Jeff Gordon, closed on his bumper. Once again, the leader held on, this time by a margin of just .006 seconds.
Some say fate played a role in the outcome that time. Harvick says maybe not. He says close finishes aren’t surprising at AMS because the layout of the racing surface lends itself to them.
“The track gives you a lot of options to move around,” he said. “When you get behind or the guy’s taking your line in front of you, from the top to the bottom of the race track it gives you a chance. That’s why you see so many of those races play out like they do.”
Carl Edwards, who participated in a similar finish in 2005, beating Jimmie Johnson with a last-lap pass to get his first Cup win by a scant .028 seconds, agrees with Harvick.
“I’d say you could probably get by a guy on the bottom too,” he said. “Jimmie was on the bottom, so I took the outside.”
Both winning cars from 2000 and 2001 were owned by Richard Childress, who like many in the sport finds it difficult to explain the similarities in the way those two races turned out.
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