When Jimmie Johnson edged Clint Bowyer for the victory in Sunday's Aaron's 499 in Talladega, he added another record to his sterling career: the closest finish in NASCAR history, 0.002 seconds.
The man whose record Johnson tied, Ricky Craven, was watching on television, and like the rest of us, didn't realize just how close the race was. "I got caught up in the race," he says. "There was no consideration that he'd tied the record. It wasn't until my wife mentioned it that I even thought about it. But Jimmie Johnson is good company."
Craven beat Kurt Busch in 2003 at Darlington, noted in the video above, by the same margin, though not in anywhere near the same manner. At Talladega, you had three pairs of cars racing end-to-end, but at Darlington, it was just Craven in the Tide #32 and Busch in the Rubbermaid #97, and as the laps wound down, neither man gave an inch.
"I'd passed Kurt earlier when we were coming with three laps to go, but I didn't expect him to race me into the corner," Craven said. "I knew I was going to only have one shot at this. I told myself, 'you're not dealing with a reasonable person here.' He was a kid, and he didn't have any regard for the track and what it could give you."
Earlier in the race, Busch had gone three-wide for a pass, a move the late NASCAR communications director Jim Hunter later told Craven was the boldest he'd ever seen. Clearly, then, Craven would have to play his last move exactly perfectly.
"I was considerably better in Turns 3 and 4 than him, so that was where my focus was," Craven says. "I wasn't quite able to make the pass off Turn 4, and then we made contact, and that's when all hell broke loose."
The cars collided, barreling across the finish line side-by-side in a billow of tire smoke. Craven, angled slightly inward, was clearly the winner, but he didn't even know it for nearly a minute.
"I don't remember much until I regained control of the car," he says. "I couldn't communicate with anybody because everybody was keying the mike at once. It wasn't until I dropped my window net and saw the 32 at the top of the scoreboard that I had confirmation."
In the wake of that incident, Craven gained new respect for Busch. "I hadn't known much about him, but I did know that he'd spun Terry Labonte at Rockingham," he said. "Nobody spins Terry Labonte. So that stuck in my mind, that I didn't quite know who I was dealing with here."
While celebrating in victory lane, Craven noticed Busch walking toward him. "I thought, 'this could go a lot of different ways,'" he says. "But he stuck his and out and said, 'That was as much fun as I've ever had.' That showed me he was a class act ... Since then, he's embraced that race, almost as if he won it. He's gone out of his way to celebrate the moment. It illustrated to me that he's a purist of the sport."
And as for Johnson? Craven says the magnitude of his achievement will start to sink in. "When I won Darlington, it was all about the satisfaction of winning at one of the toughest places on the circuit. How I won, the circumstances, were secondary," Craven says. "But after a while, it starts to really settle in that you've won a hell of a race."
And done it in a way that's almost unmatched in NASCAR history. Not bad at all.
Shiri Appleby Kelly Hu Michelle Rodriguez Mena Suvari Georgina Grenville
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