Cook, Isaac, Labonte, Smith and Turner make 2016 NASCAR Hall of Fame class
Jerry Cook, Bobby Isaac, Terry Labonte, Bruton Smith and Curtis Turner are the 2016 inductees into the NASCAR Hall of Fame.
The five will be inducted into the Hall of Fame in January. They were chosen from a pool of 20 candidates on Wednesday and five candidates will take the inductees’ place in the pool for consideration into the 2017 class.
Smith was the leading vote-getter with 68 percent of the vote. Labonte was second with 61 percent, and Turner was third at 60 percent. Both Cook (47 percent) and Isaac (44 percent) got less than half of the available votes, speaking to the lack of voter consensus among this year’s nominees.
Jerry Cook: Perhaps the most unrecognizable name for casual NASCAR fans, Cook won six NASCAR modified titles. He also won four in a row from 1974-1977. He retired in 1982 and became the series director of the NASCAR Whelen Modified Tour in 1985. He is a competition administrator for NASCAR. He’s also a member of the NASCAR Hall of Fame voting panel, but he, along with Robert Yates, was recused from the voting since he was a nominee.
Bobby Isaac: Isaac won 37 Sprint Cup Series races in 308 starts over 15 years. He was the 1970 series champion, winning 11 races in 47 starts. His winningest season came in 1969 when he won 17 races. He won 19 poles that same season, a mark that still stands as the most poles won in a single NASCAR season.
Terry Labonte: A two-time champion, Labonte won 22 races in 890 starts. He won his first title in 1984 when he had 24 top-10 finishes in 30 races. His second title came in 1996, when he had 24 top-10 finishes in 31 races. He also won two races in each of those seasons. His winningest seasons were in 1994 and 1995; he won three races in each. His first and last wins came at Darlington.
Bruton Smith: The executive chairman of Speedway Motorsports, Inc., Smith has been an integral part of NASCAR’s growth. SMI owns tracks in Charlotte, Texas, Las Vegas, Kentucky and more. Overall, Smith has eight tracks on the Sprint Cup Series schedule and the tracks host a third of the series’ points races. He built Charlotte Motor Speedway in 1960 and Joe Lee Johnson won the first Coca-Cola 600 that year.
Curtis Turner: Turner made starts over a span of 17 NASCAR seasons and had 17 wins in 184 races. He won four races in 16 starts in 1950 and won three races in 12 starts in 1951 and three races in 17 starts in 1958 (he never ran a full season in NASCAR). He competed in NASCAR’s first strictly stock race at Charlotte in 1949 and he’s the only driver in NASCAR history to win two-straight races from the pole while also leading every lap. Those wins came at Rochester and Charlotte in 1950.
The pool of 15 candidates that didn’t make it in the 2016 class included Buddy Baker, Red Byron, Richard Childress, Ray Evernham, Ray Fox, Rick Hendrick, Harry Hyde, Alan Kulwicki, Mark Martin, Hershel McGriff, Raymond Parks, Benny Parsons, Larry Phillips, Mike Stefanik and Robert Yates.
Harold Brasington won the Landmark Award for Outstanding Contributions for NASCAR. Brasington built Darlington Raceway, which hosted NASCAR’s first 500-mile race in 1950.
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Nick Bromberg is the editor of From The Marbles on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter!
