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Terry Labonte
| Biography |
(born November 16, 1956, in Corpus Christi, Texas (Corpus Christi, Texas: more facts about this subject) ) is a racecar driver in NASCAR (NASCAR: the national association for stock car auto racing (nascar) is the largest sanctioning...
[follow hyperlink for more...]) . His father had worked on racecars as a hobby for his friends, so young Labonte’s interest in the sport seemed only natural. He started racing quarter-midgets when he was 7 and won a national championship at nine. But once he tried the local short tracks in a stock car as a teenager, he had found his calling. Driving on both dirt and asphalt, he won track championships in his hometown, in Houston, and in San Antonio from 1975 to 1977. During this time he also met the man who would become his first big-league sponsor and team owner, Billy Hagan. A successful businessman from Louisiana, Hagan offered Labonte a job on his Winston Cup team along with the promise to drive five races that year.
Labonte’s first start came in 1978 at The Track Too Tough to Tame, Darlington Raceway (Darlington Raceway: |style="background-color:#016dab;color:#fff;text-align:center;border-bottom:2px #000 solid;" colspan="2"|darlington...
[follow hyperlink for more...]) . He finished an impressive fourth that Labor Day weekend and competed for Rookie of the Year in 1979 along with Dale Earnhardt (Dale Earnhardt: more facts about this subject) , Harry Gant, and Joe Millikin. Earnhardt won top honors in that department, but Labonte was one of three rookies to finish in the top 10 in points. The following year saw him win his first race, again at Darlington, in September 1980.
Within five years (1984) he won his first Winston Cup (Winston Cup: the nascar championship is the championship held in nascars top stock car racing...
[follow hyperlink for more...]) championship, the youngest driver ever to accomplish that feat at the time. In 1987, after almost 10 years with Hagan, Labonte made the first team change of his career and began a 3-year contract with the famed Junior Johnson. He made plans to field his own team in 1990, but promised investments fell through at the last minute and he instead signed to run the 1990 campaign with Richard Jackson before returning to Billy Hagan for the 1991-1993 seasons. His career seemed to have hit the skids by this time, failing to win a single race during those 4 years.
In 1994, Labonte joined Hendrick Motorsports and responded by notching 3 wins in each of his first two years there. In 1996, his pursuit of Richard Petty (Richard Petty: richard petty (born july 2, 1937) is a renowned former nascar winston cup...
[follow hyperlink for more...]) ’s Ironman streak for consecutive races ended in April in Victory Lane at North Wilkesboro. Despite winning only two races, Labonte went on to win the championship that year as well, a record-setting twelve years after his first. Driving with a broken hand during the last two races of the season, Labonte and younger brother Bobby Labonte (Bobby Labonte: more facts about this subject) treated the fans to a dual victory lap in Atlanta at the last race of the year. Bobby won the race and Terry the championship on the final day of the season, giving Bob and Martha Labonte two winning sons that day.
After his championship run, Labonte’s point totals once again began to falter. For the next six years, his final standing in the season’s points dipped lower and lower, plunging from first in 1996 all the way to 24th in 2002. During this time his own Ironman streak ended as well. After hard crashes two weeks in a row in July 2000, he began to experience the vertigo that would force him from the car eventually at Indianapolis during the first week of August. His own family doctor finally determined that the culprit was a tiny piece of calcium that had been knocked loose in his inner ear. With finishes outside the top 20 in the year-end standings during those lean years, Labonte was written off once more as a driver with no wins left in him.
In 2003, Labonte’s career showed signs of life once again. He garnered a pol |
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