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Ryan McGee, ESPN Senior Writer
As the race shops and racetracks of the world begin to fill up with the racket and noise of crew members working and the roar of preseason testing, before we stand on the loud pedal of the 2024 motorsports calendar, let’s take a moment to pause and make ourselves a quiet promise to keep in the year ahead. Don’t take for granted the people who are still here with us.
Over the holidays, auto racing lost a pair of driving titans. The first was on Dec. 29, when Indy 500 and two-time IndyCar champion Gil de Ferran died at the age of 56, suffering a heart attack while behind the wheel during a private racing event in Florida. All one needs to know about the universally beloved Brazilian is what he did with his final moments of life. Sensing something was wrong, he was conscious enough of his worsening health condition that he pulled off to the side of the raceway, using his last bit of strength to find the brake pedal and ensure the safety of his co-driver, his son.
Only two days later, New Year’s Eve, NASCAR Hall of Famer Cale Yarborough died at the age of 84. Last fall, when we began revealing our NASCAR 75 Greatest lists, the first of those top-five compilations was Toughest Drivers. Determining the top spot of those rankings was the easiest decision we made all fall. Yarborough, winner of three Cup Series titles, 83 races and four Daytona 500s also survived — and all of this true — a poisonous snakebite, a lightning strike, falling 20 feet out of a tree and onto his head, bouncing off the ground after a parachute didn’t open properly, and holding off an angry bear with one hand while flying an airplane with the other. He also walked away from a crash at Darlington Raceway when his car jumped the guardrail and tumbled down an embankment into the parking lot, as well as his legendary flip while qualifying at 200 mph in 1983.
The last lengthy conversation I had with Yarborough was in 2020, not long after the passing of Junior Johnson, aka the Last American Hero and Cale’s car owner for all three of his Cup Series championships. We talked about this very topic, all the crazy stuff Yarborough had survived and the fact that while he definitely spent some time in the hospital, he never once had to spend a single night in a medical facility because of something that happened in a race car.
“I am a lucky man, just as I was a lucky kid, still to be here and still have my wits about me,” he said to me from his home in Timmonsville, South Carolina. “But I don’t care how fast you were as a race car driver, no one is fast enough to outrun Father Time.”
My last chat with de Ferran was last May, when I saw him in the paddock at the Miami GP, where he was working as a consultant with McLaren. We were in the infield of Hard Rock Stadium, and during a ten-minute chat we spotted Formula One champions Damon Hill and Emerson Fittipaldi, as well as four-time NASCAR champion Jeff Gordon and 1985 Indy 500 winner Danny Sullivan. Our talk turned to the deaths of Al and Bobby Unser, brothers and multi-time Indy 500 winners who had both passed away in 2021, as well our mutual friend, legendary IndyCar writer Robin Miller, lost that same year.
“How unbelievably fortunate are we to have come along when we did?” he said giddily, with a smile on his face as bright as the South Florida sun beating down. “I never got to race against A.J. Foyt or Rick Mears or Jackie Stewart. I missed Mario Andretti by a year. But I know all of them. I see them. It is amazing just to walk where they walk, isn’t it?”
It is. And that’s why it is so crucial to appreciate that “is” before it becomes a “was.”
I had no idea that talk with de Ferran in Miami would be our last. If I had, when I saw him at Indianapolis a few weeks later I wouldn’t have settled for a wave across Gasoline Alley. I would have run to him, shaken his hand and said thank you for three decades of chats, insight and that smile.
I also had no idea that my phone conversation with Yarborough was the last time I would ever hear his trademark raspy, confident, staccato voice. The one that sold so many t-shirts, Holly Farms chicken, Hardee’s hamburgers and warned the Duke Boys about Boss Hogg’s roadblock up ahead. If I had, I would have kept him on the phone for another hour, repeating again and again, “One more story, please!”
I suppose that everyone believes their era was the best one, but those of us who first arrived in the garages and pit lanes of American motorsports in the late-1990s, we know the truth. We’re the lucky ones.
We caught the tail end of what many still believe was the golden era of auto racing in the United States and also witnessed the beginning of the next wave of talent that rolled in. Even after the driving retirements of Richard Petty, Foyt, Andretti, Mears, Bobby Allison, and yes, Yarborough, they all stuck around for years as team owners. It created this amazing crossroads of timelines, as the greatest of the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s were there to watch the youth infusion of the next three decades that followed and continues to this day.
The living legends of Petty, Foyt, Andretti and Mears can still be found walking and working at today’s speedways. They aren’t alone. Seemingly every race weekend, no matter what series or event, is packed with legends, either passing through or still on the payroll. Parnelli Jones. Don “The Snake” Prudhomme. John Force. Don Garlits. Ned Jarrett. Shirley Muldowney. Jackie Stewart. Ivan Stewart. The list of living legends is endless. For now.
So, we need to promise ourselves that we will not take that for granted, because, as he was with most topics, Cale Yarborough was right. Father Time and his checkered flag comes for us all. And the average age of the dozen drivers named in that last paragraph is 83.
“People ask me all the time, Mario, how do you stay so young?” Andretti, himself 83, said to me at Indy last May. “The answer is, well, first of all, I’m not young. But I feel young because of this right here, all around us. The energy of the racetrack keeps me young at heart.”
Or as Petty, now 86, once said to me, paraphrasing baseball great Satchel Paige, who pitched in the big leagues into his late-50s: “I never stop moving, because if I do, it all might catch up to me.”
Throughout 2024, whether we are at a racing event in person or watching on TV from our easy chairs, when we spot an icon, a transcendent champion, a steering wheel superhero, we need to make sure we take a beat. To reflect. To remember all those times that they made the hairs stand up on our arms or even if they made us raise that arm in anger because they’d just whipped our favorite driver. We need to pause and give thanks that we have been gifted a window in time in which we were allowed to share the same air with those who found a way to slip through air a helluva lot faster than the rest us.
Because, as we learned too many times just before the page turned on 2023, that window will close without warning and without the opportunity to give them the thanks that they deserved when we had the chance.