Finally, Gant’s Luck Begins at 51 : Auto racing: He credits fortune for allowing him to leave behind second-place stigma.

Dale Earnhardt probably will clinch his fifth Winston Cup stock car driving championship Sunday at Phoenix, but 51-year-old Harry Gant, a master craftsman from Taylorsville, N.C., is this year’s biggest NASCAR attraction.

Gant, known for years as “Second Place Harry,” cast aside that nickname in September, when he had the biggest month in NASCAR history. He was six for seven, winning four Winston Cup and two Busch Grand National races before losing Sept. 29 at North Wilkesboro, N.C., not far from his home.

“I still don’t know what all the fuss was about,” Gant said as he prepared to drive his Oldsmobile in the Pyroil 500 at Phoenix International Raceway, the next-to-last race on the NASCAR schedule. “I won a lot more races than that, like 14 in a row when I was driving late model sportsman cars back in mid-’74 or ’75. I had a little ol’ Chevelle, and when the streak got to 10, I kept saying there was no way I could win another one. But I kept on winning.”

Gant has been a late bloomer all his career.

He did not leave late model sportsman cars to drive in the elite Winston Cup series until 1979, when he was 39, and he did not win until 1982. Before that, he finished second 11 times.

Gant became the oldest winner of a Winston Cup race when he won at Pocono, Pa., in June of 1990. He was 50 years and 158 days old. Since then, he has extended the age record five times, and it now stands at 51 years 255 days--from the day he won the Goody’s 300 at Martinsville, Va., on Sept. 22.

He began his string of September victories in the Southern 500 at Darlington, where he also collected a $100,000 bonus for having won two of the four Winston Million races. He had won the Winston 500 at Talladega, Ala.

The weekend after Darlington, Gant swept both the Busch Grand National and Winston Cup races under the lights at Richmond (Va.) Raceway, then followed with another weekend sweep at Dover (Del.) Downs, where he lapped the field in the Peak 500.

Victory No. 6, at Martinsville, climaxed the month. He had to overcome a 15-second deficit after a crash. Only three other drivers, Cale Yarborough in 1976, Darrell Waltrip in 1981 and Earnhardt in 1987, had won four Winston Cup races in a row in the modern era.

“About the only thing we did different was that we stuck around to the end,” Gant said in his usual low-key manner.

When he took the checkered flag at Martinsville, his crew unfurled a huge white banner that read: “Life Begins at 51.” That resulted in the marketing of buttons with Gant’s picture and the slogan, “Life Begins at 51,” that have become the hottest selling item on the NASCAR circuit.

“I’m proud to be 51 and still working, whether I’m building houses or driving race cars,” Gant said. “Some people don’t live to be 51. Age doesn’t have anything to do with it as long as you do your job.”

Nolan Ryan, baseball’s “old man” at 44, sent Gant an autographed baseball and a Texas Ranger uniform shirt. Gant plans to return the compliment with an autographed helmet.

Gant, though, is more than simply NASCAR’s oldest winner. He is an anomaly, a throwback to the good ol’ boys of stock car racing’s early days:

--He doesn’t believe in testing his car between races, and he does as little practicing before a race as possible. This in an era when the better teams test and test and then test again.

--He doesn’t believe in wearing a neck brace or shoulder harness, items that are used by nearly every other driver in races producing G-forces of 2.5 on the high-banked ovals.

--He doesn’t believe in wearing a coolsuit or cool helmet, even though temperatures inside the car get as high as 135 degrees and there is little air movement because the right-side window is rolled up for aerodynamic purposes.

--He doesn’t hold grudges against other drivers after being involved in accidents, a trait totally foreign to most members of the fender-bashing set.

“I don’t like to work the car any more than necessary,” he said. “We changed very little (on the car) during the streak. We just took it right off the truck to the track. We practice the least of anyone out there because I want to keep unnecessary time, stress and strain off our engines and the drive train.

“And I’m in better shape than the other drivers. That’s why I don’t need those neck braces and coolsuits. I don’t like all those contraptions on my body. I keep in shape pouring cement or putting on a roof or building cabinets.”

At Martinsville, the left-rear quarter-panel of Gant’s car was hit, and he was spun out by Rusty Wallace when Wallace drove into a corner too fast.

“Rusty tried to drive in there, and he went in too far,” Gant said. “I knew it was just racing and he didn’t try to hit me, but it nearly took us both out. I was upset and for about the next 10 laps I was mad as a bull. Rusty was behind me, and I was wishing he was in front of me. Pretty soon I realized that was hurting my driving, so I calmed down. Rusty and me are still good friends, always will be.”

Nor is Gant taken in by his recent successes. When asked what accomplishment in his life gave him the most satisfaction, instead of pinpointing his victory at Darlington or in the International Race of Champions or his six in a row in September, he said, without even stopping to think about it:

“I’m the best damn carpenter in Alexander County.”

How does he explain the sudden rise in his racing fortunes?

“Luck, mostly. When luck’s with you, you can’t lose, and when luck’s against you, it’s too bad. We have a good car and a good team, and a lot of hard work has gone into our effort, but mostly we’ve had a lot of luck.”

A case in point was an incident after qualifying for the Tyson Holly Farms 400 at North Wilkesboro, N.C.

Gant won the pole and the crew began loading the Olds onto the upper deck of the team’s transporter with a hydraulic lifter. As the car was about to be rolled forward, a wedge gave way and the car began to roll backward, toward a 12-foot fall to the garage floor. Unaccountably, it stopped two inches short of what might have been a total disaster the day before the race.

“Like I’ve been saying, nothing beats the luck we’ve been having,” Gant said at the time.

But he finally ran out of luck--and brakes--in the next day’s race and finished second to Earnhardt.

Life in racing wasn’t always this way for Gant. During one streak in 1981, he had seven second-place finishes and he missed his first victory when a tire blew after he had led 253 of 500 laps.

Darrell Waltrip commented: “Harry’s luck is so bad that someone told me the extra tire in his trunk blew out.”

Then there was the night before his final race in 1977 at Nashville. He had won the pole for a late model sportsman race, and a victory would have put the cap on his most successful season at that time.

“We took the car back to the motel, just like the other guys, and the next morning it was gone,” Gant said. “Stolen right out from under us. They got the truck, trailer, car, two engines, everything I owned. It was 10 years of accumulation of gears, transmissions, even 20 new mounted tires. Every tool I owned was in the trailer.

“The police found the truck in Alabama, but everything was gone.”

Gant borrowed a car from Butch Lindley for the race, and the throttle stuck, sending Gant into the wall and then to the hospital.

The hardships he overcame while racing as a weekend hobby at Hickory Speedway, his hometown track, have made driving 4,000-pound stock cars at more than 200 m.p.h. seem like being partially retired.

“I hear people say how hard it is to drive a stock car,” Gant said. “But they never built chicken coops.

“There were lots of days when I worked 7 to 5 with my dad (as a carpenter), came home and fed my chickens (30,000 of them) and worked to 4 or 5 a.m. on the car. Then we’d load up and I would try to catch a couple of hours’ sleep. I’d get up to Hickory and the boys would be sitting on the trailer, waiting to get going.

“There’s nothing like a loyal and experienced crew, and that’s what I had back then, and that’s what (car owner) Leo Jackson has put together for us this year.”

Gant also credits racing for years on dirt tracks for his recent success on the high-banked paved superspeedways. Junior Johnson, one of racing’s legendary pioneers, agrees.

“Harry got the hang of what he’s doing from the dirt tracks,” Johnson said. “A lot of these young guys nowadays don’t understand it. At those places, you learned a lot about how far you could hang a car out and still save it. You knew how far you could stick a nose into places and still survive. Harry understands that, and it’s helping him outsmart a lot of people.”

Longtime stock car observers rank Gant’s victory at Martinsville as one of the most memorable races in Winston Cup history.

That was the one in which he and Wallace tangled about two-thirds of the way through the race, sending Gant to the pits three times in six yellow caution laps to repair front end and sheet-metal damage to his Olds.

Despite his in-and-out dashes, Gant managed to stay on the lead lap and when racing resumed he passed 11 cars ahead of him, plus several lapped cars, in getting to the lead 47 laps from the finish. His last pass of leader Brett Bodine was a breathtaking move that brought the capacity crowd to its feet.

“I’m not getting any better,” Gant insisted. “But we’re getting luckier. We were real lucky to come back from that wreck. The crew did a great job. The oil cooler was pushed almost into the wheel, and a lot of sheet metal was crumpled.

“After I got spun out, all I was thinking about was finishing in the top five, but when I ran down the fifth-place car, I saw we were making up a lot of time on Ernie (Irvan, the leader at the time), so I kept on going.”

His September streak has moved Gant into fourth place in points with the two races remaining, Sunday’s at Phoenix and the finale Nov. 17 at Atlanta. He has 3,726 points, only 60 fewer than third-place Davey Allison. Earnhardt, who needs only to finish one position behind Ricky Rudd at Phoenix to win a fifth championship, has 3,989 points. Rudd has 3,832.