Remembering NASCAR Champion Alan Kulwicki on his 70th birthday. Triumph, tragedy in 1992-93

In the 31 years since his tragic death, it has become clear that the racing gods cast the mold after Alan Kulwicki’s career ended.

He was unique then, and in retrospect even more so.

The Wisconsin driver, who made perhaps the greatest underdog run to a championship in NASCAR history, would have turned 70 on Saturday.

Let’s look back at the quiet thinker who brought an engineer’s touch to the cockpit of his Underbird, brought Hooters to racing and, along the way, invented the Polish victory lap.

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Alan Kulwicki grew up in one of Milwaukee’s many Polish-American suburbs. His first interests in automobiles likely came from his father, Gerald, who built engines for several USAC championship teams.

Although NASCAR, especially at that time, was considered a Southern sport, it was born in a region familiar with stock car racing. The list of Wisconsin native riders includes Dave Marcis, Dick Trickle, Paul Menard, Pancho Carter and a whole host of Sauters.

Alan began racing karts as a young teenager, largely without help from his father, who encouraged him to learn the ins and outs of automotive design and power on his own.

He began racing late models in the mid-’70s and in 1977 won the track championship at Slinger Speedway. It was also in 1977 that he received a degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

In 1979-80, he won back-to-back track championships at Wisconsin International Raceway. He joined the Midwest-based ASA circuit and raced there until moving to NASCAR in 1984, when he finished seventh or better in four Busch Series starts.

Kulwicki has adapted to NASCAR in his own way

Kulwicki ran six Cup Series races for owner Bill Terry, who would sell his team to Kulwicki early in the 1986 season.

Kulwicki filled many positions on his underfunded team and had difficulty retaining help due to his demanding nature and desire to have things done his way. Future Hall of Fame crew chief Ray Evernham spent only six weeks with the team.

“It’s not about people thinking he was a genius. The man was a genius,” Evernham said years later. “But his personality paid the price.”

Kulwicki was a loner and was only married to his work. It was not uncommon to see him walking from his truck to the garage and back, dressed in his driver’s uniform and carrying a briefcase.

In 1986 he owned one race car and two engines, and employed only two full-time crew members, but he won Rookie of the Year honors that year.

NASCAR’s Polish Victory Lap was born in 1988

Kulwicki finished 15th in the 1987 points standings and improved to 14th the following year, when he scored his first Cup Series victory late in the season at Phoenix.

It was after that Phoenix victory that Kulwicki rewrote the book on victory celebrations. Instead of the usual victory lap, he turned his Ford around and drove clockwise around the track. It allowed him to see the stands from his driver’s side window, a pragmatic move, and he calls it his “Polish victory lap.”

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NASCAR legend and team owner Junior Johnson approached Kulwicki after 1989 and offered him a seat to replace Terry Labonte. While only a small handful of riders would have turned down the Junior option, Kulwicki declined because he wanted to continue owning his own team.

He won a race in 1990 and 1991 while finishing eighth and 13th in points and attracting sponsorship from Hooters. In other words, there was no sign of what was to come in 1992, when it shocked the stock car world.

The underdog Underbird wins a NASCAR championship

In 1992, Kulwicki won the spring race at Bristol and the first summer race at Pocono while remaining in the top five in the points race for most of the year.

He moved up to second after the penultimate race of the season, at Phoenix, setting up a three-way race for the championship at the season finale at Atlanta.

Davey Allison headed to Atlanta leading in points, with Kulwicki 30 points back and Bill Elliott 40 back. Fully accepting his underdog status, Kulwicki dropped the T’s and H’s from the front of his car to spell UNDERBIRD.

At Atlanta, Allison was caught up in a crash and limped his damaged car to 27th place, 43 laps off the pace. Elliott won and collected 180 points for the victory, but Kulwicki matched his 180 by finishing second and leading the most laps (5 point bonus).

At 38, he won the championship with a 10-point lead.

Tragedy struck twice in 1993 for NASCAR

There’s obviously no way of knowing how Alan Kulwicki’s career would have gone. But in an era when star drivers raced into their 40s and sometimes beyond, one assumes he would have stayed behind the wheel for several years before becoming a full-time owner.

Through five 1993 races, the defending champion finished six times or better on three occasions and was ninth in points ahead of Bristol, where he was the reigning spring race champion.

After a sponsor appearance Thursday at a Knoxville Hooters event, Kulwicki was a passenger on a Hooters business jet flying across Tennessee to Bristol when the plane crashed as it neared its final approach to the Tri-Cities Regional Airport.

A little over three months later, Davey Allison, with whom Kulwicki had fought for the previous year’s championship, died from injuries suffered in a helicopter crash while attempting to land at the Talladega Superspeedway in Alabama.

— Email Ken Willis at ken.willis@news-jrnl.com

This article originally appeared in the Daytona Beach News-Journal: Alan Kulwicki, the NASCAR champion we lost in 1993, would have turned 70 today.