NASCAR Race Legend – Harry Gant

Posted by admin on February 17th, 2010 filed in Nascar Diecast

Harry Phil Gant honed his driving skills in the 1950′s, street racing on rural roads in Alexander County, NC. He began his career on a dirt track in Hickory, where those skills began to be put to the test. He and his buddies took turns driving an old’57 Chevy that Harry had put a Corvette engine into. When he became the full-time driver, he won the hobby class championship without so much as a blink. He drove in the Sportsman Series and won over 300 races and three championships in 1972, 1973, and 1974.

In 1973, Harry found his way to the Winston Cup Series and by ’79 he was running a full schedule. He competed against the likes of Dale Earnhardt and Terry Labonte for rookie of the year. It was a fierce battlefield and the highly contested award wasn’t given until the last race of the season-in favor of Earnhardt. Harry Gant’s racing career spanned over 2 decades and he was mostly known for driving the #33 Skoal Bandits car. He was a handsome man and throughout the garage area he soon acquired the nickname Handsome Harry Gant–but he was humble and never came off as cocky about his driving talent.

The 1991 season was his most successful. That’s when he became known as Mr. September for winning four cup races in a row and two Busch races all in the month of September of that year. He finished 4th in the standings which was his career high. He won five races that year along with one pole position, fifteen top-5′s and seventeen top-10′s. He also had the most laps led in 1991 with 1,684. Harry holds two age-related records: The oldest to get his first career win (he was 42 when he won his first Cup race at Martinsville) and the oldest driver ever to win a Cup race (age 52).

At the end of the 1994 season, Handsome Harry Gant retired from his racing career and now resides in his North Carolina home. He did return however, for a partial season in the Craftsman truck series in 1996 and to substitute for an injured Bill Elliot in the ’96 Winston Select.

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