Morgan Shepherd: A Racer Who Just Won't Quit

(Photo by John Harrelson/Getty Images for NASCAR)

I didn’t start following NASCAR until the 2003 season, and entered that year as a curious viewer with absolutely no knowledge of the sport’s history or its competitors. Thus, I had absolutely no clue who Morgan Shepherd was.

All I saw was a 60 plus year old man who just couldn’t give up a sport that had seemingly passed him by. 2003 saw Shepherd qualify for only two Sprint Cup races, scoring last place finishes in them both.

In fact, until 2008 I saw Shepherd running at the finish of only three of the 89 races that he started across NASCAR’s top three national divisions.

So when he announced that he was planning to run a full Nationwide Series schedule in his own No. 89 cars, I didn’t give it a second thought, dismissing his campaign as nothing more than the same field-filling I’d seen him engaging in for the past five years.

And for the first nine races of 2008, it was more of the same. Shepherd failed to qualify for the events at Daytona and Mexico City, while failing to finish the other seven that he did make the field for.

Then came Talladega.

As usual, the restrictor-plate racing offered at the high-speed Alabama oval resulted in a great deal of attrition, with lots of the fastest cars bowing out early with crash damage. Shepherd, meanwhile, stayed in the back of the pack and missed the wrecks.

Once the field thinned out, the then 66 year-old driver put the pedal to the floor and into the lead drafting pack, cracking the top 10 for much of the race’s final 30 laps and even challenging for the lead at one point.

By day’s end, Shepherd finished on the lead lap in the 13th position, a finish that turned eyes everywhere from the garage to the grandstands.

What did Shepherd do after this? Excited, he surprised everyone in the racing community when he called-in as a guest to Tony Stewart’s radio show the following week.

The call proved fruitful; impressed both with Shepherd’s top 15 finish the weekend prior plus his unvarnished enthusiasm to still be racing, Stewart and announcer Matt Yocum decided to pick up Shepherd’s tire bill for the upcoming race at Richmond.

Shepherd accepted the tires, and completed the race at Richmond in 28th, his best short track finish in any form of NASCAR racing since 2001.

The week after that, with tires again bought and paid for, Shepherd tamed the famed “Lady in Black” that is Darlington Raceway, finishing in the 16th position while outrunning some of the Sprint Cup Series’ brightest stars, including Jeff Burton, Matt Kenseth and Mark Martin.

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