SEASON IN REVIEW
Columbia, Tennessee driver Clifton “Coo Coo” Marlin scored his first LASTCAR Cup Series Championship in 1975 when he scored two last-place finishes in twenty-three starts in a thirty-race season. Marlin edged owner-driver Earle Canavan for the title by a single bottom-five finish, 6-5. The tie-breaking Bottom Five came when Marlin scored his second last-place finish of the season at Charlotte on October 5, three races after Canavan’s last start of 1975.
Marlin was competing in his ninth season on the NASCAR Cup Series tour, driving for the H.B. Cunningham-owned team for whom he drove in all but his first three Cup Series starts in 1967. Marlin’s car bore #14 from 1972 until the end of his career in 1980, a number his son Sterling would run as tribute when he moved to Ginn Racing a year after Coo Coo’s death in 2005. On February 15, 1973, Marlin took the checkered flag in his qualifying race for the Daytona 500, which had just become a non-points race following NASCAR’s schedule realignment in 1972.
In 1975, Marlin equaled his career-best finish of 3rd at his home track in Nashville, Tennessee on May 10, part of a streak of five consecutive top-ten finishes at the start of the season. One week after the last race of this streak, the same May 18-19 race at Dover, Delaware where 1970 LASTCAR Cup Champion Cecil Gordon scored his career-best 2nd-place finish, Marlin scored the first of his two last-place finishes of the 1975 season.
The finish came in the May 25 running of the World 600 at the Charlotte Motor Speedway in Concord, North Carolina. Marlin finished 40th after the engine on his Chevrolet let go 33 laps into the event. The other finish came in the second Charlotte race twelve races later on October 5, where another engine failure took him out after eight laps. This made Marlin the first driver to finish last in both Charlotte races in the same season, but not the first to finish last in two straight races at the track - Jim Vandiver finished last in the fall race in 1971 and the World 600 in 1972.
Ironically, 1975 turned out to be Marlin’s best overall season as he finished 20th in points. He raced for five more seasons, but made just forty-two more starts. He scored one more top-five finish - a 4th in the 1977 Daytona 500 - and retired following his 165th career start at Talladega, Alabama on August 3, 1980, where he finished 37th in a field of 41. He passed away on August 14, 2005.
OTHER LASTCAR HEADLINES
At North Wilkesboro, North Carolina on April 6, a young Virginian named Ricky Rudd picked up his first last-place finish in his fourth and final start of the season. During the Gwyn Staley Memorial when his Bill Champion-prepared #10 Champion Racing 1973 Ford was taken out in a crash after three laps. Rudd would win his first Cup race at Riverside, California on June 5, 1983, starting a streak of sixteen consecutive seasons with at least one win.
J.D. McDuffie scored another two last-place finishes in 1975, tying G.C. Spencer’s record for most last-place finishes in NASCAR Cup Series history with 19 apiece. The two would remain tied for the record until McDuffie took the lead for good in 1980.
CHAMPIONSHIP STANDINGS
1st) Ivan Baldwin [2 B5s], Earle Canavan [5 B5s], Coo Coo Marlin [6 B5s], Dick May [3 B5s], J.D. McDuffie [3 B5s], Rick Newsom [4 B5s], Cale Yarborough [4 B5s] (2)
2nd) Buddy Arrington, H.B. Bailey, John Banks, Richard D. Brown, Bill Champion, Joe Frasson, Ed Negre, Richard Petty, Jackie Rogers, Ricky Rudd, Johnny Rutherford, G.C. Spencer, Randy Tissot, Warren Tope, Darrell Waltrip (1)
