PHOTO: Lee Johnson Collection
SEASON IN REVIEW
Rockbridge Baths, Virginia driver Rick Mast scored his first LASTCAR Cup Series Championship in 1990, scoring two last-place finishes in twenty starts during a twenty-nine-race season. Mast won the first bottom-ten tiebreaker since 1981 over Harry Gant, 10-8.
Mast was competing in his third season on the Cup Series tour. Following a brief run for the Buddy Baker and Danny Schiff team in 1988, Mast scored a surprising 6th in the 1989 Daytona 500 driving for Mach 1 Racing, owned by Hollywood director and racing enthusiast Hal Needham.
Needham’s team folded up after 1988, leaving Mast without a ride to defend his Daytona 500 finish in 1990. However, one week later on February 26, Mast raced at Richmond, Virginia in 1980 LASTCAR Cup Series Champion D.K. Ulrich, replacing Eddie Bierschwale as driver of the #2 U.S. Racing Pontiac. Mast still fought to find consistency, finishing no better than 12th at Bristol, Tennessee on April 8 and scoring six DNFs in fourteen starts. However, it was not until Mast moved to Travis Carter’s #98 Chevrolet that he scored his two last-place finishes of 1990.
The two last-place runs came in consecutive weeks during his first two starts for Carter. The first came at Martinsville, Virginia on September 23, when his #98 IGA Chevrolet crashed after 36 laps of the Goody’s 500. The other finish on September 30 came at North Wilkesboro, North Carolina, where another crash took out his #98 Galaxy Food Centers Chevrolet after just 17 laps.
Despite a season-best 7th-place finish at Phoenix on November 4, Mast finished just 31st in the point standings, and he left the Carter team at the end of the year to be replaced by Jimmy Spencer. The move was well-timed, however, as Mast became driver of the #1 Skoal Classic Oldsmobile owned by former Phil Parsons co-car owner Richard Jackson. With the team, Mast got his next shot at the Daytona 500, where he finished 4th on February 17, 1991.
Mast continued to race for Jackson through the 1996 season, including a career-best 1994. That year, Mast scored the pole for the inaugural Brickyard 400 at Indianapolis, Indiana and four Top Fives, including a career-best runner-up to Dale Earnhardt the day he clinched his seventh consecutive championship at Rockingham, North Carolina on October 23, 1994.
After two seasons with Butch Mock and another for Cale Yarborough in 1999, where he was the only full-time driver without a DNF that season, Mast raced for three more seasons. He retired after a severe case of carbon monoxide poisoning he suffered in his 364th and final start at Richmond, Virginia on May 5, 2002. He currently runs RKM EnviroClean, Inc., an environmental clean-up business, in his hometown of Rockbridge Baths, Virginia.
OTHER LASTCAR HEADLINES
Derrike Cope, the surprising Daytona 500 champion, came one bottom-five short of challenging Mast and Gant for the LASTCAR Cup Series title. His two last-place finishes - the fourth and fifth of his career - came in the first eight races of his first career victory. The first was at Bristol, Tennessee on April 8, where a crash sidelined him after 56 laps, and the other at Talladega, Alabama on May 6, where engine trouble took him out of the running after three laps.
“Mr. Excitement,” Jimmy Spencer, who replaced Mast at Travis Carter’s team in 1991, scored his first last-place finish in 1990. Spencer was driving for Rod Osterlund, the team owner behind Dale Earnhardt’s first two full-time Cup seasons, including the 1980 NASCAR Cup Series Championship. Spencer’s #57 Heinz Pontiac crashed with Chad Little’s #19 Ford after 97 laps of the Mello Yello 500 at Concord, North Carolina on October 7.
Tragedy befell two of 1990's last-place finishers. Rob Moroso won his first NASCAR XFINITY Series Championship in 1989 and went full-time into Cup racing in 1990. Other than a runner-up finish to Dick Trickle in the Winston Open exhibition race at Concord, North Carolina on May 20, Moroso struggled to make the adjustment. His only last-place finish in Cup competition came at North Wilkesboro, North Carolina on April 22 when his #20 Crown Petroleum Oldsmobile crashed after just nine laps. On September 30, just after the fall race in North Wilkesboro, Moroso was killed in a traffic accident. He was just 21 years old. At the end of the year, Moroso became the only NASCAR driver to win Rookie of the Year posthumously.
USAC Sprint Car and Midget Champion “Rapid” Rich Vogler was slated to make his Cup Series debut in the July 22 running of the AC Spark Plug 500 at the Pocono Raceway in Long Pond, Pennsylvania. Having missed the show at Brooklyn, Michigan on June 24, Vogler and his Ray DeWitt-prepared #50 Coors Light Chevrolet qualified 32nd in Pocono’s 40-car field. Tragically, Vogler was killed the night before the Pocono race while leading a USAC Sprint Car event in Salem, Indiana. He was 39 years old. The Salem race was stopped and Vogler was posthumously awarded the win. His #50 Cup car was withdrawn from the Pocono event, listed as the final car in the race results.
CHAMPIONSHIP STANDINGS
1st) Derrike Cope [5 B5s], Harry Gant [6 B5s, 8 B10s], Terry Labonte [5 B5s], Rick Mast [6 B5s, 10 B10s] (2)
2nd) Buddy Baker, Charlie Baker, Terry Byers, Rodney Combs, Edward Cooper, Freddie Crawford, J.T. Hayes, Sterling Marlin, J.D. McDuffie, Hershel McGriff, Rob Moroso, Jerry O'Neil, Phil Parsons, Larry Pearson, Kyle Petty, Greg Sacks, Jimmy Spencer, Rich Vogler, Rusty Wallace, Michael Waltrip, Rick Wilson (1)
