About the only negative thing you can say about Dale
Jarrett's remarkable 1999 championship season is
that he made it a pretty dull chase. Once Jarrett
took command of the points lead, he stretched out a
pretty healthy lead pretty quickly, and he wasn't
really challenged in the second half of the season.
Jarrett wasn't spectacular in winning his first
title, he was strong and steady. He finished out of
the top-20 only twice all year, wrecking in the
Daytona 500 and the night race at Bristol. He missed
the top-10 only three other times in 34 events, one
of which was an 11th-place at Las Vegas. At one time
he went 19 straight races without a finish of worse
than eighth.
Another hallmark of Jarrett's year was his
ability to wrangle a top finish out of a second-rate
car. Nowhere was that more evident than in the
season's longest race, the Coca-Cola 600 at
Charlotte. Jarrett fell a lap down during the
grueling event, but still battled back to finish
fifth. It could have been a disastrous night,
because his closest challenger at the time, Jeff
Burton, won the race; instead it was just another
step on the path to the championship.
In fact, the whole year was strangely routine for
Jarrett and his teammates. The 88 car showed up at
the track every week, qualified well, raced well and
finished well. A little racing luck here and there
didn't hurt, but no one raced as well as Jarrett and
co. in '99.
Jarrett began racing in 1977 in the Limited
Sportsman Division at Hickory Motor Speedway, where
his father was once the track promoter. His first
NASCAR Winston Cup Series win came in his 129th
start at the 1991 Champion 400 at Michigan Speedway
in a Wood Brothers car.
But the win that launched his career came in 1993
with Joe Gibbs Racing, in the Daytona 500. That
season he would finish fourth overall in series
points.
He stumbled a bit the following two years,
finishing out of the top-10 in both 1994 and 1995,
but since '96 only Jarrett has finished in the top-3
in points every year. He has established himself as
one of the true elite in the sport, and now he's a
NASCAR Winston Cup Series champion as well.
