NASCAR Hall of Fame Class of 2026 Endorsements - Pioneer Ballot
Today's column looks at the five nominees on this year's Pioneer ballot.
The NASCAR Hall of Fame voters will be determining who will make up the class of 2026 on Tuesday, May 20th.
In addition to the voters, an additional ballot will be submitted via the results of a fan vote. The link to that can be found here.
I have kept track of the Hall of Fame voting results via a tracker on Google Spreadsheets. That can be found here.
At the last moment, I decided to split this column in two. Today is my choice for the Pioneer ballot, while tomorrow will have the Modern Era ballot. I will also be looking at the Landmark Award nominees tomorrow.
Pioneer Ballot
This ballot is the highest voted of the following nominees:
Jake Elder (Crew chief)
Ray Hendrick (Driver, Non-Cup)
Banjo Matthews (Driver, Car Owner, Chassis Builder)
Larry Phillips (Driver, Non-Cup)
Bob Welborn (Driver)
For years, I’ve been a supporter of Banjo Matthews in this category. And I probably should be looking at his resume. In 1978, every single race-winning chassis was a Banjo car. That is something we didn’t see again until NASCAR went to a spec car a few years ago.
Bob Welborn, on the surface, also makes sense. Welborn won the championship in all three seasons of the NASCAR Convertible Division and had success in his more meager Cup career.
I also appreciate that the Hall is finally crediting the Convertibles more and more in recent years. When NASCAR created it, notice that it was called a “Division,” not a “Series.” Smokey Yunick attested in his book that competitors were under the belief at the time that the Convertibles were on equal footing with Cup, with races not usually serving in support roles. Rather, they believed Convertible wins would be counted as Cup victories.
Instead, NASCAR has officially deemed the division “a regional series” on the level of the old Busch North or K&N East and West. This is nowhere near the case, and the reality is that those races should really count towards Cup win totals. But they can’t because Richard Petty won one, and they can’t just give the King another win to make his total an uneven 201. But I digress.
Anyway, Matthews and Welborn were nominees I should support. But the reality is that I cannot, as I do not think their success outweighs the reality that both were objectively racist towards Wendell Scott.
The source for this is the late Brian Donovan’s excellent book Hard Driving, an autobiography on Scott. Now, the racism wouldn’t make them unique among past inductees. Buck Baker and, allegedly, Bruton Smith were not nice to Mr. Scott in this regard. And it was a different time in many ways; there have absolutely been more than just those two who have gotten in.
But Matthews and Welborn were pretty damn bad in their quotes in the book. Matthews is quoted as calling Scott’s car “a typical n****r rig”. Later on, when commenting on another car Scott raced, Matthews said “Typical n****r - you’d give him something, and you’d look again, and it would all be wore out”.
Welborn’s story is much more situational. Scott won one Cup pole in his career, in 1962 at Savannah, Georgia. Welborn started on the outside of Scott in second.
During the driver’s meeting, Welborn mentioned there were “Two n****rs on the pole tonight,” which prompted NASCAR officials to warn drivers that they would face repercussions if they delibrately made contact with Scott.
Scott would later confront Welborn, having not heard the comment in the moment. I’ll just excerpt this part verbatim from Donovan’s book, with the you-know-what word censored:
Welborn, journalist Hank Schoolfield recalled, was known as “a dyed-in-the-wool southern racist.”
Scott walked over to Welborn. “I said ‘Bob, you called me a n****r?’” Scott recalled.
“He said, ‘I called both of us n****rs.’
“I said, ‘I knew you were lowdown, but a n****r is a lowdown thing, and I didn’t know you were that low,’ and I put my finger in his face.
“He said, ‘Take your finger out of my face.’ And I didn’t take nothing out of his face.”
You’ll have to buy the book to read about the entire situation, but that ends Welborn’s involvement in it.
Bringing race relations and the treatment of drivers to Scott against a Hall of Fame nominee might seem questionable at first. A lot of NASCAR drivers of the day were poor southern boys without much of an education in the mid 1900’s. Plenty of them were racist just as the result of the environment they were raised in, and I don’t think all of them should be demonized for something they didn’t have a say in.
But not everybody was like that, either. The book also glowingly mentioned individuals such as Ralph Moody, Curtis Turner, Richard Petty, and especially the Wood Brothers.
A sports Hall of Fame is supposed to be a celebration of athletes and those who helped shape said sport. Matthews or Welborn being inducted would not be the worst day of all time by any means, but it would be inductions I cannot condone or celebrate.
Keep in mind that NASCAR doesn’t have to celebrate drivers like this, the ones racist to a point that Scott can recall it specifically like with Welborn or are as dismissive as Matthews.
Jack Smith was a well-traveled veteran of the NASCAR circuit for many years, winning 21 of his 264 starts and having three top 5 finishes in points. Smith has been largely ignored by NASCAR for one crucial reason: he was abusive towards Scott.
Smith’s name is in the record books; his stats have never been erased. But he was left off both the Top 50 and Top 75 driver lists, and he hasn’t been nominated for a spot in the Hall.
Matthews and Welborn probably both deserve the same fate. The voters will be the judge, but neither really should be ahead of the other three nominees on this strong of a ballot as it is.
My pick for this instead is Ray Hendrick, who placed second in last year’s vote. My former colleague Michael Massie wrote a great piece on him last year supporting his Hall of Fame nomination, and I cosign him on that now.
Above, you can see Massie’s interview with Roy Hendrick, who has passed away in the year since.
I was born in Maryland, but I have strong roots in Virginia. That classic flying 11 is still ubiquitous to this day on the local scene around there, even though Hendrick passed away in 1990.
Hendrick is a guy who pops up so frequently when I read old NASCAR driver autobiographies, almost always as the immovable object they would fail to beat in local, sportsman, or modified competition.
He’d race anywhere, everywhere, in anything, and usually won. He didn’t place well in most championship standings, but that’s because he didn’t commit himself to any circuit. Massie goes into more detail in his column.
The other nominees in the category are strong. Jake Elder was a cantankerous crew chief who won championships with David Pearson, was fired midway through Dale Earnhardt’s first championship season, and won races with so many different teams and drivers.
Larry Phillips is probably the greatest Weekly Series driver in history and absolutely dominated the 90s in that championship. I’d probably put him second to Hendrick on my ballot.
Again, be sure to subscribe to check out the Modern Era ballot column that is on the way tomorrow morning.