The Original 1-Time Only 1980 Championship Earnhardt/Osterlund Wrangler Jeans Machine at Ontario

The original Wrangler Jeans Machine only ran one race. That one race took Dale Earnhardt to the 1980 NASCAR Winston Cup Championship - his first of seven. It was the final race of the 1980 NASCAR Winston Cup season - The L.A. Times 50 0 at the long gone Ontario Motor Speedway in Ontario, California.

Many people have never seen a photo of that car design, which was the same design Osterlund ran during the year with Mike Curb and Curb Records as sponsor.

Thanks to the search I was doing for a Terry Labonte 1979 Riverside Western 500 photo responding to a posted request, I stumbled across these photos by RR member, Scott Baker on www.bakerracingpix.com of a driver, track and sponsor no longer with us.

This is the one of a kind, one race only, original Dale Earnhardt/Wrangler Jeans Machine - the car that took Dale Earnhardt to his first Winston Cup Series Championship.

The Wrangler deal was in place. I had been hired to run the program. It began with this race... lucky us. Good yellow color. And the blue is "Reflex Blue."

Interesting to see Lake Speed's name on the pit wall. I didn't realize his Cup career started that early. Checked Racing Reference to learn 1980 was indeed his rookie year. I remember his Yazoo Mowers red 17 car in the early 80s & of course his tearful top 5 finish at Daytona with Nationwise Auto Parts (not NationWIDE Insurance) with Rahmoc around 85 or so. But seeing him in that 1980 season was surprising.

Ontario was supposedly a clone of Indianapolis Motor Speedway, but I guarantee you have never seen stock cars race like this at Indy. Check out Dale, Cale, Darrell and Benny swapping paint in this short clip from the final Ontario race when Dale clinched his first championship.

I loved that Yazoo Mowers sponsorship on Lake's car. In Fall 1970, I spent two weeks in Tupelo, Mississippi at an engineering time study course at the Wrangler Tupelo Division headquarters. The other big employer in Tupelo was the Yazoo Lawn Mower factory.

We spent all our evening time at the Chickasaw lounge, where Elvis used to play. We also crossed over the famed Tallahatchie bridge, jumped off of by Billy Joe McAllister in the song.

Cool!

That was even better racing than this year's Indy race.....and if it's not, then it's a close second!

Nice picture find Dave! I've found several never-before-seen (to me atleast) pictures...and they are all great pics like they were taken yesterday!

Sports Illustrated photo taken at Ontario following Earnhardt clinching 1980 Cup Championship.

Two of my favorites from a year earlier:

The ORIGINAL 7x CHAMP...

...and the uh-oh, advance-prep, and humorously unusable headline.

Great photos.

Question- is that Brock Yates in the dark sportscoat in the pits in the first pic? Sure looks like it.

Yes, that is Brock Yates. Brock used to pit report and do victory lane on the CBS telecasts.

Chase, here's the final lap of that 1979 Ontario race, won by Benny Parsons, with interviews with Richard and Darrell. Note Darrell questions why he was scored a lap down instead of being the race leader.

Sad note... incomparable motorsports writer and broadcaster, Brock Yates , longtime editor of Car & Driver and instigator of the Cannonball Run ,passed on October 5. I was privileged to have hoisted a few cold ones with Brock, the late Joe Whitlock and Unocal's Bill Brodrick at the long gone HoJos lounge in Daytona.

I still get a kick out of reading Brock's interview at a Michigan motel during a M.I.S. TransAm race weekend with my friend, car owner Bud Moore for Brock's 1972 classic book, Sunday Driver . Little has changed in NASCAR in the intervening 44 years:

Interesting, Dave. I've recently been looking at a copy of the book, "Earnhardt - A Racing Family Legacy," which essentially is Circle Track/Stock Car Racing reprints. A friend who's a diehard Earnhardt fan found it at a yard sale and loaned it to me. I was ticked off because of the near total exclusion of Wrangler cars: you're nearly 100 pages into the book before the first black-and-white, and the ONLY color shot of a Wrangler car is a publicity photo of Dale posing in street clothes in front of his #2. That shot has the paint scheme we all know, but the b&w shot seems more like the car you've depicted here, although the Wrangler name doesn't seem to be in the same type (I guess that could just be b&w vs. color, plus a different angle). The shot shows Earnhardt following Cale Yarborough in the Junior Johnson Busch #11, but it doesn't identify the track.

The book does have two shots of another pretty rare car, though: the #31 Wrangler Busch car that Dale Jr. drove. I'd forgotten about that one.

One of the best remarks I've heard about "cheatin" was when Richie Bartz was asked if it was fun working in that grey area back in the day. His reply spoke volumes, "The most fun was betting them when it wasn't your turn."

So, Dennis, do you suppose Richie would have thought Jimmie "Got The Call" Sunday at Charlotte?

No clue Dave, did not watch it but it has happened before.