Catchfence

It says something about how the sport has evolved that it is likely few will remember Richard Jackson. Yet a serious student of the sport should remember Jackson as part of one of the most dramatic runs of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Forming a specialized racecar parts supply emporium known as Precision Products, Richard Jackson and his brother Leo grew into car owners in NASCAR’s Sportsman Division, the precursor to the Busch Series. When they graduated to Winston Cup in the 1980s, they did so with help from Johnny Hayes, the marketing genius best known for his efforts with Burt Reynolds and Hal Needham’s #33 Chevrolets. Hayes was the owner of the Jackson Brothers’ racecars, and their first drivers were the Parsons brothers, Benny and younger brother Phil.

Hayes later recalled that Phil’s elevation to Winston Cup in 1983 was a mixture of perseverance and luck – the younger Parsons had run his own racecars in NASCAR’s Dash series and had run out of money (“If I had the choice between buying tires and eating, I bought tires”) and the racing credentials he’d earned to that point would not have been enough to warrant the kind of opportunity he wound up getting. It began in ugly fashion in the 1983 Winston 500.

Yet Parsons and the Jacksons persevered and by 1988 Richard had purchased the team from Johnny Hayes and the combination was a full-time participant. Five years after trying to blow open the walls at Talladega, Phil Parsons and Richard Jackson had won there.

In 1989, though, Leo and Richard had formed a second team; the team, basically Harry Gant’s #33 team transferred from the lameduck Hal Needham outfit, eventually was purchased by Leo and became a seperate entity. Richard, while still owning the former Phil Parsons team (changed from #55 to #1 in 1990), still had a role with his brother’s outfit, and the team became a point team in the sport’s transition to radial tires. Richard’s #1 car won poles at the 1992 Dixie 500 and the inaugural Brickyard 400, but perhaps the team’s best run came at the end, as Morgan Shepherd drove Richard Jackson’s #1 Pontiac in the 1997 Atlanta 500 to the top five.

He eventually became another casualty of the sport’s economics, and warrants being remembered for pushing on despite them.