DAYTONA BEACH, FL :: Five-time NASCAR Whelen All-American Series Champion Larry Phillips is now a two-time NASCAR Hall of Fame nominee. His second appearance on the ballot comes on the 25th anniversary season of his first NASCAR national championship in 1989.
From the list of 20 NASCAR Hall of Fame nominees announced last month, five inductees will be elected by the NASCAR Hall of Fame Voting Panel, which includes a nationwide fan vote on NASCAR.com. Voting Day for the 2015 class will be Wednesday, May 21. Fans can attend the announcement at the NASCAR Hall of Fame in Charlotte, N.C.
Phillips, from Springfield, Mo., set and reset NASCAR Whelen All-American Series records. Established in 1982, the NASCAR Whelen All-American Series is NASCAR’s national championship program for weekly short track auto racing.
In the series’ 10th season of 1991 he became the first multi-time national champion and in 1992 the first to win back-to-back national championships. He remains the series’ only five-time national champion. Philip Morris of Ruckersville, Va., has four national titles, the most recent in 2011.
Spanning his NASCAR Whelen All-American Series career arc from 1989 to 2001, Phillips also won seven regional championships and 13 track championships. He had a 13-season winning percentage of .734; In 308 starts he won 226 feature races and posted 263 top-fives and 275 top-10s. His NASCAR Late Model track championships came at Bolivar (Mo.) Speedway USA (6), Lebanon (Mo.) I-44 Speedway (5) and Lakeside Speedway in Kansas City, Kan. (2).
Based largely on his NASCAR accomplishments Phillips’ was enshrined in the Missouri Sports Hall of Fame in 2001. He joined a list of inductees that includes Rusty Wallace, Len Dawson, Payne Stewart, Marcus Allen, Tony LaRussa, Ozzie Smith, Yogi Berra and George Brett. He is also a member of the Springfield (Mo.) Area Sports Hall of Fame, National Dirt Late Model Hall of Fame, and the Ozarks Racing Hall of Fame.
Phillips was 47 when he won his first NASCAR national championship as a pavement Late Model rookie in 1989. In the prior 30 years he became a nationally known star in dirt Late Models. Fellow dirt driver and 1986 NASCAR Whelen All-American Series national champion Joe Kosiski of Omaha, Neb., convinced Phillips to give NASCAR weekly racing a try in 1989. Phillips’ local dirt tracks, Lebanon I-44 and Bolivar, were paved at the end of the 1988 season and joined NASCAR the following spring.
Phillips built, maintained and obsessively worked on his race cars. He became a mentor to young drivers from his region in the 1970s and 1980s including Jamie McMurray, Ken Schrader, Mark Martin and Rusty and Kenny Wallace.
“I talked to [Ken] Schrader, Kenny [Wallace] and Jamie [McMurray] during Speedweeks at Daytona,” said Kevin Greven, once a crewman for Phillips and now general manager and promoter of the Lebanon track. “You can’t talk about racing with them without Larry’s name coming up.”
Greven was crewman for Late Model driver Wayne McCarthy who was lost in an accident at Bolivar in 1994. Afterward, Phillips asked Greven and several other McCarthy crewmen to join his team.
“Larry was one of the best I’ve worked around,” Greven said. “I learned so much. He was intelligent and earthy. He didn’t get in his race car unless he thought he could win. We’d test different set-ups and combinations on race nights and he still expected to win.”
Phillips was diagnosed with lung cancer in 2000. The illness claimed him on Sept. 21, 2004.
“To this day not a week goes by that Larry’s name doesn’t come up somewhere,” Greven said. “He raised the level of competition and visibility of racing in the Midwest. This is still Larry Phillips country.”
Phillips concluded his career without ceremony on April 7, 2001 at Lebanon when he knew his failing health would no longer allow him to be competitive. He was leading in the closing laps of the feature race but fatigue from illness and its treatment that had taken a toll on his strength. Ken Dickinson was able to get by Phillips and went to Victory Lane while Phillips finished second. Physically unable to battle for the win, Phillips hauled his car back to the race shop for the last time.
That shop is still busy. It is the base of operations for Phillips’ son Terry, now 47, a nationally known professional dirt Late Model and Modified driver. The two shared the shop space throughout their careers. From childhood forward Terry worked on his dad’s cars.
“Dad influenced everything in my racing,” said Terry Phillips said. “He never made me do anything I didn’t want to do. I was helping work on cars at a young age. I’ve got his work ethic and I work hard. I think about him every day.
“We raced against each other quite a bit early on,” Phillips said. “I won my first dirt Late Model feature against him at Lebanon in 1987, and it was one of my first Late Model races.”
The younger Phillips acquired his dad’s last race car about a year ago.
“It changed hands several times and it was raced,” Phillips said. “It’s the old Lefthander chassis dad drove for at least his last five seasons. I took the body off and it’s just sitting there right now. I can look at it and see dad’s touches. While he was driving it I worked on it every day myself for years. I’m going to powder coat it, restore it and someday get it back to the way it was.”
The completed car won’t be for racing, Phillips said. It’ll be in the shop just to enjoy.
About NASCAR Hall of Fame
Conveniently located in uptown Charlotte, N.C., the 150,000-square-foot NASCAR Hall of Fame is an interactive, entertainment attraction honoring the history and heritage of NASCAR. The high-tech venue, designed to educate and entertain race fans and non-fans alike, opened May 11, 2010 and includes artifacts, hands-on exhibits, 278-person state-of-the-art theater, Hall of Honor, Buffalo Wild Wings restaurant, NASCAR Hall of Fame Gear Shop and NASCAR Media Group-operated broadcast studio. The venue is opened 10 a.m. – 6 p.m. seven days a week and has an attached parking garage on Brevard Street. The five-acre site also includes a privately developed 19-story office tower and 102,000 square-foot expansion to the Charlotte Convention Center, highlighted by a 40,000 square-foot ballroom. The NASCAR Hall of Fame is owned by the City of Charlotte, licensed by NASCAR and operated by the Charlotte Regional Visitors Authority. www.NASCARHall.com.
