19 reasons to love the only Canadian to win a NASCAR Cup race
The enduring legend of Earl Ross, pranks, and a one-handed hole in one
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Every once in a while, I do phone interviews that are so much fun I think, I need to go meet that person (or those people.) That's why I ended up in Canada for my latest NASCAR story (which I pasted below). It's about the only Canadian driver to ever win a Cup race (friends and family are celebrating its 50th anniversary), and the interviews on the phone and in the Great White North were full of laughter and great stories.
I now have visited four foreign countries for NASCAR stories — Mexico, Canada, Belgium and Talladega. I hope you’ll read the latest. It’s below and here (which I encourage you to click on for the great photos by Nic Antaya.)
19 reasons to love the only Canadian to ever win a NASCAR race
Late in Earl Ross’s life, Parkinson’s disease robbed him of his mobility. He was and remains the only Canadian to ever win a NASCAR Cup Series race, took more than 100 checkered flags at short tracks across the Midwest and Canada, earned induction into seven different Halls of Fame by going fast ... and near the end he drove around on a motorized cart.
Ross, who died in 2014, was nothing if not a survivor -- he suffered a near fatal car accident in a passenger car, escaped as flames shot out of his race car after he rolled it in one of his final races, and rebuilt his manufacturing business after a lightning strike burned it to the ground. He tackled Parkinson’s just like he tackled those -- at full throttle. He never let circumstances beat him down.
And yet he also found humor in his change of speeds. When Ross was inducted into the London (Ont.) Sports Hall of Fame, he listened as the presenter outlined his accomplishments – the high point being his victory at Martinsville 50 years ago, in one of the most unlikely wins in NASCAR history.
When the introduction was over, Ross fired up his scooter to go deliver his speech. It took, his daughters say, forever for him to get there. He drove across the front of the stage, turned to the side of it, turned again to get backstage, turned up a ramp onto the stage, turned again to get to the dais and finally parked.
He climbed off his cart and walked to the microphone ...
He had his audience’s rapt attention ...
He leaned forward ...
And said ...
“I used to be faster.”
... And that's just story No. 1.
Story No. 2. When Earl was 21, he and lifelong friend Ron Ling -- eventually his front-tire changer -- went to a dance. That night Earl first laid eyes on the future Bonnie Ross. He turned to Ling and said: “That’s the woman I’m going to marry.”
There was only one problem, as Earl’s daughter, Lisa Ross VanderWal, put it: “He didn’t even know what her name was.”
Well, two problems: “Mom didn’t want anything to do with him,” Lisa says. “She made him work for it.”
Bonnie became Earl’s biggest fan. If you sat near her at the track, you were likely to wind up an Earl Ross fan, too. Or you would if you knew what was good for you. “If somebody else had a favorite driver, that wasn’t good enough. They had to be on her team,” Lisa says.
Even if you survived whatever Bonnie threw at you, you would have to deal with Dorothy McKichan, wife of Gord McKichan, a genius mechanic who was also Earl’s friend and crew chief.
They called her Hurricane Dot.
No. 3. The fire started with a lightning strike. News spread quickly around Ailsa Craig, Canada, that Earl S. Ross Inc., a manufacturing facility owned, of course, by Earl Ross, one of the most prominent and well-liked men in town, was on fire.
Locals gathered at the scene, including Kim Pickering, who as a teenager liked to hang out at Earl’s race shop to work on cars and listen to Earl’s stories. He knew there was nothing he could do by being there. He went anyway. “That’s the way things are here. If it’s a neighbor or a friend, you show up to help,” Kim says.
Earl’s business partner, Jerry Thompson, jumped on a backhoe and drove it through the burning building -- above the protestations of firefighters. That created a gap between the warehouse, which was on fire, and the office, which was not. The fire could not jump over the gap. The office was saved, but the warehouse was destroyed.
Lisa and her sister, Liz (who worked there then and now), thought Earl would be devastated to see his life’s work go up in flames.
He wasn’t.
A few days after the fire, Lisa and Earl visited the site. As he surveyed the damage, he said the building had two parts. The office, which was full of irreplaceable records, and the warehouse, which was not suited to the work done in it.
Standing amid the ruins, Earl said the fire was not a tragedy that destroyed his life’s work but an opportunity to improve upon that work. From the ashes of the warehouse that wasn’t suited to the business anyway, he could -- and did -- build exactly what the company needed.
It was like wrecking a slow race car and replacing it with a fast one.
No. 4. One time Earl showed up to a race with the bottom of his car covered in rubber, almost like it was babyproofed. Thinking that gave him an advantage, other teams scrambled to replicate that. Then, just before the race started, Earl peeled the rubber off his car because it was there just to confuse opponents.
No. 5. Earl was, at different times, a race car driver, a truck driver, a car salesman, a manufacturing company owner, a Ford executive, an amateur pilot who flew himself to races and, while in his 20s, a gas station owner.
It was there that his improbable journey to Martinsville Victory Lane began.
A customer asked him to build a race car. So he did. That customer was too scared to drive it, so Earl drove it instead. He won the first race he entered.
His career soared after he befriended the McKichan (mi-KEEK-in) brothers -- Gord, Stan and Kenny -- and they formed one of the most successful teams in Canadian racing history.
First, they bonded over a clutch.
It was 1967, and one night, Ross was loading up a car.
What’s the matter? Gord asked
The clutch is out, Earl said.
Do you have another one?
No.
We do.
Friendly Canadians that they were, the three McKichan brothers climbed under Earl’s car and changed the clutch.
In nine minutes.
Soon Earl and the McKichans were winning races all over the Midwest and Ontario. They raced at Mount Clemens, Michigan, on Thursdays, Fort Wayne, Indiana, on Fridays, Grand Rapids on Saturdays and on Sundays they’d pick up a race on the way home from Grand Rapids.
They won three track championships in one year, and in 1970 they won nine out of 10 big races in Canada with international drivers, Kenny says.
Which was great. And almost beside the point
"It's not just winning," Kenny says. "Winning is important. But it's the friends you make."
Says Stan: "All the thousands of laps we ran, there was never an argument about anything."
Argument, no. Laughter, yes, and lots of it. The brothers still crack up about the yellow bumper.
When Earl joined what is now the NASCAR Canada Series in the 1990s, even though he had been racing for decades and was a Cup Series winner, he was, technically, a rookie, so he had to use a yellow bumper.
He thought it was ridiculous -- and because he thought it was ridiculous, everyone teased him about it. All of Ailsa Craig got in on the joke. During a parade before a race at Delaware Speedway, Earl’s hometown track, the cars had yellow bumpers. "He hated that,” Kenny says. "I wouldn't let him forget it. I said, 'You're just a rookie.' "
No. 6. Bonnie Ross, Earl’s wife, was 100 percent Chippewa and the oldest of 13 children. She rarely talked about that part of her background, but two of their daughters, Lisa and Liz, have pieced together an incredible story about how their parents fought for her siblings’ freedom during a dark period in Canadian history.
Bonnie's siblings were caught up in what has come to be known as the 60s Scoop. The Canadian government removed "First Nations, Métis and Inuit children from their homes, often without the consent, warning or even knowledge of the children's families and communities," according to the Indian Residential School History and Dialogue Centre at the University of British Columbia.
When the government men arrived at the reservation, the children scattered and hid in swamps, Liz says. Estimates say as many as 20,000 children were forced into adoption between 1951 and 1984.
Shortly after Bonnie married Earl, she learned that eight of her brothers and sisters were being taken. Bonnie and Earl went to court to stop the move. They were awarded custody of five of the eight. The judge put the other three into the system, and they disappeared into it.
Even though they were newly married, Bonnie and Earl raised those five others. “There was no hesitation,” Lisa says. “He said, ‘This is what needs to be done.’
“He was kind and generous. There wasn’t a single soul that he ever turned away. My dad always said the single-hardest word to say is ‘help.’ It really is, if you think about how hard it is to ask for help. I know there was lots of people in town that he helped out.”
Eventually, Liz says, the family made contact with the three who were adopted; one of them had no recollection of his early life and wanted nothing to do with his biological family.
No. 7. Today Ken Martin is NASCAR’s director of historical content and an expert on NASCAR’s history with international drivers. In 1974, he was a race fan who showed up at Martinsville hoping to watch his home state short-track heroes make history by beating NASCAR’s biggest stars.
Instead he watched a Canadian short-track hero make history by beating NASCAR’s biggest stars.
Track owner Clay Earles had recruited Virginia aces Ray Hendrick, Paul Radford, Jimmy Hensley and Sonny Hutchins to race against Richard Petty, David Pearson, Cale Yarborough and the rest. Martin says the crowd went nuts early in the race as the Virginians dominated the scoring pylon.
Hutchins, in his final Cup race, started on the inside pole and led the only 79 laps of his Cup career. He crashed, and one by one, the Virginia ringers fell off, until eventually Yarborough took the lead in the No. 11 Junior Johnson Chevy with the beautiful Carling livery.
Yarborough's engine blew on Lap 422, and Earl, driving Junior Johnson’s No. 52 with identical Carling livery, took the lead.
"Who is he?" Martin wondered, along with everyone else in the place. "52?!? The 52 doesn't win races."
It did when Earl Ross drove it.
As the laps ticked down toward the biggest win of his life, Earl heard things. His teammate’s engine had blown. Was his next?
Ten laps (rattle rattle), eight laps (crack crack), four laps (ping ping), and finally the checkered flag flew, and under it drove a man whose preferred flag has a maple leaf on it.
Quoting the Spartanburg Herald Journal: "I feel like crying," the heavy-set Ross said as he mopped a weary brow. "I'm no youngster, but the one thing I've always dreamed of was winning a big stock car race in the South where the best drivers in the world operate."
For an unknown rookie from a foreign country to win the first time he ever raced at Martinsville was unprecedented, Martin says. At that time, Mario Andretti, who was born in Italy, was the only foreign-born driver to win a Cup race (1967 Daytona 500). Since then, Juan Pablo Montoya (Colombia), Daniel Suárez (Mexico), Marcos Ambrose (Australia) and Shane van Gisbergen (New Zealand) have won Cup races.
Adding to the unlikeliness of Earl’s win was that 1974 was dominated by four drivers who combined to win every other race: Hall of Famers Richard Petty (10), Cale Yarbrough (10), David Pearson (7) and Bobby Allison (2).
Earl finished eighth in points, and the drivers who finished ninth through 16th all entered at least six more races than he did. Whatever high hopes his win, consistent runs and rookie of the year award might have raised, 1974 marked the end of Earl’s NASCAR success. The Carling deal fell apart, and he ran just two more Cup races after the 1974 season, one each in 1975 and 1976.
He had offers to return to NASCAR, Lisa says, but those deals were just for him, not his team, and he refused to accept them without his teammates.
That win changed everybody’s life, not just Earl’s. Gord and Kenny moved to North Carolina and worked for NASCAR teams. (Kenny eventually moved back to Canada to be near his grandkids.) Gord’s son, Timmy McKichan, lives in the Charlotte area and works in racing.
The Canadians bonded with Junior Johnson and often spent Thanksgiving with him in North Carolina.
No. 8. Earl (tried to) never let anyone pass him on the highway. He somehow made a Chevette drive so fast friend Stan McKichan couldn’t get by him on I-95 near Daytona International Speedway.
Granted, Stan was in a Gremlin, but still: Every time he got close, Earl blocked him. Finally, Stan tucked in so close behind another car that Earl couldn’t cut him off and grudgingly let them both by. “It took me all that time, but I finally got by him,” Stan says.
“They probably still got places in in the U.S. where we can’t rent cars,” Kenny McKichan says.
“Dad would scare the hell out of us just because he could,” Lisa says.
“Especially if Mom was in the car,” Liz adds.
Lisa: “Did I ever tell you about the time my dad got my mom to race a cop, and she didn’t know it was a cop?”
NASCAR.com: (Laughing) “No. But you’re going to tell me now.”
Lisa: “Mom was driving home from the race because, of course, after the race, Dad was horribly exhausted. Regardless of where the race was, he was done driving, right? So somebody would hop in the car and drive him home. Quite often, it was my mom.
“I’m not even sure which track they were coming home from, but Mom’s driving the car, and Dad’s supposed to be sleeping in the back. And there’s this car coming up behind them, and Dad knows darn well that it’s a cop. And he says, ‘Bonnie, this guy’s going to pass you. You better put your foot on the gas. Just put it right to the metal.’
“So Mom does, and she’s trying to outrun this guy. Next thing you know, sirens are on and the cherries are going and Dad is laying on the floor in the backseat just killing himself laughing.
“Mom got a ticket. Dad was in the backseat, just howling.
“She wasn’t very happy with him.”
No. 9. As a grandfather, Earl “didn’t know how to say no,” says Trevor Moore, Liz’s husband. And Catherine Arenthals, one of Earl’s seven grandkids, agrees. He bought her a horse named Chase and christened one of his race cars “The Lady Catherine.” Someone painted that moniker on the dashboard, and now it hangs on the wall in her garage.
As a girl, Catherine joined the family on trips to Earl’s races. “My brother and I used to fight over who got to ride home with Grandpa because he would let us drive,” she says. “And we were definitely not old enough.”
Earl gave her lessons in Bonnie’s Ford Probe on Ailsa Craig’s backroads. A police offer spotted her driving and pulled them over. He arrived at the passenger side and asked Earl what in the world was going on.
“I’m teaching my granddaughter how to drive,” he replied.
He did not get a ticket.
Neither did Catherine.
She was 13.
No. 10. When Liz and Trevor got married, Earl rigged their car so that when Trevor turned it on, they would get shocked. By luck, Trevor saw the wire and thus avoided that wedding present. Faye, the oldest of Earl’s three daughters, was not so lucky: Confetti came pouring out of her vents on her wedding day. Lisa was not a prank victim on her wedding day. Instead, she and Earl rode to the church in a horse-drawn carriage driven by Kim Pickering.
No. 11. The 50th anniversary of Earl’s win was Sept. 29. At the 25-year anniversary, Earl, his family and the McKichans attended the race at Martinsville for a commemorative celebration. They sat at the start-finish line and were thrilled that everybody remembered, everybody cared, everybody affirmed the awesomeness of the biggest day of their racing lives.
After Earl shook hands with every driver in the field, he turned to Lisa and said, “Wouldn’t it be great if one of these guys was Canadian?”
He was proud to be the first Canadian to win a Cup race.
He would have been prouder still of the second.
“That was his dream,” Lisa says.
No. 12. Not long before he died, Earl took an old friend to Varney Speedway. That friend had the great good sense to ask to be let out at the entrance.
Earl pulled onto the racing surface and started barreling around the track. ...
Track officials burst outside of the office ready to raise hell. ...
Then they saw it was Earl Ross they were running toward. ...
And they put their arms around him and had their pictures taken with him.
Even 50 years after his win and 10 years after his death, Earl’s legend remains strong in Canadian motorsports. In 2022, nearly 500 people attended an Earl Ross Memorial in Ailsa Craig. And Charlene Pickering of the local historical society has chartered a bus to take fans on a trip to the race this weekend in Martinsville.
They’ll be gone a week, with stops at the NASCAR Hall of Fame, Wood Brothers Racing’s shop and 23XI’s state of the art facility.
Why this fascination decades later? It’s as simple and as complicated as a local man who became famous and didn’t forget where he came from. As Charlene Pickering says, everybody knew Earl, everybody loved him, everyone had a story about a race (see No. 7) or prank (No. 10) or a golf outing (No. 18) or all three.
And so heck yeah they’re still celebrating him, even now, in 2024.
Owners and drivers honor his legacy in the region. Inside the rebuilt Earl S. Ross Inc., is a race car painted to look like Earl’s No. 52. This one has the skin of a 2004 Pontiac Sunbird. Rob Nichol owns it, and his son, Carter, races it in a NASCAR Weekly Series at Grand Bend Speedway in Parkhill, Ontario.
Rob had admired Earl since the early 1990s. He became an employee of Earl S. Ross Inc., in 2002 and still works there today. He says painting his car to look like Earl’s felt like a fitting tribute.
There’s also this: When Rob got married 16 years ago, Earl fired up his own 1952 Ford Victoria and drove Rob and his new bride around town for photos. The seats did not shock anyone, confetti did not come spitting out the vents and he did not drive like a maniac. “He was nice and courteous,” Rob says.
No. 13. Ailsa Craig, population of about 1,000, sits a 40-minute drive east from Port Huron, Michigan. Three roads leading into downtown have billboards with Earl’s picture proclaiming him to be the only Canadian to ever win a Cup race.
Small town life in rural Canada: One day in August, Lisa and Liz ate lunch at The Crown and Turtle Pub in Ailsa Craig and told stories about Earl. Each ordered a chicken wrap that is not on the menu but is named after a local. In walked Charlene Pickering, organizer of the bus trip from Ailsa Craig to Martinsville.
Small town life in rural Canada, part 2: The next person to come in now lives in the house where Lisa and Liz grew up. It has an historical marker in the front yard pointing out that Earl lived there.
Small town life in rural Canada, part 3: Earl’s granddaughter Catherine and her husband, Josh, live in Ailsa Craig across the street from that house. They can see the garage where he built race cars from their yard.
No. 14. Earl would be baffled by this story. He saw himself as someone who had done something interesting, yes, but that was a long time ago. He’d be surprised people still wanted to talk about it. But they do. Fans still contact Lisa on a regular basis, and the Earl Ross Tribute Facebook page is vibrant with comments, photos and reminisces.
He deflected credit for his success. He gave speeches frequently, and his message was always the same, says Lisa: “I’m the driver so I get all the attention, but racing is a team sport. I wouldn’t be here without people supporting me.”
When officials at Delaware Speedway began planning to build a monument in his honor, they wanted to erect a large placard with all his accomplishments on it. No way, Lisa thought. That’s not what he would want.
Instead, she told them to build a smaller placard and inscribe it with “Racing is a true team sport.”—Earl Ross
No. 15. In advance of a visit from NASCAR.com, Lisa, Liz and the McKichans gathered their memorabilia and displayed it in a she-shed on Lisa’s property. The uniform Earl wore on the day he won at Martinsville hung near the bar. On the bar sat photos of Earl with Richard Petty, Cale Yarborough, every other star of the 1970s and President Jimmy Carter.
All that and more told the incredible story of Earl’s rise to the top of the NASCAR mountain. But one crucial piece of memorabilia was missing: the clock.
The race every NASCAR driver wants to win most is the Daytona 500. But if there’s one trophy every driver craves most, it’s the Martinsville clock. Earl’s clock was too heavy to move to the she-shed, so it remained in its prominent place between Lisa’s kitchen and living room.
As she posed with it, the McKichans and Liz teased her about star turn, a scene repeated at each person’s photo shoot for this story.
The team got the trophy back from Martinsville by stuffing it into the official Carling team station wagon and driving it home. After Earl died, Lisa and Liz talked about what to do with his memorabilia. Lisa offered a simple proposal. She wanted the clock, and Liz could have everything else. It turned out to be a great deal for both.
Here’s the thing they don’t tell you about that iconic trophy clock: It’s really loud. It ticks one second, and it tocks the next, and it clangs and clangs and clangs some more. That’s really cool at first and distracting from there on out.
And so while it is ... a stellar conversation starter ... and the best trophy in motorsports ... and a prized memento from a day that shocked the NASCAR world ... as a clock it’s annoying. So Lisa shut it off.
No. 16. At first Earl and the McKichans found the NASCAR world insular. Then someone groused about them being Yankee carpetbaggers, and Kenny corrected them. “We’re not Yankees. We’re southern Canadians.”
And that opened the door for Southern hospitality.
No. 17. In 1971, Earl attended the Daytona 500 as a fan. He marveled at the spectacle, turned to Gord McKichan and said, wouldn’t it be great to run this race?
Little did he know that he would soon have that chance. Kenny orchestrated a deal in which he landed a car, owner and sponsor for the 1973 Daytona 500. He called Earl and asked if he wanted to drive it. Earl asked many questions, all legitimate. Kenny pretended to be put off.
“I said, ‘Well, if it’s going to be a problem, I’ll get somebody else,’ and I hung up,” he says.
He let Earl stew.
“And then he was just going nuts for about 10 minutes: ‘Don’t you even think about giving that to somebody else!’ ”
No. 18. Earl might have been more obsessed with golf than he was with racing. He brought his clubs with him on race trips and played courses across the United States and Canada.
As complications from Parkinson’s set in, he began to swing one handed -- using his right hand to swing lefthanded, like a backhand in tennis.
Shortly before Parkinson’s forced him to stop playing entirely, he stepped to the No. 7 tee at Ironwood Golf Club in Exeter, Ontario. Holding his five-iron in his right hand, he thwacked the ball.
It flew over a pond and bounced onto the green. When they got there, they couldn’t find it.
“We knew it was a great shot,” Trevor Moore says. “He said, ‘It couldn’t go over the green because I can’t hit it that far.’ I said, ‘Look in the hole, Earl.’ And he walked over to the hole, and there it was.”
No. 19. Bonnie -- the woman Earl loved at first sight, the woman whose siblings he welcomed to the family, the woman he tricked into racing a cop -- died in 2005. Lisa delivered the eulogy. As she prepared it, Earl asked her to say how lucky he was to have found a woman who was always willing to follow his dream.
“But it was really her dream, too,” she says, “because she wanted the best thing for her husband. And what’s better than to achieve your dream?”
Only achieving your dream with the people you love most.