2026 NASCAR Hall of Fame class to be inducted Friday
Forty years later, there’s still no one like Richie Evans.
Nine NASCAR Modified championships. Winner of the inaugural Whelen Modified Tour title and an estimated 475 races. NASCAR Hall of Famer.
The only man in NASCAR to have his number — the iconic No. 61 — retired from his respective division.
Those professional milestones define part of his story but not all of it. The other is defined by his character: A friendly, helpful, driven and confident-yet-gregarious face from Central New York who was always ready for a post-race party.
On Oct. 24, 1985, Evans died driving a Modified stock car around Martinsville Speedway in Virginia, practicing for the finale of the inaugural Modified Tour season. His legacy lives on four decades later. And while there was no one like him, it’s hard for longtime industry voices to avoid drawing obvious parallels to another NASCAR Hall of Fame icon: seven-time Cup Series champion Dale Earnhardt.
Mike Joy, FOX Sports’ lead NASCAR announcer, was on the call when Earnhardt was killed in a last-lap crash at the 2001 Daytona 500. He also was at Martinsville Speedway on the day Evans died (set to broadcast what should have been Evans’ championship coronation for the Motor Racing Network). A Northeast native who grew up in Modified country, Joy said Evans’ death “was bigger to Modified racing than Dale Earnhardt’s death was to Cup racing.”
“Certainly there was the same sense of, ‘Well, if it can happen to Richie, it can happen to any of us,’ ” Joy said.
Said Tommy Baldwin Jr., who grew up the son of another Modified legend in New York before winning a Daytona 500 as a crew chief and becoming the competition director for Rick Ware Racing: “Simplest way to put it is, (Evans) was the Dale Earnhardt of the Northeast.”
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