James Hylton

James Hylton

NASCAR Cup Series statistics
Best placement	2. - (1966, 1967, 1971)
Starts Victories Poles Top 10 602 2 4th 301
NASCAR Xfinity Series Statistics
Best placement	135th - (2008)
Starts Victories Poles Top 10 4th - - -
NASCAR Camping World Truck Series statistics
Best placement	102nd - (2011)
Starts Victories Poles Top 10 1 - - -

Jamey Harvey Hylton (born August 26, 1934 in Roanoke , Virginia - † April 28, 2018 in Franklin County , Georgia ) was an American racing driver .

Career

In 1964, at the age of 30, Hylton drove his first NASCAR - Grand National Series race. He started the last three races of the season in a Ford Galaxie owned by Bondy Long, but he could not finish any of them.

After a year break, he made his debut as a regular driver in the Bud Hartje team in 1966, this time with a Dodge Charger . Hylton's rookie season is considered to be the best for a rookie to date. Although he did not win a race, he drove 20 top 5 and 32 top 10 placements and finished the season in second overall behind the superior David Pearson . For this, he was also named NASCAR Rookie of the Year .

The 1967 season went just as well, although he did not finish a race within one lap with the leader, Hylton was again second in the final standings, this time behind Richard Petty , and with 26 top 5s and 39 top 10s, but the first win went on to wait.

From 1968 onwards, Hylton finally started with his own team and continued to drive Dodge. This time he finished seventh, in 1969 he was even able to compete for the title for a long time and finally finished third, his deficit to champion David Pearson was only 420 points.

In the Richmond 500 1970, the knot for Hylton finally broke and he finally managed to claim his long-awaited first victory in a Ford Torino in the 187th race , having already been in the top 5 89 times and in the top 10 138 times had driven, at the end of the season he came closest to the title with 123 points behind Bobby Isaac . His second win was in the Talladega 500 in 1972, this time on a Mercury Montego , when the largest NASCAR division had already been renamed the Winston Cup Series . It was to be his last win though.

In 1975 Hylton finished a season in the top three for the seventh and final time. Now he mostly competed in Chevrolet . In the following year he was only 13th and also achieved his last top 5 placements. Nevertheless, he finished seventh in the final ranking in 1977. Alongside JD McDuffie and Dave Marcis, he was still one of the best among those who competed as driver and owner at the same time, which became more and more difficult with the rapid development in the 1980s, and precisely because of this, those three drivers are still today despite their lack of success as Legends seen. In 1980 Hylton succeeded for the last time in finishing a race in the top 10 and was the last time to start every race. After missing three races in 1981 (and still finishing 19th in the overall standings without making it into the top 10), he decided to no longer start full-time but only sporadically in NASCAR races in the future. Until 1993 he started sporadically in Winston Cup races.

With the end of his NASCAR Cup career, however, Hylton's driving career was far from over. After the smaller two of the larger NASCAR divisions saw the light of day, he competed in one race each in the Busch Series (or Nationwide Series) in 1982, 2006, 2008 and 2011 . He also dared several attempts in the Camping World Truck Series , but was only able to qualify for one race in 2011 when he was already a stately 76 years old. This makes Hylton the oldest starter in one of the three largest NASCAR series.

Most of all, however, Hylton was active in the ARCA Racing Series in his final years . Although he never managed to finish a race in the top 10, he quickly became the series' most popular driver. In 2005, Hylton surprised his fans when he announced that he would have a full ARCA season in 2006, which he did, although he only qualified for 19 of the 26 races and his best place was a 21st place, but he was 18th Overall ranking, as only a few drivers have contested the full season in the ARCA series for a number of years. It was the first time since 1981 that Hylton had contested a full motorsport season.

In 2007 Hylton tried to qualify for the Daytona 500 , in which his best result was a fifth place in 1972 (it would have been his first Cup start since 1993), but failed. He then turned back to the ARCA series and started again full-time between 2009 and 2013. In 2009 and 2010 he missed a total of only five races, in his last three years Hylton started every race and finished eleventh in the final standings in 2011 and 2013. After that, the 79-year-old finally resigned as a racing driver, but kept the post of owner of James Hylton Racing and now let other drivers compete.

death

On April 28, 2018, James and his 61-year-old son James "Tweet" Hylton Jr. were killed in a traffic accident on Interstate 85 in Georgia . The course of the accident is unclear.

After Hylton's death, Brad Smith , who has been a regular driver for James Hylton Racing since 2017, took over his team and renamed it Brad Smith Enterprises . Smith still competes in almost every race.

Web links

Commons : James Hylton  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

• James Hylton website
• Driver statistics on racing-reference.info

Individual evidence

1. ↑ On the death of James Hylton (English)