Lebo’s Bivins back on track
By Bobbi Mlynar
Originally published 12:39 p.m., October 25, 2007
Updated 12:39 p.m., October 25, 2007
The man who narrowly missed being NASCAR’s Rookie of the Year in 1976 is back racing, this time on tracks like Lakeside Speedway and others across the country that feature modified cars running on dirt tracks.
Terry Bivins says he won more than 400 races in his career, despite a hiatus of more than 30 years that was directly the result of the rookie brouhaha that eventually gave the title to Skip Manning.
At the end of that 1976 NASCAR racing season, Bivins realized that he had the points to give him the title.
“I won the Rookie of the Year,” he said. “We had a celebration dinner.”
Bivins, though, ran independently; he had no sponsors to take his case to NASCAR officials, but Manning did, he said.
“They turned that around and gave it to Skip Manning,” Bivins said. “(The sponsor) went to NASCAR and told them if his guy didn’t win” the sponsor would pull out.
“There’s a story on the Internet about how I got politically screwed. I got so fed up that I quit and didn’t race for 32 years,” Bivins said.
For three seasons, though, Bivins and his wife, Claudia, and their children traveled the NASCAR circuit with cars that he had rented or put together and maintained. He raced at Darlington, Charlotte, Talladega and other stops on the tour against drivers like Cale Yarborough, Richard Petty and Dale Earnhart Sr., and he won enough money to support his family, the car and the travel. In 1976, NASCAR’s web site shows Bivins earned more than $44,000 that year.
“I was kind of the first Yankee coming in,” Bivins said. “... I raced with old Richard Childress back in the day. ... He and I shared a shop in Winston-Salem, N.C., in ’76.”
They had met at a Daytona motel, noticed that each wore racing jackets, and subsequently sat on a curb, talking racing for hours.
Childress, who since has developed one of the most successful teams in NASCAR, and Bivins got together again most recently at Kansas Speedway a few weeks ago to talk about old times and racing.
From the beginning, Bivins did much of his own mechanical work and built his own cars.
He started racing in 1964, with a 1955 Ford he bought off a used-car lot in Merriam.
“We put a roll cage in it and went racing,” Bivins recalled with a grimace. “It had snow tires on the back and we ran them. ... And, boy, that old girl had some rough rides!”
He installed a clothes hanger to help him hold the car in second gear instead of popping out. Soon, with success, he was able to buy a Chevrolet and that is what he raced throughout his career.
NASCAR then was different. The payouts were far lower, the cars were more stock and less technology.
“There was so much air going under the car, it would float back and forth,” he said. “Your car would move clear to the other side of the track and you never moved the steering.”
He went through the wrecks, broken bones and concussions common to drivers in those days.
“You never can relax for a second, not even a millisecond,” he said.
At Darlington, a wreck sent him to the hospital with broken ribs and “knocked me goofy as a duck for three days,” he said. At I-70, his throttle stuck wide open and he “hit that wall a ton.” The car went through the concrete barrier and flipped several times.
“His car went like this,” Claudia Bivins said, making loops with her hand. “Kadoink! Kadoink! Kadoink!”
“The whole stands, I think, thought I was dead,” he said.
Claudia, who tapes each race, caught that wreck on videotape, just as she has others.
At Fort Smith, two wreckers got on opposing ends of a Camaro and pulled its crushed body out far enough to unpin Bivins’ legs and release him.
“I came to and argued, ‘You’re not cuttin’ on my race car,’” he recalled telling people preparing to cut the car away. The wrecker ploy saved the Camaro to run again.
“If I had good luck, I would run a car a whole season,” he said. Then he would sell it at the end of the season.
“I’d build me a new one with a little better technology. We always built all my own from scratch, from the ground up. You pretty much know what makes that car work,” he said.
Bivins is in the Central Auto Racing Boosters Hall of Fame.
“Terry was the only stock-car driver, the original inductee,” Claudia Bivins said.
Cars now come together or receive needed maintenance or tweaking in the couple’s garage at Lebo, where they moved in 1999.
Claudia Bivins always has been part of the crew, in one capacity or another, her husband said, whether it’s videotaping or helping him repair engines on his car or the pickup trucks he restored during their time away from full-time racing. In those days, Bivins had his own construction company too, and he later took up professional fishing.
The association with fishing partner Randy Moore of Moore’s Home Mechanical Services brought him the modified car he currently races, plus a sponsorship.
“He bought me a car and then he decided we needed a new one, too,” Bivins said, adding that the new car cost about $14,000 plus the expense of a new engine and transmission. He gave the first car the extra scrutiny and tweaking it needed to become a winner.
“About four races into this season, I got it tuned up and it was bad fast,” he said.
And the racing itself felt right, too.
“That’s the part that amazed me,” Bivins said. “After 20 laps, it felt like I’d never been out of the car.”
This time, it’s where he plans to stay.
“I had more people come up and tell me ‘I used to watch you when I was a kid.’ Now they’re 30-something and bringing the kids,” he said.
The Bivins’ son, James, 39, who has been helping with crew duties since he was 17, now has joined the modified’s crew, along with crew chief Myron Coons, who is Claudia’s brother-in-law, and nephews Dustin Haas and Jason Coons.
Bivins’ mother and stepfather attend every race and bring along $20 worth of quarters each time to make sure the mud gets washed off the car.
Bivins is making plans now for next season, including a swing through Missouri, Oklahoma, Nebraska, New Mexico and, probably, Las Vegas.
“We’re going to do some traveling,” Bivins said.
The caravan will include a GMC one-ton pick-up truck and a long, enclosed trailer with a winch to haul the cars, tires, tool box and other racing accessories.
“This is the nicest luxury we’ve ever had in our career,” Claudia Bivins said.
The rig was a perk from the sponsor Randy Moore.
“He walked up to me Friday night,” Bivins said during an interview early this month. “He walked up and handed me the keys to that truck and said, ‘There, that ought to make you happy.’”
Most likely, anything that lets him sit behind the wheel of a fast car and race would be enough to make Terry and Claudia Bivins happy. Even the Rookie of the Year fiasco can’t dim the overriding pleasure of his racing career, interrupted though it was.
“I wouldn’t change anything about it,” Bivins said. “That was a fun, fun time.”