Richard Petty

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• Top 5 NASCAR Drivers of All Time

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• Dale Earnhardt

  Dale Earnhardt won seven NASCAR Cup Series championships between 1980 and 1994, tying Richard Petty's all-time record, and built a reputation as the sport's most aggressive and intimidating competitor, a style that earned him the nickname "The Intimidator" and made him one of the most polarizing, and most popular, drivers in NASCAR history. Earnhardt's black No. 3 Chevrolet became one of the most recognizable cars in American sports, and his aggressive, bumper-to-bumper driving style at NASCAR's high-speed superspeedways, Daytona and Talladega in particular, produced some of the most memorable finishes in the sport's history, for better or worse depending on which side of a given finish a fan was on. He finally won the Daytona 500 in 1998 on his 20th attempt, ending one of the most talked-about droughts in the sport's history at its single biggest race, a win that produced an emotional celebration from rival crews lining pit road to congratulate him — a rare moment of universal goodwill in a career built partly on divisive, hard-nosed racing. Earnhardt died in a last-lap crash at the 2001 Daytona 500, a tragedy that led directly to sweeping NASCAR safety reforms, including mandatory head-and-neck restraint devices and the development of the "car of tomorrow" safety chassis, changes credited with preventing further driver deaths in the sport in the decades since.

• Jimmie Johnson

  Jimmie Johnson won seven NASCAR Cup Series championships between 2006 and 2016, tying Richard Petty's and Dale Earnhardt's all-time record, and did it with a level of season-to-season consistency, rather than reliance on a single dominant year, that's arguably unmatched in the sport's history. Johnson's five consecutive championships from 2006 to 2010 remain the most consecutive titles won by any driver in NASCAR's modern era, a streak built during the sport's playoff-format "Chase for the Cup" era, meaning Johnson had to navigate a genuinely different, higher-pressure championship structure than Petty or Earnhardt faced during their title runs. He won the Daytona 500 twice, in 2006 and 2013, and finished with 83 career Cup Series wins, sixth on the all-time list, a total built through a partnership with crew chief Chad Knaus that lasted 17 seasons — an unusually long driver-crew chief pairing that both credited as central to the championship consistency. Johnson's calm, understated public persona stood in contrast to more outspoken NASCAR stars of his era, but his championship total speaks for itself, and his case as the greatest driver of NASCAR's modern, more standardized-car era is rarely seriously disputed among the sport's historians.

• Jeff Gordon

  Jeff Gordon won four NASCAR Cup Series championships between 1995 and 2001 and finished his career with 93 wins, third on the all-time list behind only Richard Petty and David Pearson, building his career during a period widely credited with expanding NASCAR's popularity well beyond its traditional Southern fan base. Gordon won the inaugural Brickyard 400 at Indianapolis Motor Speedway in 1994, a race NASCAR created specifically to bring stock car racing to one of American motorsport's most historic venues, and his win there helped legitimize the sport to a broader national sports audience that had previously paid it little attention. His rivalry with Dale Earnhardt through the mid-to-late 1990s, a clean-cut, California-raised young star against NASCAR's established Southern-rooted intimidator, became one of the defining storylines of the sport's biggest era of national growth, drawing new fans who related to Gordon's different background from the sport's traditional audience. Gordon retired from full-time competition in 2015 and moved into broadcasting, and his four championships combined with his role in growing NASCAR's national television audience during the 1990s and 2000s make him one of the most commercially significant drivers, not just statistically successful ones, the sport has ever produced.

• Cale Yarborough

  Cale Yarborough won three consecutive NASCAR Cup Series championships from 1976 to 1978, still the only driver in NASCAR history to win three straight titles, a run of back-to-back-to-back dominance that neither Richard Petty, Dale Earnhardt, nor Jimmie Johnson, despite each winning seven championships across their careers, ever managed to match in single-year consecutiveness. Yarborough won four Daytona 500s (1968, 1977, 1983, 1984) and was involved in one of the most famous moments in NASCAR broadcast history at the 1979 Daytona 500 — a last-lap crash with Donnie Allison while battling for the win led to a post-race fistfight between Yarborough, Allison, and Allison's brother Bobby, captured live on CBS during the first flag-to-flag network broadcast of the race, a moment widely credited with dramatically boosting NASCAR's mainstream television audience. His driving style combined aggressive short-track racing with genuine superspeedway skill, a versatility across NASCAR's very different track types that underpinned his championship consistency during the late 1970s, a period generally regarded as one of the most competitive eras in the sport's history. Yarborough finished his career with 83 wins, tied with Jimmie Johnson for sixth on NASCAR's all-time list, and his three-peat championship run remains a genuinely singular achievement in stock car racing — a record that's gone unmatched for more than four decades despite NASCAR producing several other seven-time champions since.