On Tuesday, the NASCAR Hall of Fame announced its three inductees for the Class of 2026: Kurt Busch, Harry Gant, and Ray Hendrick.
Busch is the obvious headliner, while Hendrick may be the most intriguing selection, a local short track racing legend believed to own more than 700 career wins to his name.
That leaves Gant to be largely overlooked, which is only fitting given that the same can generally be said about his place in NASCAR history. But the legacy of "Handsome Harry" deserves a brighter spotlight.
Harry Gant's Hall of Fame career doesn't even do him justice
Gant's resume in the NASCAR Cup Series is impressive enough as it is. Fewer than 50 drivers have ever amassed more than his 18 career wins, and all of them besides Jim Paschal, Jack Smith, and Speedy Thompson are either in the Hall of Fame or not yet eligible for it. When adjusting for the context of Gant's career, though, he might as well have at least tripled that number.
First, there's the fact that Gant never ran full-time in the Cup Series until his late thirties. Early in his career, he was a regular competitor in the NASCAR Sportsman division, the series which is now known as the Xfinity Series, where he was consistently among the cream of the crop. Unfortunately, NASCAR does not officially recognize results in that series prior to 1982, so the full contents of his successes there are unknown.
Gant made the jump to Winston Cup racing in 1979, only a year before his 40th birthday. Even in NASCAR's previous eras, when drivers weren't thrust into the top level in their late teens or early twenties as they are now, this was an outlier. Yet instead of having a short-lived run on the circuit, he became the most successful old guy in series history.
In September 1991, Gant won four consecutive races, capped off by a gritty victory at Martinsville Speedway with a car that had been damaged in an accident. A year later, his win at Michigan International Speedway, at the ripe age of 52, made him the oldest driver to win a Cup Series race, a record that still stands to this day.
Perhaps most impressively of all, Gant accomplished all of this without ever driving for a powerhouse race team. He was most iconic for driving the No. 33 Skoal Bandit machine owned by Leo and Richard Jackson, whose organization only won one additional race throughout its entire history (Phil Parsons at Talladega Superspeedway in 1988).
Considering all of this, there's an excellent case that Gant was a multi-time champion-level talent who simply never caught the right breaks to showcase his full capabilities.
There's an alternate universe somewhere in which he was mixing it up with Richard Petty, David Pearson, and Cale Yarborough throughout the 1970s, and remaining a dominant force well into the 1980s as big-money race teams began to establish themselves more prominently throughout the sport.
Even as it stands, the fact that Gant has had to wait this long to get his Hall of Fame nod feels like an oversight. This is an honor with which he should have been recognized several years ago, and now that he has, it must be ensured that Handsome Harry doesn't get forgotten again.