David Pearson (racing driver)
American racecar driver (1934-2018)
David Gene Pearson (December 22, 1934 – November 12, 2018), nicknamed The Fox and later The Silver Fox, was an American professional stock car racing driver and team owner, who raced from 1960 to 1986 in the now NASCAR Cup Series. Throughout his career, Pearson raced under several car numbers, though he was most prominently known for driving the No. 21 Mercury Montego and Cougar for Wood Brothers Racing between 1972 and 1979 in the Cup Series.
Pearson won the 1960 NASCAR Rookie of the Year award and three Cup Series championships (1966, 1968, and 1969). NASCAR described his 1974 season as an indication of his "consistent greatness", finishing third in the season points having competed in only nineteen of thirty races. Pearson's career paralleled Richard Petty's, the driver who has won the most races in NASCAR history. They accounted for 63 first/second-place finishes, with the edge going to Pearson. Petty had two-hundred wins in 1,184 starts, while Pearson had 105 wins in 574 starts.
At his finalist nomination for the NASCAR Hall of Fame's inaugural 2010 class, NASCAR described Pearson as "... the model of NASCAR efficiency during his career.
“David Pearson (racing driver)” enters the record as american racecar driver (1934-2018). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what David, Pearson and racing can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 3, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q946583. VIAF identifies the subject as 45563319. The Library of Congress control number is n78070201. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1934, 2018, 1960 and 1986.
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This entry incorporates text from “David Pearson (racing driver)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.