Lonnie LeeRoy Yarbrough was born on the 17th September, 1938 in Jacksonville, Florida. Living in a rough area of the town and being one of six children his childhood was for some reason filled with loneliness and unhappiness. the reasons for this he would never discus. "A lot of things happened to me," he says, "and there are a lot of things I just don't want to remember." A self-confessed delinquent he was well-known to the police for fighting and getting into trouble. This was a failing that he carried through to adulthood, both on the track and off it.

LeeRoy Yarbrough (Courtesy or Wiki Commons)

When LeeRoy was in his early teens he built himself a car, a 1935 Ford coupe with a Chrysler engine that he would drive around the streets of the town and on the local dirt tracks that were bog-holed and rutted, learning to be tough and aggressive in his approach to driving.

In 1957 when he was nineteen LeeRoy won the very first race that he entered at the Local Jacksonville Speedway. Jacksonville race promoter, Julian Klein, took the cocky and quick-tempered teenager in tow and over the next couple of years LeeRoy won more than a hundred Sportsmen and Modified features but tired of Leroy’s temper and attitude their relationship broke down and they parted company. Even when he moved to Columbia, South Carolina in the early 1960’s it was difficult to lose his aggressive attitude to driving and as his reputation for his talent in driving grew so to did his reputation of being hard-nosed. Tiny Lund said of him, "LeeRoy is the only real bad ass left among the top drivers. Everybody is individual, but he is really different from the rest. He has always been real mean out on the track, and he keeps to himself all the time."

He started racing in NASCAR’s lower tier Sportsman division moving up to the Modifieds after winning eleven races. In the Modifieds division he won eighty three features over a three year period. He won a couple of short-track races in the NASCAR Grand National (now Sprint Cup) 1964 season and two years later on the 16th October 1966 he won his first superspeedway race, the National 500, at Charlotte.

His big opportunity came in October 1967 when Junior Johnson approached him to drive for him in his factory Ford team with Herb Nab as crew chief. The following year, 1968, was a year of learning for Junior and Herb as they tried to understand LeeRoy’s strange personality but in 1969 the team was ready and they entered thirty of the fifty four events resulting in seven wins, including NASCAR’s version of the Triple Crown, (the Daytona 500, the Firecracker 400 and the Southern 200).

LeeRoy also had twenty one Top ten finishes and it was his best season. "It was a great year," recalled Johnson. "We won half the races we ran. I'm not taking anything away from my car, but you just have to give it to him (Yarbrough). He was beyond any other driver there was at that particular time with taking chances and just going beyond what anybody thought anybody would do. He just out-nerved most of the drivers that he ran against that year. It was unbelievable to see the chances he'd take. Lee Roy had no, you might say, respect for fear at all. He just didn't. Nothing out-nerved him and that's basically the way he won some of them races we were in. He'd just keep going deeper and deeper. Whatever it took to beat somebody, that's what he did." This was the pinnacle of his career and in 1970, with only one win to his credit, his problems began.

He became very moody and seemed to be filled with demons. He had shot to fame but now was on the slippery slope downwards. He had a bad crash while testing tyres at Texas World Speedway in the April of 1970 which affected him very badly and left his disorientated with memory loss. He started drinking a lot and took pain killers. People didn’t know what was wrong with him, some thought that it might have been the crash; some thought that it could have been caused by Rocky Mountain spotted fever.

In 1972 he drove in eighteen NASCAR races with nine top ten finishes. That was his last year, his career ended at the age of thirty three. He was picked up many times over the next few years by the Jacksonville police, either for being drunk or for fighting. On the morning of 13th February 1980 he was at his mother’s house when he put his hands around her neck and said, "Mama, I hate to do this, but I’ve got to kill you." The police came and took him to a psychiatric hospital where he was judged to be incompetent to stand trial. It was at this time that doctors discovered lesions on LeeRoy’s brain.

On the 7th of March 1980 he was committed to a Florida mental hospital. On the 6th of December 1984 LeeRoy suffered a violent seizure and fell, striking his head. He was rushed to Jacksonville‘s University Hospital where he died the following day, December 7th 1984 of internal bleeding in the brain. He was forty six years of age. He was named as one of NASCAR’s Greatest Drivers in 1998 and elected into the National Motorsports Press Association’s Hall of Fame in 1990. "Lee Roy was capable of winning any race," said Johnson. "A lot of people have an opportunity to win four or five times a year, but he was one driver that I know that had the capability of winning every race he went to. He was just a great race driver. I enjoyed working with him, and I was sorry his career was cut short."

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