Greg Biffle arrived in NASCAR in the late 1990s, at a time when the league was swimming in larger-than-life personalities. You know the roll call.
Any recollection of the bigger names and legends wouldn’t likely include the solid racer from the Pacific Northwest, who was part of the mini-wave of western drivers who came our way during that era — Mike Skinner, Derrike Cope, Kevin Harvick, Kasey Kahne, Kurt Busch, Ron Hornaday, etc.
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He was no Wallace, Gordon, Jarrett or, Lord knows, Earnhardt. But damn if he wasn’t always there, in the best way possible.
Greg Biffle after a 2006 win at Fontana, one of his 56 combined wins in NASCAR’s top three national series.
Thousands of racers have come and gone without ever being there, among the fast traffic, occasionally the fastest traffic, and on 19 occasions during 14 full-time Cup Series seasons, ahead of ’em all at the checkers.
With racers like Mark Martin and Carl Edwards as Roush Racing teammates for much of his career, he was never even the biggest star on his own team, much less one of the entire sport’s true power players. Perhaps his highest-profile days came before he was a Cup Series regular, when he and Harvick ignited a short but eventful feud in the old Busch Series.
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But he spent more than a decade collecting his mail in the top 10, occasionally in Victory Lane, because unlike so many quality racers whose names you’ve never heard, he was able to take advantage of that often elusive right-time/right-place moment in his young life.
Greg Biffle took advantage of old NASCAR wintertime series
It was called the Winter Heat Series, a NASCAR product at Tucson Speedway in the late-’90s, designed to provide programming for NASCAR television partner TNN. When Biffle wasn’t racing there, he was back near home in Washington, racing on a short Portland oval, across the Columbia River from his Vancouver hometown.
“You could tell he loved racing,” says Dennis Huth, former NASCAR higher-up who was running the Portland track and assisting Winter Heat in those days. “Every time he ran a race, if he didn’t finish near the front, you could tell he was disappointed. But I guess that’s every racer.
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“Benny Parsons was doing TV for Winter Heat and he and I had lunch one day. He told me he knew of a couple NASCAR owners looking for talent, and we started putting a list together. Biffle was one of them, and I think Benny went to Jack Roush and told him he should take a look at him.”
In less than a decade, Biffle became a NASCAR name, if never a household word. Of the thousands of racers who strapped into a big-league stock car, only 44 collected more than Biffle’s 19 career wins, a total he shares with Fonty Flock and a pair of Hall of Famers — Buddy Baker and Davey Allison.
Biffle was a NASCAR champ, having won the title in both the Trucks (2000) and formerly named Busch Series (2002). His best Cup Series run was a runner-up championship effort in 2005, when he enjoyed the best short-term success of his career — five wins in the season’s first 15 races.
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He won the season finale at Homestead three straight years (2004-06), but that was before the finale was a winner-take-all for the championship among the top four drivers in the playoffs. Poor timing, in that instance.
True, Harvick once tried to choke Biffle, and there was the time an angry Sterling Marlin called him a “bug-eyed dummy,” but if that’s the only two run-ins you can recall from a NASCAR career pushing two decades, nearly every driver would take it.
Greg Biffle’s hurricane relief efforts earned him much love and respect
Near the end — and much will rightfully be made of this — Greg Biffle’s highest level of adulation came due to something much bigger than a Sunday race. Last fall, he beat a steady path to the western Carolinas in the wake of Hurricane Helene, back when the federal response was under heavy criticism.
He did constant back-and-forths with his helicopter, delivering supplies to folks in need. Folks in bad need. No, he didn’t do it without fanfare, because he went to social media to give visuals to the effort. But there was never any thought those visuals were anything other than him letting the rest of us know of needs that needed to be met.
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During his racing career, he was what you might call a ’tweener. Not the fan favorite whose name adorned the marquee, but certainly not the villain. As said before, though, he was always there.
And when it really counted, more than it ever did at Daytona, Darlington or Dover, he was there in a big way. His moments of glory came from something bigger than a checkered flag, and that’s not a bad legacy at all.
— Email Ken Willis at ken.willis@news-jrnl.com
This article originally appeared on The Daytona Beach News-Journal: NASCAR racer Greg Biffle delivered when it mattered after solid career
