2002 Pro Stock Car Racing Season

Here's another GREAT "vintage" racing season created by our go-to NASCAR expert, Jerry Minks! Presenting the 2002 Pro Season for RED WHITE & BLUE RACIN' Stock Car Action Game. While it's tough to think of anything from the 21st century as being "vintage," let's face it--2002 was over 20 years ago! And, vintage or not, it's a racin' season truly worth re-creating on your tabletop. In Jerry's words, "With 18 different winners and a couple dozen others who wouldn't have surprised me if they had won, 'fierce competition' are the key words for this set." It is arguably the greatest competitive balance of talented drivers ever to race together in a single NASCAR season. Plus, adding to the drama and unpredictability, there's a higher attrition of cars with mechanical failures and crashes than in more recent sets we've done. Bottom line: this card set will be great fun to play!

Tony Stewart won the 2002 championship with six DNFs, more than several drivers below him. He out-pointed Mark Martin via the laps led bonus points (Martin only lost by 38 points). The next five drivers were within 50 points of each other: Kurt Busch, Jeff Gordon, Jimmie Johnson, Ryan Newman and Rusty Wallace--there's some serious star power in that top tier! And we haven't even gotten to Dale Jarrett, Dale Junior, the LaBonte boys, Ricky Rudd, Kevin Harvick, Matt Kenseth...

There were plenty of highlights that made 2002 special. It was the final year that Dale Jarrett won multiple races in the same season; it was the ONLY season in Ward Burton's career that he won multiple races. Dale Junior won both Talladega races, and, when combined with his late 2001 win, he joined Buddy Baker as the only drivers in NASCAR history to win three straight races at Talladega. Ricky Rudd would become NASCAR's new Iron Man by making his 656th consecutive start, passing Terry Labonte. Kevin Harvick was banned from competing in the Virginia 500 at Martinsville due to reckless driving in the truck race the day before. That's the last race Harvick ever missed until he retired over 20 years later (2023). The "Big One" took out at least 24 cars on lap 164 of the Aarons 499 at Talladega--Tony Stewart hit the wall and then all hell broke loose.

The 2002 Pro Season card set for Red White & Blue Racin' includes standard and TV cards for 60 drivers based on their real-life 2002 performances, and a set of 23 track cards representing all 36 sanctioned races run that year.