David Pearson (racing driver)

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. With little exaggeration, when Pearson showed up at a race track, he won." Pearson ended his career in 1986, and holds the second position on NASCAR's all-time win list with 105 victories; as well as achieving 113 pole positions. Pearson was successful in different venues of racing; he won three times on road courses, 48 times on superspeedways, 54 times on short tracks, and had 23 dirt track wins. Pearson finished with at least one top-ten finish in each of his 27 seasons. ESPN described him as being a "plain-spoken, humble man, and that added up to...."

Petty had high praises for Pearson, saying, "He could beat you on a short track, he could beat you on a superspeedway, he could beat you on a road course, he could beat you on a dirt track. It didn't hurt as bad to lose to Pearson as it did to some of the others, because I knew how good he was." Pearson said of Petty: "I always felt that if I beat him I beat the best, and I heard he said the same thing about me." Petty went further by saying that he believed Pearson would have pulled off 200 victories like him, if he ran the full schedules of NASCAR racing.