The 1992 NASCAR Winston Cup season came down to its final race with an extraordinarily tight championship battle. Entering Atlanta, Davey Allison led the standings at 3,928 points, with Kulwicki just 30 points behind, Bill Elliott 40 back, Harry Gant 97 back, Kyle Petty 98 back, and Mark Martin 113 back. Allison needed only a fifth-place finish or better to clinch the title outright; any higher finish if he led a lap would also suffice.
Richard Petty, the seven-time champion nicknamed "The King," had announced his retirement in October 1991 and ran a Fan Appreciation Tour throughout 1992 to say goodbye to the sport he had defined. A sell-out crowd of 160,000 fans packed Atlanta Motor Speedway for the occasion, and country band Alabama performed a tribute concert at the Georgia Dome the night before. Kulwicki, meanwhile, had personal stakes beyond the points: he was a self-financed owner-driver running the No. 7 Hooters Ford for his own AK Racing team, the last such owner-driver in the modern era, and he had famously turned down two large offers from Junior Johnson — whose car would be driven that very day by championship rival Bill Elliott.
Davey Allison had won five races in 1992 and was the only driver who controlled his own destiny. His season had been marked by extraordinary bad luck: a violent crash at Pocono broke his arm badly enough that he continued racing, he lost the Winston Million bonus at Darlington when his crew misread a radar screen and called him in before a rain stoppage, and personal tragedy struck when his brother Clifford was killed in a Busch Series practice crash at Michigan. Allison had rallied from all of it to reclaim the points lead entering Atlanta.
Kulwicki's path back was equally improbable. After a 34th-place finish at Dover left him 278 points behind, he strung together five consecutive top-fifteen finishes while rivals faltered. His car carried two Mighty Mouse decals on the nose, covering the letters "TH" in "Thunderbird" to read "Underbird" — Kulwicki's self-deprecating nod to his underdog status as the sole owner-driver in contention.
Bill Elliott had won four consecutive races in the spring, tying the NASCAR record, and led the standings for much of the summer before three consecutive poor results at Martinsville, North Wilkesboro, and Charlotte cost him the points lead.
The green flag flew with Rick Mast on pole — his qualifying lap of 180.183 mph was the first over 180 mph at an intermediate-length circuit — but contact between Mast and Brett Bodine on the second lap brought out the first caution. Dale Earnhardt slipped through to lead early, but Allison was tagged from behind in the melee, bending his rear fender toward the tire.
Kulwicki's day turned complicated when his transmission lost first gear during pit stops early in the race. Working from memory of an identical problem at Charlotte weeks earlier, he shifted into fourth gear and ran most of the race from there, unable to upshift through the gears normally and risking further damage every time he downshifted. Despite this, the No. 7 was one of the fastest cars on track.
A piece of duct tape accidentally left on Jeff Gordon's car during a pit stop rolled onto the track and struck Allison's front air dam around lap 118, adding to his bodywork woes. On lap 160, Mark Martin's engine expired, eliminating him from championship contention. The decisive moment came on lap 254 when Ernie Irvan's car lost control exiting turn four and collected Allison, breaking the No. 28's steering column. Allison's crew heroically rebuilt enough of the car to return him to the track, but his championship hopes were effectively finished.
The final laps became a battle between Elliott and Kulwicki over who would lead the most laps — a five-point bonus in the old points system that could decide the championship. Kulwicki had led 103 laps and needed Elliott to not catch him in lap count. Terry Labonte's late pit stop inadvertently denied Elliott the laps he needed by leading lap 315 between the two rivals' pit stops. Elliott led the final thirteen laps and crossed the line first for his fifth win of the season, but Kulwicki maintained second place throughout, having clinched the most-laps-led bonus.
After crossing the finish line, Kulwicki executed what he called a "Polish victory lap" — driving the wrong way around Atlanta Motor Speedway, clockwise, so he could wave to fans on both sides of the track, a tradition he had started after his first career victory at Phoenix in 1988.
Kulwicki won the championship with 4,078 points. Elliott finished ten points behind him in the closest margin in NASCAR history to that point. Allison, despite finishing 27th after being gathered up in the Irvan accident, held on for third in the final standings, 63 points back. The ten-point margin stood as the record until 2011, when Tony Stewart and Carl Edwards finished in a tie and were separated only by the tiebreaker.
Richard Petty returned to the track with two laps remaining, his car stripped of sheet metal from the nose-fire earlier in the race. He finished 35th and was credited as running at the checkered flag. After the ceremony in victory lane, he took one final ceremonial lap as Alabama's tribute song played on the public address system. Petty said of his car fire: "I wanted to go out in a blaze of glory; I just forgot about the glory part."
Jeff Gordon, meanwhile, finished 31st after crashing on lap 164 — an inauspicious debut that gave no indication of the four championships to come.
The 1992 Hooters 500 is considered the defining generational transition in NASCAR history: the day the sport simultaneously bid farewell to its most decorated champion of the modern era and introduced the driver who would define the next decade. It is the only race in NASCAR history to feature Richard Petty, Jeff Gordon, and Dale Earnhardt all taking the green flag together — three drivers considered among the greatest in the sport's history.
Kulwicki's championship as an owner-driver stood as the last of its kind for nearly two decades, until Tony Stewart replicated the feat in 2011, also in a dramatic final-race finish. Both men who led the 1992 championship fight — Kulwicki and Allison — died in aviation accidents before the 1993 season was over: Kulwicki on April 1 in a plane crash near Bristol, and Allison on July 13 in a helicopter accident at Talladega. The following year, at the 1993 Atlanta fall race, Rusty Wallace and Dale Earnhardt carried flags bearing the numbers 7 and 28 on a Polish Victory Lap in their honor.
The race broke ESPN's auto racing television rating record at the time, drawing a 4.1 rating and 2.5 million households.