Bobby Allison Once Acted as Elvis Presley’s Body Double in ‘Comeback Special’ Year Movie Shot on Half a Million Worth of Cameras

Bobby Allison was a name everyone knew about in the 1960s and 1970s. He was a driver with exceptional ability; young, ferocious, and fearless. Bobby was everything fans wanted to see from NASCAR.

At the peak of Bobby Allison’s NASCAR career, there was another person who was at his peak; not from NASCAR, though. That person was young Elvis Presley. Elvis was the actor that every moviegoer would go ga-ga over.

Elvis had already done 2 movies about racing. These movies, Viva Las Vegas (1964) and Spinout (1966) had him portrayed as a sports car driver. They were about racing but were not pertaining to NASCAR directly.

That changed when he played Steve Grayson, a NASCAR driver, who drove a Dodge-powered and Cotton Owens-owned car. Major parts of that movie, Speedway (1968) saw their filming done at Charlotte Motor Speedway.

They shot the racing scenes using cameras by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) sent to Charlotte from their Hollywood studio. These $500,000 worth of cameras were installed in Bobby Allison’s car when he raced in the 1967 World 600 in Charlotte.

Apart from Bobby, other big NASCAR stars also shared the limelight in the movie. The likes of Cale Yarborough, Richard Petty, and Buddy Baker – all made it into the last cut of the movie.

However, the most astonishing part was that Presley never even visited the Charlotte tracks. All his parts were either shot in Hollywood or an 18-year-old stand-in named Robbie Robinson covered them.

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There’s a lot about Bobby’s life that large sections of the public don’t know. This little factoid adds to that long list.

Bobby Allison lost his will to live in 1988

Bobby Allison’s life changed in ways nobody could possibly comprehend after his accident in Pocono. That 1988 race was one night he doesn’t remember, yet he can’t forget. It’s a night that left him without the will to live.

Racing at Pocono, he suspected a tire issue. He radioed his team that he will be pitting at the end of the lap. But he couldn’t reach the pit. His tire burst midway through the lap, and that’s where everything changed.

Several cars started piling up. But the hardest blow came when a rookie called Jocko, ‘T-boned’ his car. The crash was so bad that it took the safety team 30 minutes just to bring Bobby out of the car safely.

Bob Nolen, one of the safety officers who tended to Bobby, called it “one of the hardest hits I’ve ever seen.” That statement shouldn’t be taken lightly, for Nolen had seen multiple deaths in NASCAR over his 35 years career.

Allison took months to recover and become just ‘stable’ enough to come out of the hospital. But he could never get back to doing what he loved doing – racing. That’s why, years after that accident, he said, “I wish I had died. My life was great then.”

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The deeper you go into Bobby’s life, the tougher it is to read and not tear up. He has shown great strength and character through all of it.