Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, July 12, 1993 TAG: 9307120068
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: B1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BOB ZELLER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LOUDON, N.H. LENGTH: Long
"Hey, Rusty, we're baaaaaack," crew chief Buddy Parrott said in a singsong voice on the team radio after Wallace took the checkered flag for his fifth victory of the year, crossing the finish line 1.31 seconds ahead of pole-winner Mark Martin.
"You guys did a great job," Wallace said from his car radio. "They're all giving us a bunch of crap about being dead. We're not dead. We were just takin' a break."
Davey Allison was third after a late-race caution period for debris ended his chance to make a run at Wallace. Dale Jarrett was fourth and Ricky Rudd fifth. Sterling Marlin finished sixth after dominating the first half of the race. And Jeff Gordon was seventh - the last car on the lead lap.
Although Wallace is third in Winston Cup points, trailing leader Dale Earnhardt and Jarrett, he gained 95 points on Earnhardt, who finished 26th after an assortment of problems. Wallace is 250 points behind Earnhardt, while Jarrett trails by 171 points.
The key to this race was a caution period on lap 267 for debris on the track. A wheel hub fell off Michael Waltrip's battered car and came to rest in the middle of the backstretch.
When starter Doyle Ford waved the yellow flag, Allison had been leading for about 25 laps. He had taken the lead from Wallace during a round of green-flag pit stops. And just before the yellow flew, Allison had his Ford Thunderbird ahead of Wallace's Pontiac Grand Prix by six or eight car lengths. Wallace didn't appear to be gaining any ground.
"I didn't want to see no . . . caution flag," Allison told his crew.
Allison and Wallace knew that it gave Wallace a chance.
"It was looking pretty grim there for a little bit," Wallace said after the race. "Then the caution came out and I said, `Boy, this is what we needed.' And when the pressure gets on [the pit crew] they can flat change those lug nuts pretty quick."
Although Wallace was first out of the pits to take the lead, Allison said he would have been a sitting duck anyway.
"We couldn't hook up on cold tires," he said. "If we had beat him out of the pits, I couldn't have held him off.
"That's the way it goes sometimes. They had to throw a caution. It was just an unlucky break for us. I saw [the hub]. It was there. It's not a tiny piece. If that thing were to get hit by somebody, or hit somebody in the head, or gone through somebody's windshield, it could have been a bad deal."
Martin, whose Ford was faster in the early laps, muscled past Allison soon after the restart on lap 274.
But he couldn't mount a challenge to Wallace, and by the end of the race he was fighting to keep Allison in third place.
"Rusty drove his heart out there at the end," Martin said. "His car was all over the track and I was, too. I was hoping to put the pressure on him and wobble him out of the groove, but I couldn't do it. And then I had my own battle with Davey there at the end."
The most disappointed driver, however, had to be Marlin, who remains winless after 274 Winston Cup starts.
Marlin led the most laps - 123 - and was in front nearly all of the first half of the race. He battled furiously with Earnhardt shortly before the halfway point, trying to put him a lap down. That contest ended with Earnhardt, not Marlin, spinning off the track.
But for Marlin, once again, it didn't work out.
"We had 'em," Marlin said as he rushed to leave the track in a rented helicopter. "But the chassis fell off, and then we got whipped."
Crew chief Ken Wilson said, "The car just got tight. And him and Earnhardt getting together might have hurt the car in some way."
That encounter produced no hard feelings, as Martin's crew chief, Steve Hmiel, noted.
"I saw Sterling and Earnhardt going out of here together, arm in arm, laughing their heads off," Hmiel said. "That's the way it ought to be."
Wallace led a total of 106 laps, including the final 30 trips around this 1.058-mile oval.
But he didn't take the lead for the first time until lap 168 - well past the halfway point. That's because he had started way back in 33rd after he "really messed up qualifying.
"Trust me," Wallace said, "It's never a benefit starting 33rd. I don't want to have to do that again. Usually when you're in the very back, you're in all the wrecks. But today they were in parts of the lineup." (There were four incidents, but none was serious and no one was injured.)
"To come here and win this thing really feels great because we've been in a little bit of a slump," Wallace said. "We've had some problems. It started at Talladega when I got knocked around a little bit" in a horrendous, multiflip crash, his second bad crash of the year.
The Talladega crash broke Wallace's left wrist. It's still painful ("like a toothache"), but hasn't bothered him nearly as much as the slump. Since Talladega, which came right after three straight short-track victories in April, Wallace has finished 38th, eighth, 29th, 21st, 39th, fifth and 18th.
"We just kept having a couple of weird things happen," he said. "But today we had a great-handling car, and every time we made a pit stop, they did everything right."
Keywords:
AUTO RACING
by CNB