Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 25, 1993 TAG: 9304250178
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: B7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BOB ZELLER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: MARTINSVILLE LENGTH: Medium
Earnhardt was more than a mile an hour faster than Friday, but his Chevrolet Lumina was still pushing in the corners. His Saturday speed would have earned him the 19th starting position on Friday.
Darrell Waltrip was second fastest Saturday, moving from 29th to 26th on the grid after a lap at 92.106 mph.
Dave Marcis and Wally Dallenbach Jr. were still too slow to make the race on their qualifying times. Both had to take provisional starting spots for the 34-car field.
"I don't know what the problem is," Dallenbach said. "But I guarantee you, before we return to the short tracks [in the fall] we'll be testing, if all we do is work on qualifying."
P.J. Jones, son of racing legend Parnelli Jones, will not be making his Winston Cup debut at Martinsville. He failed to make the field, as did Jimmy Means.
\ CLEARANCE FOR ALLISON: Almost five years after his near-fatal racing crash at Pocono in 1988, Bobby Allison has finally regained the right to fly his plane alone.
The ironic footnote to this happy story is that on his first opportunity to fly alone last week, Allison flew to Allentown, Pa., the same city where he spent so many long weeks recovering from the Pocono crash.
"I got my medical [clearance] on Monday morning, and on Monday afternoon, I flew Judy to Allentown," Allison said at Martinsville Speedway as he prepared for today's Hanes 500.
"It's great," he said. "Right now, the plane is sitting in Charlotte and I don't have to have a guy standing by to ride with me wherever I go."
Allison said his wife is being treated in Charlotte for a muscle disorder by Dr. Harry Stephens, the same physician who treated him after the 1988 crash. Stephens also treated his son, Davey, after Davey's Pocono crash last year.
As for possibly racing in the Winston Cup series again, "it's just something that's back there," he said. "I don't know if it will materialize."
Allison said he will compete in ESPN's Fastmasters legends races that begin next month on the cable network's Saturday Night Thunder racing series. "Judy has given me her support to do Fastmasters," he said.
\ SLOW START FOR HARRY: One of the also-rans of 1993 has been Harry Gant.
He won five races in 1991 and two more in 1992. Both years, he was fourth in the Winston Cup championship.
But in 1993, he has only one top 10 finish in seven races - a ninth at Atlanta - and is 23rd in points. Atlanta also was the only race he managed to finish on the lead lap.
"We just ain't running," Gant said. "Our objective is trying to finish on the lead lap, and we've hardly done it all year."
Part of the problem could be the departure of crew chief Andy Petree to Dale Earnhardt's team, but "I don't really know what the problem is, to tell you the truth," Gant said. "We're just not running fast."
How about at Martinsville?
"The same way, slow," said Gant, who starts 23rd in today's race.
\ IT'S OVER: The finality of Hooters' withdrawal as the sponsor of the late Alan Kulwicki's Ford Thunderbird team is most apparent when looking at his race car hauler. The Hooters name has been painted out with white paint that does not quite match the off-white color of the rest of the trailer.
Kirk Shelmerdine, Dale Earnhardt's former crew chief, will race in the Poulan Pro 500K ARCA series stock car race next Saturday at Talladega Superspeedway with sponsorship from Advantage Memory Corp, a California computer company.
Keywords:
AUTO RACING
by CNB