Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, August 9, 1993 TAG: 9308090049
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: B1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BOB ZELLER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: WATKINS GLEN, N.Y. LENGTH: Long
Martin was having so much pit trouble during the 90-lap road race at Watkins Glen International that he was voted the recipient of the Goody's Headache Award - until he won.
So instead of getting a consolation prize, he won a personal-best, first- place prize of $166,110, which included a $98,800 Unocal bonus for winning the race from the pole.
It was a big day for Ford Thunderbirds, which took the top four places and seven of the top eight. And it was the biggest day ever in Winston Cup racing for team owner Jack Roush, whose cars finished first and second.
Martin finished 3.84 seconds ahead of teammate Wally Dallenbach Jr., who had the best finish of his career. Jimmy Spencer was third, followed by Bill Elliott and Ken Schrader, who had the highest-finishing Chevrolet Lumina.
Martin's first victory of the year was just as improbable as all the bad luck he's had in 1993 with his fast Thunderbirds.
Each of his four pit stops was a disaster. His crew was plagued by soft lug nuts that rounded off under the intense pressure of the air wrenches and made tire changes slow.
But Martin clawed his way back through the field each time in the 2-hour, 12-minute race.
And he was running third with less than six laps to go when leader Kyle Petty spun in turn 2 of the 11-turn road course. Then Dale Earnhardt, who was running second, ran into Petty. That handed the victory to Martin, who eased through the smoke and past the crashed cars at half speed.
"The door kind of swung open there at the end and we just slipped in," Martin said. "We had some problems that were really setting us back in the pits. It was taking us forever to get the tires changed. We were really fortunate to win this race. Had we not had an awesome car, we wouldn't have pulled it off."
Roush said his first one-two finish "was a bonus."
"I feel like some of the black clouds that have hung over us all year have broken and we got a bit of sunlight," he said.
For Dallenbach, it was a bit of redemption after months of trouble.
"It's been a frustrating season, but this will soften it up a little bit," Dallenbach said.
Martin said he had a chance to win the race even if Petty and Earnhardt had not crashed.
He had won the pole on Friday by 2.5 mph, and his car was just as fast Sunday.
"No one could really run with it," he said. "We weren't that far back when we got into third [on lap 84 of the 90-lap race]. I knew I could catch them. I don't know about passing them. But the race was going to be on."
Petty, however, ended that with his spin on lap 85.
"I just lost it, man," Petty said. "I went into turn 2 and ran up on the curb with the right-front tire and when I did it just pitched the car over the left side and when it landed it spun around that way. Dale had no place to go, and I hate it for him because he was running good."
Earnhardt knows the breaks of road-racing.
"I guess I'm not supposed to win a road course race," he said. "I thought Kyle was going to slide to the right after he spun, but he went the other way. I guess that's just road-course luck today."
Martin missed all the other numerous spins and crashes. It was the pit stops and bad lug nuts that nearly doomed him.
"Every pit stop, we jammed at least one lug nut," Roush said.
It was a rather mysterious problem because Dallenbach had no problems at all with his.
"I thought we were probably not going to be able to win," Martin said. "Sitting there, I was saying to myself, `Well, there it goes.' But as soon as we got back out there, we went to work to recover from them.
"But it got worse. The first stop, we lost one spot. The second stop, we lost about three or four spots. And the third and fourth stops, we lost the whole field."
The problem was the same Rusty Wallace experienced at Sears Point last year. After that, Martin's team and many others began testing their lug nuts for hardness. But test after test showed strong, hard lug nuts, so the team stopped testing.
"I was the guy who had 'em round off," said crew chief Steve Hmiel, who also changes tires on race day. "You can actually feel them getting round when they're going on."
Martin's third stop was the worst. It came around lap 53. One of the nuts was so round, it would not come off with the air wrench. To remove it, the team had to hammer a slightly smaller socket over the lug nut and loosen both the socket and nut by hand with a breaker bar.
That stop took more than a minute, and when Martin finally got out of the pits, he was in 25th place. By lap 74, when the next yellow flag flew, he had fought back to third.
But it was the same story again. Martin had another long stop and came out in 16th. By the next caution period, he was ninth, directly behind Dallenbach.
Dallenbach has not had a pleasant year as Martin's teammate with Roush Racing. He will not be returning to the team in 1994. Despite this, he did not try to seek revenge. In fact, he helped Martin.
On the restart on lap 83, Dallenbach communicated directly with Martin on their two-way radios.
"Go to the outside," Dallenbach said. "I'm going to bore a hole for you."
And he did. By the middle of the next lap, Martin was third, trailing only Earnhardt and Petty.
"Wally gave me a break in traffic on at least two occasions today because he knew how fast we were running," Martin said. "Instead of racing me for position, he chose to do the right thing and let me go and try to win the race."
Dallenbach said: "I knew I had a good second-place car. All I know is I drove it as hard as I could all the way through the race. I run this hard everywhere, it's just sometimes I don't get results like this."
On the last restart on lap 88, after the Petty-Earnhardt crash, Dallenbach was third behind Spencer. As the green flag flew, Martin seemed to hold up just a bit to block Spencer and allow Dallenbach to move into second.
At least that's how Spencer saw it.
"I got snookered on that last restart," Spencer said. "I got teamed up on by Roush Racing."
That was the case for all the other drivers, too, as Roush experienced his finest afternoon in six years of Winston Cup racing.
Keywords:
AUTO RACING
by CNB