Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, April 27, 1994 TAG: 9404270034
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: B-2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BOB ZELLER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
In last year's Winston 500 finish, Wallace was hit by Dale Earnhardt and barrel-rolled past the finish line. That terrible crash left him with a broken wrist and may have cost him the 1993 points championship.
"I just wish I could have a good run at Daytona and Talladega," Wallace said Sunday, after winning the Hanes 500 at Martinsville Speedway. "Man, I take new cars down there and they get wrecked."
He has another new car for Sunday's Winston 500.
Wallace's Ford Thunderbird for Talladega, he said, "is definitely, without a doubt, better than what I had at Daytona, and I had a better run than I've ever had down there" before he was caught up in a crash and finished 41st.
"So I'm going down there with everything I've got," Wallace said. "I'm real happy we've got the roof flaps. I think that's good. That'll help my driving style."
NASCAR now requires superspeedway cars to be equipped with roof flaps designed to open if a car spins, keeping it from flipping.
Qualifying begins at 4 p.m. Friday. The race is 1:30 p.m. Sunday. Saturday's schedule includes IROC and ARCA series races.
\ THE WHOLE STORY: Since the demise of the speedway in Ontario, Calif., and the road course in Riverside, Calif., many in the racing world have been hoping a new speedway would be built in the lucrative Southern California market.
So the news last week that Roger Penske planned to build a track near Fontana, Calif., east of Los Angeles, was greeted enthusiastically.
But there is a dark side to that story.
Penske has taken over a project that was carefully nurtured for three years by Southern California promoter and attorney Cary Agajanian, son of the late J.C. Agajanian, who fielded two Indy 500 winners.
Agajanian, the promoter of the Ascot Park dirt track in Gardena, Calif., until its demise in 1990, was floored by Penske's announcement.
"Obviously, I was very shocked and disappointed, totally shocked that it happened," said Agajanian, who is based in Universal City.
As the agent for John Andretti and Jeff Gordon, Agajanian was at Martinsville Speedway during the weekend and has been at most of the Winston Cup races this year. Penske was at Martinsville, too. But the two didn't cross paths.
Penske announced last week he and Kaiser Resources, Inc., had agreed to develop The California Speedway, a two-mile track on the site of a closed Kaiser steel mill in Rancho Cucamonga, about three miles from the site of the Ontario track. The track is scheduled to open in 1996.
Agajanian, who spent more than $1 million on the project, said he had an exclusive letter of intent with Kaiser that expired in October, but "I was still sending letters" and working on the project, trying to resolve how to clean up 12 acres on the property polluted with toxic waste.
"I have no idea why [the Agajanian project] did not go forward," Penske told the Richmond Times-Dispatch. "Kaiser contacted us. There weren't any parallel negotiations in any way."
by CNB