Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, May 16, 1994 TAG: 9405160096
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: B1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BOB ZELLER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: SONOMA, CALIF. LENGTH: Long
Two years ago, Ernie Irvan jumped the start of the Save Mart 300 at Sears Point International Raceway, was sent to the back of the field and still won going away.
On Sunday, Irvan showed what it would have looked like without a penalty.
Irvan gave the rest of the Winston Cup field a grape-stomping, free-wheeling, top-down, California-style whipping, leading 68 of 74 laps to win by 9.56 seconds over defending champion Geoff Bodine.
"Everybody watching it had to see how awesome it was," Irvan said. "I guess NASCAR is going to have me in the trailer for stinking up the show. Maybe they could have sent someone to the back of the field today to make it exciting. But I'm glad it wasn't me."
Even if he had received that sort of penalty, Irvan said, he had a car capable of carrying him back into contention.
"From the very start, we knew our car was strong," he said. "But when the first caution came out [on lap 14], Dale [Earnhardt] got by us there on the pit stop. And when we got back by him [on lap 18], right then I knew the car was real strong."
The little drama there was in this race was further back in the field, behind Irvan, Bodine and Earnhardt, the third-place finisher.
Wally Dallenbach, who has been struggling just to qualify for races this year, finished fourth in the No. 43 Petty Enterprises Pontiac Grand Prix, giving himself, his team and his car owner, Richard Petty, a big boost.
Rusty Wallace finished fifth, followed by Ted Musgrave, Morgan Shepherd, Mark Martin and Ken Schrader. Harry Gant, in his farewell appearance at the track, finished 10th.
Dallenbach was no worse than seventh all afternoon. With less than four laps to go, he passed Wallace for fourth.
It was the best finish for a Petty Enterprises car since "The King" himself drove to a third-place finish in the spring race at Richmond six years ago.
"It felt good because it's been a bumpy year," Dallenbach said, emerging sweaty and smiling from his red, white and blue car. "This is satisfying, and it shows we can do it. We just need more time, and we need to pull this thing together. And we need about 10 more road courses on the schedule."
Said Petty, "This is just one race, but it sure does make it easier to go to the next one next week. I knew it had been a pretty good while since our last top-five [finish]."
"We needed that bad," said crew chief Robbie Loomis. "We were one of the few teams that came out here and tested. We knew this was our best shot for a victory, and with the same approach, I believe we're going to win."
For the rest of the front runners, who didn't have as much at stake as Dallenbach, it became another day at the office as Irvan drove away from them.
"I did all I could to catch him," Bodine said. "He should have slowed up. That last run, he was pulling away and I was doing all I could. So I said, `Well, second is better than nothing.' "
Earnhardt said, "We ran a good race all day, but we got beat a little off the corners and we got beat on torque. But we had a good day. We didn't run off the course and we finished the race."
Said Wallace, "Our car didn't run near as good as I wanted it to. We didn't test it and we need to do a lot of work to get it better."
Winning car owner Robert Yates built Irvan a new road race car for this race and, he said, "put every bit of new technology that we knew of into it."
The result was a car that clearly was the class of the field in handling and in power.
For instance, on lap 51, crew chief Larry McReynolds told Irvan on the radio that his car was "about dead even" with Bodine's on lap speeds.
"Probably the worst thing he did was tell me Geoff was running the same speed I was because then I started speeding up," Irvan said.
Irvan's car was so good that he couldn't believe anyone was going as fast as he was.
"I was ready to call on the radio and ask about that," he said. "I was ready to get out my own stopwatch and start clocking it.
"With about eight or nine laps to go, I started taking it a little easier, but I was still gaining a quarter to a half-second a lap on Geoff."
There were four yellow flags in the race, including one for a spectacular crash involving Derrike Cope and Winston West series driver John Krebs coming out of turn 5.
They were side by side going through the turn when they collided. Both cars shot off the track, slammed into a tire barrier and went over it. Cope landed on top of the earthen berm above the tires, but Krebs went on over it and his car flipped end over end twice before coming to a stop in a gulch a considerable distance from the track.
"The worst thing was looking down after we hit the crown of the berm," said Krebs, who was uninjured. "It hit hard when it bounced. Butkus [the race car] is retired now."
For Irvan, a native Californian who grew up in Salinas, this was the third victory of 1994 and the 12th of his career.
"It might not have been a good race for the fans, but I think these California fans like it because a California driver won," he said.
Keywords:
AUTO RACING
by CNB