Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, May 27, 1994 TAG: 9405270052
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: B-6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: CONCORD, N.C. LENGTH: Medium
This was a surprise of monumental proportions for the 36-year-old driver and his Greensboro-based team owned by Gene Petty.
Although he has been a racer for almost 20 years, Skinner has run one NASCAR Grand National race in his life. And he blew his team's only engine during the morning practice session.
The first round of qualifying for Saturday's Champion 300 was almost over and Harry Gant looked to be a lock for the pole when Skinner wheeled his car onto the 1.5-mile speedway. He was hoping to make a half-decent lap with the new engine his team had just bought and installed in his Chevrolet Lumina.
"My expectation was just to get a lap in so I wouldn't have to start dead last in the heat race," said Skinner, a California native who lives in Level Cross.
But as he coasted around the track after his run, some of Mark Martin's crew members were smiling broadly and holding up their index fingers.
"Get out of here!" Skinner said he told himself. "You guys are joking."
"But when I got out of the car, here come all of these people and cameras and I thought, `Maybe this is for real,' " Skinner said.
Skinner's improbable lap of 172.480 mph on Hoosier tires was the fastest among the field of 63 drivers trying to make the race.
Gant, also using Hoosiers, was second fastest at 172.447 mph in a Chevy. Elton Sawyer of Chesapeake, Va., was third fastest in a Goodyear-shod Ford Thunderbird at 172.397 mph, followed by Joe Nemechek in a Chevy (172.370 mph) and Tim Bender in a Pontiac (171.931).
Skinner ran his lap late in the session, when temperatures were cooler. That always helps, but usually not enough to put a journeyman driver on the pole.
Although he was the track champion last year in Late Model Stock Cars at Caraway Speedway outside Asheboro, N.C., Skinner has struggled in the big leagues, "driving just about anything anybody would let me in."
He ran his first three Winston Cup races in 1986, driving his own, unsponsored car until he went broke. In 1991 and 1992, he ran five Cup races for Thee Dixon of Raleigh, NASCAR's only black car owner. But Dixon also was unable to find adequate sponsorship.
Meanwhile, Gene Petty, who had dropped out of racing in 1981 after a lifetime in the sport with his famous family, found himself bitten by the racing bug again in 1991.
Petty and Skinner put together a Late Model Stock Car for Caraway. And this year they built a Grand National car, racing it for the first time at Orange County (N.C.) Speedway on April 30. Skinner finished 26th there after being knocked into a wall.
They picked Charlotte for their second race, but the prospects were looking bleak around noon Thursday.
"We only got about seven or eight laps in practice when the engine blew," Skinner said.
And it was their only engine.
But Petty went to work and managed to buy an engine from Bobby Labonte's Grand National team. When qualifying started, the team still was installing the new power plant in Skinner's car. So NASCAR officials allowed him to go to the back of the qualifying line.
His warmup lap was his first with the new engine.
"During qualifying, I just held it wide-open and held on for life," Skinner said.
With sponsorship from Kentucky Fried Chicken, Skinner and Petty plan to run in about eight Grand National races this year. They hope to run the full schedule next year.
Thirty-one other drivers also qualified Thursday. And the 34 drivers who didn't qualify, including such Winston Cup drivers as Dale Earnhardt, Ernie Irvan, Morgan Shepherd and Ken Schrader, will compete in a 40-lap challenge race at 2 p.m. today for the final 10 starting spots.
Second-round qualifying Thursday for Sunday's Coca-Cola 600 Winston Cup race was a non-event, with only five drivers trying to requalify.
Of the five, only Loy Allen Jr. made it into the race, improving from 45th fastest to 37th.
Kyle Petty and Ted Musgrave will use regular provisional starting spots to get into the race, and Bill Elliott gets a champion's provisional. None of them tried to requalify.
Those who didn't make it were Bobby Hillin, Jimmy Hensley, Dave Marcis and Jim Sauter.
Hensley was faster Thursday than he was Wednesday night, but he still wasn't fast enough.
"We gave it our best effort," said the driver from Ridgeway, Va. "But we were too loose getting in the corners."
Keywords:
AUTO RACING
by CNB