Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, July 24, 1995 TAG: 9507240107
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BOB ZELLER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: TALLADEGA, ALA. LENGTH: Medium
It came down to the final lap of the DieHard 500 at Talladega Superspeedway on Sunday, and suddenly nobody was racing anymore.
So Sterling Marlin waltzed to his third victory of the season with little heat from Dale Jarrett, Dale Earnhardt and the string of other cars behind them. Morgan Shepherd finished fourth and Bill Elliott was fifth.
``Nobody pressuring you from behind! No one from behind!'' Marlin's spotter shouted as Marlin reached the start/finish line about two car-lengths ahead of Jarrett, who had squeezed past Earnhardt five laps earlier.
Earnhardt summed it up best. ``I was going to try to help Dale [Jarrett] do something, but there wasn't nobody doin' nothin,''' he said. ``We tried. Did all we could.''
Marlin, who led 57 laps, took the lead for the final time on lap 149 and led the final 40 circuits around the 2.66-mile trioval.
``Once we got the lead, I knew it would be hard to pass,'' he said. ``I did a lot of mirror driving at the end.''
It was a tame conclusion to a wild weekend during which too much close racing led to a string of terrifying crashes and flips, including a 12-car accident that erupted on lap 139 and sent Ken Schrader flipping five times in the backstretch grass.
Schrader spun after a tap from his teammate, Jeff Gordon, who led the most laps - 97 - but was ineffective after the incident. Gordon was not caught up in the crash, but he didn't lead a lap from then on. He finished eighth and has a 78-point lead over Marlin in the Winston Cup championship as the series heads to Indianapolis Motor Speedway for the Brickyard 400 on Aug.5.
Schrader, who has gone end-over-end many times in a sprint car, emerged from the wreck of his Chevrolet Monte Carlo unhurt except for a huge knot on his right eye caused when his head slammed against the steering wheel.
``Got turned around and we just caught a little too much air over there,'' Schrader said. ``It just took off. Then I played sprint car driver - head down, arms up and hold on to the steering wheel.''
For Schrader, it was yet another in a series of bad-luck races. And for NASCAR, the honeymoon is over with the roof flaps.
Unquestionably, the flaps have prevented cars from flipping many times since they were introduced at Daytona 18 months ago.
But three flips in two days here, including two in which the flaps could not prevent a car from getting upside down, showed they are not foolproof.
``I don't think we can attribute it to anything other than coincidence,'' Winston Cup director Gary Nelson said after the race.
``You know, two wrecks in one weekend after a year-and-a-half with none ... I don't see what you could ever do [to make them foolproof] with those speeds and with that body weight. The potential is always there.''
The 12-car crash was the only incident of Sunday's race, which ran green for 111 laps until a caution period for debris on the track. But on the heels of several mishaps in Saturday's Grand National race, NASCAR officials were concerned about over-aggressive driving.
In the driver's meeting two hours before the race, the drivers received stern lectures from Nelson, NASCAR vice president of competition Mike Helton and veteran driver Darrell Waltrip, who was a television commentator for Saturday's carnage-filled Grand National race, in which 25 cars wrecked. (Fifteen Winston Cup drivers competed in Saturday's race.)
``That was the ugliest race I've ever seen,'' Waltrip said. ``People were bumping into people and swerving in front of them. It's ridiculous. This could be a neat race track. It's just not necessary.''
The drivers seemed to take the lectures to heart.
``Everybody has been real courteous to each other so far,'' Ricky Rudd said after dropping out of the race on lap 68 with a broken engine.
But then Gordon got into Schrader. That's all it took for things to get ugly. Schrader spun around and his dual roof flaps popped open as they're supposed to do. The flaps were keeping Schrader's car on the ground until it was struck by Ricky Craven's car.
``My assumption is that another car [Craven's] sort of shoveled Schrader up,'' Nelson said. ``You go a whole year without an accident like that and now two in one weekend. Same roof flaps we had last year. But we'll continue to work on it and see what we can do to make it better.''
Keywords:
AUTO RACING
by CNB