Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, August 21, 1995 TAG: 9508220036
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BOB ZELLER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: BROOKLYN, MICH. LENGTH: Medium
While Bobby Labonte pigeonholed his second straight victory at Michigan International Speedway with a gas mileage triumph, Jeff Gordon extended his lead in a Winston Cup championship battle that has become his to lose.
Labonte beat his brother, Terry, by 6.8 seconds while Gordon finished third, some 15 seconds behind, after his team unveiled their stretch-run strategy by refusing to gamble on running out of gas.
``I believe we can coast from here, guys,'' Labonte calmly announced on his radio as he rolled through turn four on the 200th and final lap of the GM 400. ``Still running. Can't pass anybody, but ... ''
Replied crew chief Jimmy Makar: ``Sometimes you've got the best car, and sometimes you make all the right moves. And that's what we did today.''
Gordon and his team made the right moves, too, at least as far as winning their first championship. With Dale Earnhardt and Mark Martin out with engine failure, and plummeting in the points, Gordon's crew chief, Ray Evernham, had the same tough decision as the other leaders. He had to decide whether to try to go all the way on fuel after the last caution period, which ended with 54 laps to go.
Evernham said his calculations showed that Gordon might have made it, or he might have run out of gas with about a half lap to go.
``I still want to try to win every race,'' Evernham said. ``But I don't want to do anything stupid that could hurt our chances for the championship. And to run out of gas would have been stupid.''
Said Gordon: ``We like to win races. We had the car to beat today when Dale Jarrett fell out [with engine failure]. We came home third, and we can't complain about that at all. They chanced it, and right now we can't chance it. We did what we had to do.''
Sterling Marlin finished fourth behind Gordon and only lost 15 points to him in the title hunt. Marlin is now 167 points behind Gordon.
But Martin, who finished 38th, fell from 159 back to a whopping 285 behind. And the fearsome, title-savvy Earnhardt, who finished 35th, is now 314 points behind Gordon.
``We've got to go out and win some races,'' Earnhardt said. ``This championship is starting to stretch out on us. We're going to give it all we got. It's not over till it's over.''
In June, when Labonte won here, he had the fastest, best car. This time, as he pointed out to his crew, he couldn't even really race with any of the leaders, even though he had won the pole.
``The car worked good, but it just didn't work quite as good as we wanted it to,'' he said. ``We could follow well, but we couldn't lead.''
He didn't lead the first lap and, in fact, had led only two laps until Gordon ducked into the pits on lap 185 and gave the top spot to Labonte.
But the key moment for Labonte and his Joe Gibbs-owned team had come some 40 laps earlier, while the wreckage of Rick Mast's car was being removed from the track. Mast brought out the third and final yellow flag on lap 140 when he hit the turn two wall in the only crash of the day.
``Jimmy Makar worked on fuel mileage,'' Gibbs said. ``We checked and double-checked and 55 [laps] was the magic number. We were counting laps.''
The question became whether the yellow would last long enough to let Labonte pit with 55 laps to go so his crew could top off his fuel tank.
``I told 'em how the clean-up deal was coming along on the [Mast] car,'' Labonte said.
``Bobby would give us a report every time he came around,'' Gibbs said. ``He would say things like, `It's not on the roll back [truck] yet.' It finally dawned on us that it was going to work.''With exactly 55 laps to go, and one lap before the race went back to green flag racing, Labonte raced into the pits, had his tank filled and took off again.
Keywords:
AUTO RACING
by CNB