ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, September 22, 1996 TAG: 9609230138
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: MARTINSVILLE
SOURCE: BOB ZELLER STAFF WRITER
HANES 500 DRIVERS may want to emulate Richard Petty, who has played it cool in the wake of traffic woes.
When you squeeze 36 NASCAR Winston Cup stock cars on a tight half-mile track such as Martinsville Speedway, then you're bound to have territorial disputes like, say, Richard Petty had 11 days ago on Interstate 85 in North Carolina.
But when the racing arguments are over and done after today's Hanes 500, the drivers will leave happy if they come out as well as Petty did.
Petty paid $65 in court costs on a charge of following too closely after bumping another driver's rear bumper in the left lane of the highway near Concord, N.C., on Sept.11.
``That's $65 worth of press,'' said Petty, who is campaigning for North Carolina secretary of state. ``I don't think it's going to make a whole lot of difference'' with the voters. ``We've heard from some people who said, `Hey, if he can get people out of the left lane, we'll vote for him.'''
Petty's driver, Bobby Hamilton, on Friday made sure he wouldn't have anyone in front of him in the left lane for the start of today's race at 12:30 p.m. Hamilton won the pole position with a lap of 94.120 mph in his Pontiac Grand Prix.
But the man beside Hamilton in the right lane for today's start, Rusty Wallace, is again the favorite to win. Wallace has won four of the past six races here.
``We're good on short tracks,'' Wallace said. ``It's reached a point where everybody thinks I'm supposed to be. You can call Martinsville a saving grace for me, because that is exactly what it is. I've made damn sure the brakes are perfect for this race and that we've got the right gear ratios.''
Brakes are always the key issue at Martinsville. Petty won 15 times here as a driver - more than anyone else - and a big reason was because his team always put monster brakes on his car.
``We've seen a lot of guys come on like gangbusters early in the race only to use their stuff up,'' Wallace said. ``You really have to pay attention all day long and be careful not to abuse the brakes.''
Robin Pemberton, Wallace's crew chief, said saving the brakes ``is strictly a driver deal. You can have the best brakes in the world, but you will still burn them up if the driver abuses them.''
The defending champion here is Dale Earnhardt, who is now the not-so-proud holder of the season's most notable slump. Earnhardt, the master of the top-five finish, has only one top-10 in the past 10 races.
His biggest problem, of course, has been the broken shoulder and broken sternum he suffered at Talladega in July.
``We had a real good season going until about halfway through it,'' said car owner Richard Childress. ``We have always gotten a little bit off at the Michigan-Pocono stage, so we weren't getting overly excited or panicking about where we were or how we were doing at that point.
``Then at Talladega, you know, with our crash and our driver getting hurt, that threw us out of our entire strategy.''
When today's race is over, and the drivers describe their experiences, you might hear something like this:
``I run up behind this cat. He slowed up to run beside a car to block me. He put on his brakes and slowed up And I didn't slow down.''
Of course, that was Petty describing his highway incident. But the stories from the track probably won't be too different.
As Wallace put it: ``Call it patience, call it finesse. All I know is that you're faced with running 500 laps down what is basically two asphalt drag strips connected by two concrete turnarounds. And you have to be aware of that all day long and take into consideration what it'll take to be around at the end.''
LENGTH: Medium: 73 lines KEYWORDS: AUTO RACINGby CNB