ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, September 30, 1996 TAG: 9610010010
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: NORTH WILKESBORO, N.C.
SOURCE: BOB ZELLER STAFF WRITER
THE WINSTON CUP points leader has a good day at a North Wilkesboro track that has seen better ones.
After Sunday's Holly Farms 400 at North Wilkesboro Speedway, the score in the Winston Cup championship is not as close as the points suggest.
Jeff Gordon won his 10th race of the year in the Winston Cup finale at Wilkesboro and took another big step in his cakewalk to a second consecutive title.
He's still only 111 points ahead of teammate Terry Labonte, but he's driving like the Dallas Cowboys in recent Super Bowls. Gordon has won three straight races, four out of the last five and five out of the last 10. And he hasn't finished out of the top five for the last eight races.
But the reality of the NASCAR Winston Cup series is that you can ground the competition into the asphalt week after week after week, but a bunch of victories in a row don't help you as much as one bad race hurts you.
``I don't think there's a number that is comfortable, not comfortable enough anyway,'' Gordon said. ``We had a pretty good-sized lead at this time [last year] and we saw it dwindle away. We keep getting stronger and stronger as the year winds down, but we've got some tough races coming up.''
Gordon led 207 of the 400 laps (including the final 78 circuits) to win by 1.73 seconds over resurgent Dale Earnhardt. Earnhardt's second place was his first top-five finish in a dozen races.
Dale Jarrett finished third, followed by Jeff Burton and Terry Labonte. Rick Mast finished sixth, giving him his third top-10 in a row. Ricky Rudd was seventh, followed by Bobby Hamilton, Mark Martin, Rusty Wallace and Sterling Marlin, the only other drivers on the lead lap.
``I used up my tires getting there,'' Earnhardt said. ``I had some momentum on Gordon, but I don't know, it's racing.''
There was some great racing between Gordon and Earnhardt, particularly between laps 303 and 322, when they swapped the lead four times. Beyond that, there wasn't a lot of action for the fans to cheer.
The race was slowed only four times by yellow flags and every car finished the event for the second year in a row.
But hundreds of loyal Wilkesboro fans hung around in the grandstands after the race while Auld Lang Syne was played over the public address system.
Next year, this race will be in New Hampshire and the April event will be in Texas.
The anger that local folks have felt about losing their races led to some anonymous telephone threats before Sunday's race. It prompted an extra contingent of law enforcement officials in case there was trouble in the crowd, estimated at 35,000. But in the end, it was a mellow finale. No post-race trouble was reported.
On the track, the key to success in Sunday's race was saving the tires.
``I think you've got to hold back,'' Gordon said. ``My car was really strong on new tires. I could just fly around there for 10 laps and then you couldn't understand why you were going backwards.
``You really had to tell yourself, `Slow down, slow down, slow down.' We were pretty nervous when we got the lead at the end that I was going to wear the tires up. But I felt pretty confident I wasn't abusing them.''
``There's nothing wrong with the tire,'' said crew chief Ray Evernham. ``It's just that at North Wilkesboro, you wear them out if you want to go fast. So what you do for the first five laps is extremely important.''
The cars have so much power at a short track such as Wilkesboro, the back tires will spin if the driver floors it coming off a corner.
``Jeff knows how to control the throttle without spinning the tires,'' Evernham said. ``Every time you spin the tires, it takes five or 10 laps off them. The whole key today was being smooth, even if somebody was putting the pressure on.''
And that, more or less, is also the key to the championship. Labonte is finishing races and keeping the pressure on, but Gordon is winning.
As Gary DeHart, Labonte's crew chief, put it, ``All they've got to do is slip up - just one time - and we can catch back up. But from the way they ran today, that doesn't seem possible.''
LENGTH: Medium: 81 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: AP. Jeff Gordon is in the driver's seat for the Winstonby CNBCup points championship after winning for the fourth time in five
races on Sunday in North Wilkesboro, N.C. color. KEYWORDS: AUTO RACING