ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, October 21, 1996 TAG: 9610220032
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: B-4 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: ROCKINGHAM, N.C.
SOURCE: BOB ZELLER STAFF WRITER
TERRY LABONTE takes over the NASCAR Winston Cup points lead after Jeff Gordon struggles.
``Refuse To Lose'' is the motto Jeff Gordon and his team adopted on the way to the 1995 Winston Cup points championship.
But you can live, eat and breathe that motto 24 hours a day and it doesn't mean squat when you get a bad set of tires.
Somehow, some way, the set of tires that Gordon's crew installed on his car on lap 102 of the AC-Delco 400 at North Carolina Motor Speedway didn't match.
Gordon went backwards. Then he went a lap down. And when the race ended after 393 laps with an unlikely victory for Ricky Rudd, Gordon and his team had lost their slim lead in the 1996 Winston Cup championship battle.
While Gordon was struggling, teammate Terry Labonte was running a cautious but consistent race to finish third behind Rudd and Dale Jarrett.
Labonte never led a lap, but he was rarely out of the top five. Labonte now leads by 32 points over Gordon and 76 over Jarrett. Dale Earnhardt, who never found the proper handling in his Chevy, finished ninth and is now out of it unless the other three fail to show up next weekend at Phoenix.
Earnhardt trails by 292 points.
``I'd much rather be ahead than behind,'' said Labonte. ``The way we'll [approach] Phoenix is no different now. It wouldn't matter if we had a 100-point lead or a two-point lead.''
Gordon, commenting on Labonte's lead, said, ``That's a blink of the eye. I liked the cushion we had going in a little better, but 32 points is nothing.''
But 32 points is plenty of cushion for Labonte to win the title as long as he can continue to match, or almost match, Gordon's performances. Not counting bonus points, Gordon could win the season's final two races at Phoenix and Atlanta, and Labonte would still win the title with a pair of fourth-place finishes.
Labonte's main worry may be the fact that he's leading. Labonte took over the lead in July, but lost the lead to Gordon after finishing 21st at Dover in September.
And Gordon seemed to be cruising to his second straight title when his string of eight straight top-five finishes ended with engine problems and a 31st place at Charlotte earlier this month.
As Gordon said: ``It seems like things go wrong for whoever's leading the points.''
Jarrett, meanwhile, dominated the race, leading 207 of the 393 laps, only to watch Rudd use a no-pit-stop strategy to take the lead on lap 320 and lead the final 74 circuits.
``I really felt like we had 'em, figuring [Rudd] would come back to me with 20-25 laps left,'' Jarrett said. ``But our final set of tires for some reason just didn't grip the track quite as well as the others had done all day, and second was as close as I could get.''
LENGTH: Medium: 61 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: (headshot) T. Labonte KEYWORDS: AUTO RACINGby CNB