DATE: Sunday, August 24, 1997               TAG: 9708240186

SECTION: SPORTS                  PAGE: C7   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY BOB ZELLER, STAFF WRITER 

DATELINE: BRISTOL, TENN.                    LENGTH:   78 lines

BRISTOL RACE TRACK TAKES TOLL ON DRIVERS SOME RACERS THINK THE 1/2-MILE ROUTE IS ONE OF THE TOUGHEST TRACKS ON THE WINSTON CUP CIRCUIT.

As you read this, some 12 hours after the running of Goody's 500 at Bristol Motor Speedway, there's a good chance that Jimmy Spencer is waking up with a sore neck.

Bobby Labonte's ears may still be ringing.

And 55-year-old Dick Trickle, despite his legendary toughness, probably will be feeling an ache or two in his aging bones.

The half-mile speedbowl that is Bristol Motor Speedway takes it out of a driver, and takes it out ON a driver, more than any other track in the Winston Cup series.

``You go to sleep (after the race) and all you hear is ringing in your ears,'' Labonte said. ``It's like going to a Metallica show and sitting right next to the speakers.''

``If you've got a mediocre car and it ain't working well, it's a chore,'' Trickle said. ``I've been in cars that handle bad and you feel pretty rough after you get out. You physically feel it that evening and the next morning.''

More than 120,000 fans watched Saturday night's race, and even with a close-up view amid all the noise you could ever want, the fans can't begin to have a sense of what it feels like to be racing on the track, said David Green, who was eighth in the lineup with his qualifying time of 122.537 mph. ``Last night, when I was spotting for my brother Mark in the Busch car, when you sit up there and watch it, it doesn't look that bad,'' he said. ``But when you get out on the race track, it's amazing how much everything is sped up. I mean, it's like playing a VCR tape at normal speeds and then putting it in fast forward and trying to watch it.

``The mental part is the biggest thing,'' Green said. ``At Michigan for instance, you go down the back straight and you can look around at your gauges, do a lot of little things. At Bristol, I very seldom have time to look around at the gauges.''

Trickle said, not entirely facetiously, that there isn't even time to concentrate.

``You have to just drive by your gut feeling,'' he said. ``There's no time for concentration. By the time you concentrate, you're already through the next corner and back down to the other one.''

``I think between the road courses and Bristol - those are the three toughest,'' said Jeff Gordon. ``It's pretty tough to stay focused here because you have so little time to relax, so little time to get ready for the next corner.

``It just comes bang, bang, bang. The laps just fall on top of themselves so fast. And when you start to wear down physically, you start to wear down mentally.''

``The biggest element of the whole thing is maintaining concentration,''said Ricky Craven, who started 14th. ``The other thing about Bristol is it's rough. That kind of constant impact is exhausting. You're just constantly turning. And it is almost hard at times to differentiate between the front stretch and the back stretch because it's just so fast.''

``I think 500 miles at Dover was a stretch for everyone and they finally shortened that,'' Craven said. ``I feel like Bristol is a stretch. I really do. I think that 500 laps at Bristol is a real battle physically and mentally.''

``It certainly costs you more than the same amount of laps at Michigan or a lot of other race tracks,'' said Mark Martin, who started in the fifth spot. ``You spend more of yourself.''

``It's hard on your neck. It's hard on everything,'' said Jimmy Spencer, who nonetheless counts Bristol among his favorite tracks. ``You don't get a break at all.''

Meanwhile, Elton Sawyer will continue to feel the effects of Bristol for days to come. Sawyer may have chipped a bone in his left ankle and damaged his right knee in a hard crash on lap 153 of the Food City 250 Grand National race Friday night.

Sawyer, a native of Chesapeake, was checked and released at Bristol Regional Medical Center Friday night and said he would see an orthopedic specialist in Greensboro, N.C., where he lives.

``Of course I am extremely sore and a little frustrated that I am not mobile,'' Sawyer said Saturday morning. He hopes to race at Darlington this weekend, but ``we'll wait and see what the orthopedic doctor says before we make any decisions about the following weeks.''

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