Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, November 1, 1993 TAG: 9311010110
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BY BOB ZELLER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: PHOENIX LENGTH: Medium
As Mark Martin motored to his fifth victory of the year, a series of mistakes and problems cost Wallace two laps and knocked him back to a 19th-place finish in the Slick 50 500 on a cloudy afternoon at Phoenix International Raceway.
That all but assured Dale Earnhardt of his sixth Winston Cup points championship.
Earnhardt, who finished fourth Sunday, gained 54 points on Wallace and now leads by 126. Earnhardt needs only to finish 34th or better at the season-ending Hooters 500 in Atlanta on Nov. 14 to clinch the title.
"We feel pretty good about going to Atlanta now," Earnhardt said. "It's still not in the bag, but hopefully we'll be able to pull it out."
"Earnhardt probably just has to basically start [at Atlanta] and win the thing," Wallace said. "I don't know what I'm going to have to do to catch up now. But I'm just not going to give up. I'm not going to give up until it's over."
Martin led 254 of the 312 laps, but he had to hold off with Ernie Irvan at the end before beating his fellow Ford driver by nineteen-hundredths of a second. Kyle Petty was third, and pole-winner Bill Elliott finished fifth, behind Earnhardt. Ricky Rudd was sixth. Five other cars finished on the lead lap, including the Ford Rick Mast drove to a 10th-place finish.
Irvan took the lead for a couple of trips around the track with about 25 laps to go. But while racing side-by-side with Martin on lap 291, Irvan slipped a bit coming off the second turn and fell back several car-lengths.
Martin said he and crew chief Steve Hmiel had struggled through the final practice sessions Saturday and ended up guessing on a race setup. "I'm not sure I could have done a better [selection] job if I'd practiced three days," he said.
Earnhardt, meanwhile, said he had a "tough, long day" because of a chassis that pushed and a high gear that was too high.
But Earnhardt and Martin overcame their problems. Wallace didn't overcome his.
The first mistake for Wallace was his team's selection of a pit stall at the start-finish line instead of closer to the end of pit road.
So even though he has NASCAR's fastest pit crew, Wallace lost ground in the pits on a couple of the early stops.
After dropping from fourth to seventh during a yellow-flag stop around lap 75, Wallace said: "Pitting down here must really be killing us."
But the most damaging mistake came shortly before the halfway point.
After studying team records from the race in Loudon, N.H., which has a mile oval similar to this one, a crewman suggested reducing the air pressure by 1 pound in the right front tire and increasing the pressure by 1 pound in the left rear. Wallace agreed.
It was the wrong decision.
While running fourth in the third turn on lap 191, Wallace shouted into his two-way radio: "Flat tire! Flat tire!"
The air pressure in the right front tire was too low and "the air popped out of it," Wallace said after the race.
"When it went down, I felt it right away and I tried to get into the pits. But Kenny Schrader was right on my rear end and he was just too close to me, so I had to run an extra lap," he said. "And when I did, [the car bottomed out and] it just ground the bottom of the sway bar out of it. That was it. It was over then."
The broken sway bar, however, did not show up until about lap 225, when Wallace started losing one position after another. On lap 234, Martin put him a lap down.
By then, the crew knew something was seriously wrong with the car. During a yellow-flag stop on lap 241, the crew discovered the broken sway bar and started trying to fix it without losing another lap.
Wallace had to stop several times during that caution period to let his crew complete the repair job. On the final stop, the most crucial one of all, when the entire team knew the job had to be completed without a mistake to keep from losing another lap, a crewman suddenly shouted: "Those are nine-sixteenths bolts! I need a half-inch bolt!"
Wallace lost another lap and fell to 20th place. It was over then.
by CNB