Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, July 25, 1994 TAG: 9407250090
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: B-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By BOB ZELLER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: TALLADEGA, ALA. LENGTH: Medium
And in Sunday's DieHard 500, two of the best drivers - Rusty Wallace and Dale Earnhardt - went home early after their engines burned up.
Earnhardt and Wallace not finishing shuffled the standings at the top of the Winston Cup points. And after Ernie Irvan finished third in the race, he found himself back on top in the championship battle.
Irvan now has a 16-point lead over Earnhardt, while Wallace dropped to fourth, 34 points behind Mark Martin, who took over third. Wallace is 292 points behind Irvan.
Wallace's departure was a shocker because it happened so fast. He was off the pace after only seven laps. Wallace completed one more circuit and finished dead last in 42nd.
As his Ford smoked around the track, Wallace told his crew: ``It blowed up. No fixing it. The car was handling. Everything was all right. Lost a motor. Sorry, guys, the party's over.''
Moments later, standing beside his dead car in the garage, Wallace said: ``I really haven't had much luck at all at Talladega, but at least I had a car that could handle this time. We just lost a cylinder. The thing that upsets me is that this really affects our hunt for the championship.''
Earnhardt's engine went sour shortly after his first green flag pit stop on lap 73, although he motored around several more times with a power plant that sounded as if it had been built in 1910. He lasted 80 laps and finished 32nd.
``We burned a piston,'' he said. ``Then we went back out and tried to run some more and burned another piston. We were trying to get the best out of it that we could. I think we might have burned three by now.''
Earnhardt pinpointed the reason for the engine failure: ``Coming out of the pits by myself, I didn't have any drafting partners. I didn't have any wind in the car and it was laboring along about 6,000 rpm. That's when it burned a piston.''
As for the championship, Earnhardt said, ``It's not over with by a long shot.''
Geoff Bodine also blew an engine, dropping out after 136 laps to finish 33rd.
``It blew up,'' Bodine said. ``We don't know what happened. We don't know if we burnt a piston like a lot of guys today or if we had a parts failure inside. You don't know until you take it apart.''
``When they're running that close to the edge, they're more susceptible to detonating,'' said Bodine's engine builder, Danny Glad.
Other drivers who failed to finish after their engines failed, mostly because of burned pistons, were Jeff Gordon, Dale Jarrett, Michael Waltrip, Jeff Purvis, Joe Nemechek and Loy Allen.
Car owner Jack Roush, an articulate expert on engines, explained the reason for the rash of failures: ``The restrictor plate engines are real sensitive to partial throttle,'' he said. ``Cars were loose today and sometimes they couldn't run wide open, so the drivers had to breath the throttle. And that's when the burned pistons started showing up.''
Larry McReynolds, Irvan's crew chief, agreed with Roush's assessment and added that many of the burned pistons occurred when drivers were entering or leaving the pits and getting off or on the accelerator
BUZZ ALDRIN'S VISIT: Never did the Winston Cup drivers listen more attentively to a speaker in the driver's meeting than when the race's grand marshal, Apollo 11 astronaut Edwin ``Buzz'' Aldrin, spoke Sunday morning.
After receiving a standing ovation, the second man to walk on the moon held everyone's attention with a short but inspiring speech.
``I feel honored to be in the presence of the legends of driving,'' Aldrin said. He broke everyone up when he said, ``We were flying at seven miles per second coming back into the atmosphere. But we weren't very close to anything.''
IN THE LINE OF DUTY: Dale Earnhardt's car carried a No.12 decal Sunday in memory of a fan.
Lt. Mike Lutz, a member of the Muskingum (Ohio) County sheriff's department, who was killed in the line of duty recently, was a staunch Earnhardt fan. The officer's will requested that a black Earnhardt flag fly above his grave on the day of his burial, and the Earnhardt team saluted back by carrying the decal.
MONTE CARLO TEST: Dale Jarrett remains in Talladega today to test the new Chevrolet Monte Carlo, which will replace the Lumina as Chevy's Winston Cup car in 1995.
Keywords:
AUTO RACING
by CNB