ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, February 28, 1996 TAG: 9602280072
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: B-4 EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: AUTO RACING NOTES
SOURCE: BOB ZELLER STAFF WRITER
Loy Allen still is one banged-up race car driver after taking a couple of hard shots in his crash Sunday at North Carolina Motor Speedway.
Allen remained at Carolinas Medical Center in Charlotte on Tuesday and was expected to remain there several more days, slowly and painfully recovering from a broken right shoulder blade and a concussion.
``The thing they're most concerned about right now is that he has had a lot of swelling around his neck,'' team member Jeff Baker said. ``They've got a cervical collar on him and they're going to do an MRI. And they're curious to find out how much pain he will have holding his head up after they take the collar off.
``The first time he hit [the outside wall] he was knocked unconscious, and then the second hit [on the inside wall], with his body being limp, he took quite a blow to his neck. It took a bad stretch.''
Baker said, however, there was no spinal injury.
``They're going to keep him there for the next two or three days,'' he said. ``We've named Dick Trickle to drive the car until Loy is able to get back at it.''
Baker said it would be too early to speculate when that might be.
TIME TO REFOCUS: Dale Earnhardt said if Bobby Hamilton is thinking about retaliating at Richmond for being spun out of contention at Rockingham, he's thinking about the wrong thing.
``First of all, I hate it happened,'' Earnhardt said Tuesday during the weekly Winston Cup teleconference. ``But it wasn't the only incident on Sunday. Dale Jarrett got into me twice and I got away from him twice. I was lucky I didn't hit the wall.
``Several cars got wrecked several times. But we [were] racing and definitely didn't do anything intentional. I don't know what to say about it. If they want to worry about what happened down there going into Richmond, it's going to take their focus off doing good at Richmond.
``If they want to try to just ride around and knock the [No.]3 car out, that's their prerogative. But it will take their focus away from winning. It happened. It wasn't intentional. Sorry about it. Let's get on and go on to the next race.''
THE OTHER SIDE: In the Hamilton camp at Richard Petty's shop in Level Cross, N.C., it's not that easy to forget Sunday's incident. For one thing, some of Hamilton's crew worked all night Sunday after the race preparing the car for repairs. By 7:30 a.m., it was at Mike Laughlin's shop near Greenville, S.C., for a new front snout.
``And some of the boys worked all night last night in the body shop to get the car ready as a backup for Richmond,'' team manager Dale Inman said.
``There's no question [Earnhardt] is one of the greatest drivers,'' he said. ``I used to watch Grand National races just to see Earnhardt run. He is just absolutely great.
``And the thing that's so disturbing to us is he's better than what he did there. There's not an inch on a race track where he doesn't know where he's at. I'm not saying he hit us on purpose, but he certainly could have missed us.''
LENGTH: Medium: 61 linesby CNB