ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, November 11, 1996 TAG: 9611120047
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: C-4 EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: AUTO RACING NOTES
DATELINE: HAMPTON, GA.
SOURCE: BOB ZELLER STAFF WRITER
The NAPA 500 was only about one minute old when the fireworks got underway in the final battle for the 1996 Winston Cup championship.
On the second lap, coming off turn four, the handling on Jeff Gordon's Chevrolet Monte Carlo suddenly became tight.
During the next few minutes, a crisis erupted that put Gordon two laps down and appeared to end any chance he might have to catch Terry Labonte in the title hunt.
But just as quickly as he went downhill, Gordon recovered. He made up both laps and even led 59 laps before yielding to race winner Bobby Labonte and finishing third. But it all didn't matter in the end, because Terry Labonte was his usual, consistent self. He finished fifth to clinch the title.
``I've got to take my hat off to Terry Labonte,'' Gordon said. ``We knew if they didn't have a problem, we wouldn't have a chance. We knew we were going to have to be aggressive all day long. We certainly wanted to make them work for it, and they did.''
But Gordon had to work even harder for his third-place finish. By the fifth lap, Gordon's handling problems had deteriorated into a bad vibration, and Gordon told his team he thought one of his rear tires might be going down.
``Try and hang with it for awhile,'' crew chief Ray Evernham said.
But this was bad.
``I got no brakes or something!'' Gordon said on his radio. ``I don't know what's going on. It went to the floor. Now it's getting ready to spin.''
``Is it still vibrating?'' Evernham asked.
``Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!'' Gordon yelled. ``Something's broke in the rear. The back end is wiggling all over the place.''
With a tone of resignation, Evernham called him to the pits to see what was wrong. There was confusion at first as the team discovered that the problem was the left rear wheel, not the right, as it originally thought. The wheel was loose and the lug nuts did not come off properly. And the studs were partially stripped. Evernham was mystified.
``We check all four wheels and they were definitely checked and signed off,'' he said. ``I don't really know what happened there.''
The team managed to repair everything well enough so the wheels would stay on. But when Gordon came out, he was two laps down. Thus began a relentless charge back to the front. Once the tires were on right, Gordon was fast.
He made up the first lap after a restart on lap 49. He made up the next one after a restart on lap 58. Then he had to come back through the field.
By lap 100, Gordon was 14th. By lap 140, he was fifth. And before lap 200, he had already led the race three times.
``We've had some awful runs here,'' Gordon said, ``but that was a great comeback and a great race car and a great team. We had to fight back, and that's what it's all about.''
THE OTHER CONTENDER: Although he finished second, Dale Jarrett also never had a chance in the championship battle.
Jarrett never led a lap, but he said, ``I almost won the race. I just got a little bit too far behind on that [last] restart. The other two guys were just too good. They just wouldn't break, but we didn't expect them to.''
ALLEN HURT: There were six crashes during the race, but none involved more than two cars.
The most serious involved Loy Allen, who crashed in turn four and was T-boned in the driver's side door by Wally Dallenbach.
Allen was thought to have suffered a broken upper left arm, but doctors at Georgia Baptist Medical Center, where he was airlifted, found no fractures. He suffered a concussion and was to be kept in the hospital overnight for observation.
Meanwhile, Mickey Hudspeth, one of the drivers injured in Saturday's ARCA wreck-fest, had his left hand amputated from the wrist down. His window net came down during his violent tumble down the frontstretch. His arm got outside of the car during the flips and his hand was crushed.
LENGTH: Medium: 76 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: AP. The car driven by Loy Allen Jr. (19) is slammed byby CNBWally Dallenbach's car during the NAPA 500.