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1999 In Review
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Points: 8th
Wins: 1 (Bristol)
Poles: 4
Top 5s: 7
Top 10s: 16
Earnings: 2,154,429
What Went Right?
Finished in the top 10 for the seventh straight season and extended winning streak to 14 seasons with victory in Bristol. With Ricky Rudd failing to win in '99, Wallace now owns the longest current winning streak. Bristol also brought career win No. 49 ...
What Went Wrong?
... No. 50 never arrived. Wallace had a strong car at both Daytona races, but finished eighth in the 500 and 16th in the Pepsi 400. Won four poles, but only one race. And winning a race and finishing in the top 10 is the "minimum" Wallace expects from his team.
-- Ron Buck
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Rusty Wallace has been given the keys to Ford's newest "hot rod." Just thinking about the possibilities of the 2000 Taurus makes the former Winston Cup champion's eyes light up.
Wallace likes to refer to his race cars as "hot rods." Give him one good enough to win and the 1989 Winston Cup champ will run with the leaders all day. In 1999, for the 49th time in his career, he proved he can still win.
But too often his '99 hot rods weren't so hot. He captured four poles, but won just once. His 16 top-10 finishes were overshadowed by 18 finishes outside the top 10 and eight races that ended with him 30th or worse. Give most drivers the season Wallace put together and they'd be more than satisfied, but not Wallace. He saw too many opportunities slip by in '99, something he's determined to not let happen in 2000.
"(1999) could be considered a minimum as far as our standards go," Wallace said.
In an effort to reach a higher standard than seventh place in Winston Cup points -- his seventh straight top-10 finish and 13th in the past 14 seasons -- Wallace has made changes in his race-day crew in his team's shop. He's dedicated his offseason to testing the new 2000 Ford Taurus, saying nobody will turn more laps from now until Daytona than himself.
"Next year, we'll have some (new) guys who'll just be real hungry. Me? I was just born hungry," Wallace said. "The reason I stay hungry is because I'm the key guy. I'm the point guy. I'm the one all the sponsors look at. I'm the one the crew looks at. I'm the lead guy everyone looks at to bail us out of a jam."
The No. 2 Ford hasn't been in many jams, but it also hasn't been in Victory Lane as often as Wallace would have liked. He watched Dale Earnhardt win three times at the age of 49 last season. If nothing else, Earnhardt's success just fueled Wallace's desire to step up his production. With that in mind, the 43-year-old Wallace enters his 17th full season of Winston Cup racing with his eye on win No. 50 and championship No. 2.
Two goals he thought he'd have achieved before the millennium.
"I plan on winning a lot more races and more championships," Wallace said. "I've got to tell you, had someone asked me if I thought I would have won championships since my '89 championship, I'd have said 'Hell ya.'
"To go and lose it to Earnhardt in '93 by a mere (80 points) was a tough one. To lose it to Elliott in '88 by only (24 points) was a tough one. Very easily, I could be sitting here with three championships and I've only got one. That's frustrating. And it's real frustrating trying to get that second one.
"Right now I'm 43 and what's Earnhardt, 49? He just won three really big races this year, so I know I have at least that much left in me.
Wallace then added with a smile, "He's an old 49. I'll look like a young 49 -- I'll guarantee you that."
Wallace's grin, however, can't cover up his frustration. A second Winston Cup has proved elusive, and while success hasn't been fleeting, the 90's could have produced more based on Wallace's consistency. Only Earnhardt was more consistent than Wallace the past decade. Over the 10 years since his championship season of 1989, Wallace won 39 races and posted 169 top-10 finishes. Earnhardt had 40 wins and 195 top 10s
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What About 2000?
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"The competition is so tough that we've really got to get up on the pipe and do better than what we've been doing. We've got to make dog-gone sure we get these cars handling better, that's one of the biggest problems we had in 1999."
-- Rusty Wallace
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Wallace's final win of the '90s was also his 49th career victory. The win on one of his favorite tracks, Bristol Motor Speedway, came early in 1999. The party for No. 50 seemed eminent, but instead became elusive. Wallace struggled to find the consistency he'd grown so accustomed to.
"Winning No. 50, I thought that was going to happen in (1999). Everybody was dying for me to win my 50th," Wallace said. "NASCAR was going to do a big promotion with it. The breweries were going to do a big promotion with it. And it's just a personal goal I set out for myself.
"People keep talking about Jeff Gordon being at 49 going for 50, but I'm not in competition with Jeff. It's a personal goal to win 50, not a race to see who gets it first."
It shouldn't come as a surprise that Wallace's lone win of 1999 came on a short track. Wallace still is considered a master of the short ovals in towns like Bristol, Tenn., Martinsville, Va., and Richmond, Va. But if he is to seriously challenge for a second Winston Cup, he must turn up his superspeedway program.
To that end, Wallace has put his confidence in new Penske engines, which he says have performed well on restrictor-plate tracks. His shop also has the new Taurus in wind tunnels, working on finding the right aerodynamic setups for 2000.
"I'd have a hard time believing you won't see that No. 2 car in the front row for the Daytona 500 and leading a lot of laps. Because you did last year," said Wallace, who finished eighth in the Daytona 500 and 16th in the Pepsi 400.
Still, it's the missed opportunities over the past decade and his desire to prove he still can be a Winston Cup champion as the new decade starts that make Wallace a contender 10 years after his only championship. And over the final month of the '99 season, Wallace found some consistency from an old source. After switching back to Penske-designed chassis that his team was building in house, Wallace finished no worse than 14th and twice cracked the top 10.
Wallace does enter the 2000 season with the longest current winning streak now that Ricky Rudd's string of winning seasons is over at 16. Wallace has at least one win in 14 seasons.
"We'd like to continue that streak, no question," Wallace said. "I'll tell ya what, when we won Bristol this year, I thought we'd have a lot more wins in 1999.
"The competition is so tough that we've really got to get up on the pipe and do better than what we've been doing. We've got to make dog-gone sure we get these cars handling better, that's one of the biggest problems we had in
1999.
"If there is anything that bugs me to death, it's trying to get the cars to do what I want them to do Handling is the key. Our biggest focus (this offseason) is going to be on suspensions and handling."
Wallace has until February to get used to his new hot rod. He has 34 races to win No. 50 in 2000. And another few years of the 21st Century to produce a second championship.
ESPN.com's series on NASCAR 2000 continues Thursday with a look at Dale Earnhardt's expectations next season.
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