| | Thanks to some great fuel mileage, the pace car managed to complete the Martinsville Horror without making a pit stop.
There were 17 caution flags at Martinsville Speedway in the appropriately named Goody's Body Pain 500. The pace car led 112 laps. "I felt like I got drop-kicked a couple of times," said Scott Pruett, who spent his afternoon playing virtual "Whack-A-Mole" -- his car serving as the mallet and the concrete wall doing its best impression of a rodent.
|  | | Bill Elliott takes a tumble along the front stretch at Talladega Superspeedway during the Diehard 500. |
Pruett, the new guy at this stock car gig, got his first taste of short-track racing. "This is the first short-track race I ever ran, and I'm glad we took the checkered flag," he said.
NASCAR tied the record for checkered flags in an event -- one -- and Martinsville's 17 yellows equaled that track's record for most cautions in a springtime race.
"It was crazy," said Jeremy Mayfield. "A lot of wrecks, a lot of cautions, a lot of track position, a lot of weird stuff going on."
If you're thinking about getting a crash course in crashing during a Winston Cup race, Martinsville's a good place to try it.
Cautions come and go on the tiny Virginia oval. Most cars involved in a wreck simply whirl around and carry on about their business -- with or without fenders.
The crashes almost always need their sheet-metal pulled off the tires; some need a new radiator and fewer still head for the garage. A crash at Martinsville doesn't ordinarily signal the end of the day.
Other tracks are not so forgiving, which is why it's a good idea to get the banging out of one's system at Martinsville.
Talladega's on tap this weekend, a spot where 1.7 caution flags at 190 mph are too many. While tiny Martinsville, with its 90 mph speeds, is merely job security for a fabricator, whopping Talladega often leaves its sheet-metaled victims searching for the nearest scrap yard.
There are no easy crashes at Talladega Superspeedway. The backstretch has a way of vaulting cars into the air like a ski jump. Several years ago, they paved a section of the Talladega superstretch -- not to increase speeds or improve grip -- but rather to help keep the cars on the ground.
Talladega is NASCAR's political action committee. Included on its list of 1990s initiatives are the restrictor plate and the roof flap -- Talladega caused them both to become law.
This season, the restrictor plate will be cut by 1/32nd-of-an-inch and NASCAR will mandate the team's rear shocks.
Talladega is the biggest. It is the fastest. It is the meanest.
"You don't want to hit anything but, if you hit something, you hit something," said Sterling Marlin, a five-time winner on restrictor-plate tracks. "The main difference in hitting something at Talladega and anywhere else is you usually hit things pretty doggone hard at Talladega. There isn't a whole lot you can do about that.
"If you're going to hit something, the important thing is to dodge it. The last thing you want to do at Talladega is lift. If you lift, even for a second, the draft has left you behind. And that's the best thing that can happen to you. The worst is you lift when the guy behind you doesn't have any clue as to what you're doing, and next thing you know, you're in the middle of the dangdest pileup of cars you ever seen in your life."
Johnny Benson's going to Talladega fresh off a surprisingly strong showing at Daytona in the season-opening Daytona 500.
"Am I scared? No," said Benson. "You don't have time to be scared (at Talladega). And really, if you wreck there you wreck so fast that by the time you realize what just happened the wreck is over, so you don't get too scared that way either."
Phil Furr, a freelance writer based in Charlotte, N.C., writes a weekly auto-racing column for ESPN.com.
| |
|
