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INDIANAPOLIS -- Rusty Wallace, already a winner of seven Winston Cup poles this season, turned the fastest unofficial stock car lap ever recorded at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
Wallace was clocked at 181.217 mph on Monday during Ford testing for the Brickyard 400. Wallace's time of 49.664 seconds in the Miller Lite Ford was
three-thousandths of a second quicker than the time of Joe Nemechek during
GM testing July 12. Nemechek's top lap speed was 181.206 mph.
The track record is 179.612 mph set by Jeff Gordon last August during Brickyard 400 qualifying. A track record has been set in qualifying at each of the six previous races. Pole qualifying for this year's race is scheduled for Aug. 3; the race is Aug. 5.
"That's everything we had today," said Wallace, who put his high mark on
the speed chart with his Roger Penske-owned car about 30 minutes before the
track closed at 6 p.m.
"Our mission when we got to the end of the day, if everything worked out
fine, was to do all qualifying stuff today, all our shock absorber work, our
tire pressure selections and things like that. And we put our qualifying
motor in, so there's not a whole lot we have left coming back.
"We might try one left front shock, maybe. I don't want to touch it. This
is our qualifying engine, and this is our car, so I guess we'll take it
home, wax it up and bring it back."
Wallace said the team will put a race setup on the car and run all of Tuesday's second and final day of testing "just racing."
"We just turned a really 'bad' lap, we're done with it now, and we're going
to take those records and file them away for qualifying and just concentrate
tomorrow solely on race setups," Wallace said.
Wallace became the third driver to break the 50-second mark at Indy. Nemechek and Dale Earnhardt both cracked that barrier last week. Earnhardt, seeking a record-breaking eighth Winston Cup championship, was clocked at 49.929 for a speed average of 180.253 on July 12.
The second-fastest driver Monday among the Ford contingent was 1997 Brickyard 400 winner Ricky Rudd with a 179.351-mph lap in his Texaco
Havoline Ford. Jeff Burton was third at 179.204, followed by defending
Brickyard 400 champion Dale Jarrett at 179.204 and Elliott Sadler at
179.184.
"It's always nice to come back here," said Jarrett, who, like Gordon, is a
two-time winner of the event. "It seems to be very special just as the very first time we were given the opportunity to come here and race (1994). A lot of things have changed. The look of the place has changed, but the racetrack hasn't changed."
There was one incident Monday, as Stacy Compton hit the wall in Turn 3 after an
apparent tire problem. Compton complained of a sore shoulder. | |
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