Thursday, April 30, 1998 | 12:29 p.m.
Two-time defending Busch Series champion Randy LaJoie has often said he likes his Sundays off and really doesn't want a Winston Cup ride.
Well, considering his showing while filling in for injured Ricky Craven, he should be turning down future offers in NASCAR's top series.
His 10th-place run last Sunday at Talladega Superspeedway was LaJoie's third top-10 finish in his five races with Hendrick Motorsports. Craven had only one top-10 run in the four races before coming down with post-concussion syndrome as the result of an earlier wreck.
But LaJoie has no intention of taking Craven's seat for good.
"If you're filling in, you're supposed to do a good job," LaJoie said. "This is Ricky's car. His name is still on it. I'm still over 50 percent for top-10s in my Busch career, so there's no reason why you can't do that in Winston Cup, too.
"Hendrick Motorsports obviously has a good race team. What they have available to them is just awesome. I'm honored to be driving for them. It won't hurt my feelings if I win a race for them along the way."
The substitute driver has taken the team from 51st to 37th in the standings.
"I seem to be getting more comfortable with the car every week," LaJoie said. "I'm getting more comfortable with the guys. I'm finally starting to learn their names. They're doing their jobs and I'm doing mine. It's working out."
Craven, undergoing physical therapy, is not expected back before midsummer.
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NASCAR FEEL: The pre-race hype for Saturday's round of the International Race of Champions at California Speedway has a decidedly NASCAR flavor.
The second of four races in the 1998 all-star series will have Winston Cup champion Jeff Gordon going for his second straight IROC win and attempting to hold off fellow NASCAR stars Jeff Burton and Mark Martin in the points race.
Those three finished 1-2-3 in February at Daytona in the first race.
"I had set a goal for myself to win an IROC race this year," Gordon said. "Now my goal is to win one without rain."
He was alluding to the Daytona race, shortened because of rain from 100 miles to 75.
The series pays its $760,000 purse entirely on the final standings. The championship is worth $225,000.
"There are only four races, so it's important to try to get a good finish in each one," said Martin, the two-time defending IROC champion. "I try to win every race, but in a short series like IROC, the points are really what counts."
The series this year, which concludes with races in July in Michigan and August in Indianapolis, includes 12 drivers, divided among NASCAR, CART, the Indy Racing League and road racing.
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BIG NUMBERS: No wonder sponsors are buzzing around Winston Cup like bees around a hive.
Television broadcasts devoted to NASCAR's top series races generated just over $1.1 billion of comparable exposure value for corporate sponsors in 1997, according to The Sponsors Report, a publication by the media research firm Joyce Julius & Associates. That marked an increase of about 31 percent over the 1996 total.
The exposure value is derived by measuring the time corporate sponsors appear on screen or are mentioned throughout a broadcast against the cost of purchasing an equal amount of commercial time.
In 1997, 108 broadcasts were devoted to the 32 Winston Cup events, including live telecasts and cable replays.
The Julius report said it monitored 808 sponsors during Winston Cup telecasts last year. The corporate entities' names or logos appeared clean and in-focus for nearly 328 hours, while sponsors were mentioned during the broadcasts on some 19,600 occasions.
On average, a typical sponsor obtained $1.4 million of comparable value, while a top primary sponsor of a competing team could expect to derive more than $13.5 million, the report said.
The leading team sponsor, in exposure value, was Valvoline, with $43,108,035. Ford Quality Care was next with $33,910,050, followed by DuPont with $32,512,725.
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BACK IN HARNESS: It turns out that Robby Gordon might be just what Toyota needed to make teams competitive.
Since Toyota began building Indy-car engines several years ago, its program has lagged behind in the CART FedEx Championship Series. Teams run by Dan Gurney and the duo of Frank Arciero and Cal Wells have tried hard to be competitive, but a lack of horsepower had kept them near the back of the pack.
But that changed Monday in the rain-delayed race in Nazareth, Pa., when Gordon, back after a disappointing year in NASCAR's Winston Cup series, drove an Arciero-Wells Reynard-Toyota to seventh place.
It was the highest finish ever for a Toyota-powered Champ car, as well as the first time one of them has finished on the lead lap.
"The key is that if I get the right tools to do my job, we can race," said Gordon, who has two CART wins to his credit. "Cal is doing everything he can to get me the right tools to race and win.
"We're not totally there yet on power, but we have the reliability. We can work on our chassis and Toyota can work on getting more power. Getting the reliability on track is really the biggest improvement."
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