Columnist Rusty Wallace: Late caution helped make a difference

Rusty Wallace

Monday, March 8, 1999 | 10:28 a.m.

Rusty Wallace, driver of the NASCAR Miller Lite Ford Taurus, is a former Winston Cup champion. This is the last of six columns he will write for the Sun in conjunction with the Las Vegas 400 at Las Vegas Motor Speedway.

We almost went from being the hobo to the hero.

It was real intimidating to start way back in the 37th position Sunday morning at the Las Vegas 400. It was downright embarrassing for me. I'm sure it was embarrassing for Dale Earnhardt, too, because he was right next to me in Row 19.

But we both ended up coming back.

That's a pretty good day for us to go from 37th to ninth. Our main goal is points, points, points. We got 424 of them, and now we're in second place in the Winston Cup Series standings, only 51 behind Mike Skinner. We feel if we just focus on getting points each race, the wins will come pretty soon.

Before Las Vegas, we hadn't had to resort to provisional qualifying since September of 1997 at Darlington, S.C. In fact, all last year we were fast enough on the first day of qualifying except for once, when we were 28th at Sears Point.

But every driver has provisionals every now and then because something goes wrong, there's disarray or you try something that just doesn't work. That's what happened here Friday afternoon.

There's a setup that we've been using for qualifying that's pretty repeatable, and it works really good. But now we have the bigger real spoilers in the back and they make the cars handle differently. They make you run bigger rear springs, different front springs and sway bars. So now when you come here, your base setup is off. You end up chasing your tail. That's what I did.

Our strategy heading into Sunday's race was to pick off as many cars as we could at the start. I knew to do that the crew was going to have to bail me out a lot, and they did. They picked me up two or three spots on every single pit stop. Every time I came in, I seemed to make progress.

I also was helped out by the caution flags.

Jeff Burton's No. 99 car was flying right behind us. At one point it looked like there was a chance I could get lapped. But I got a set of tires that really made my car fast, and once I got going I was really able to hold my own.

I didn't get lapped, but it was close. And then I got the caution flag on lap 232 because there was oil on the track and that put all the cars back together again.

That last caution was definitely needed. When it came out, my crew was telling me there were four or five cars that could have gone the distance without stopping for fuel. But we had to.

We all have to be happy with Sunday's result. You're never pleased when you finish eighth or ninth. The goal is to win, and that's what we want to do Sunday at the Cracker Barrel 500 near Atlanta.

So what we'll do is go back to the shop. And with a two-car team, we can judge off teammate Jeremy Mayfield's car -- because he had a real hot rod today but had bad luck and finished 17th -- and see how the motors ran together, how the suspension was, how the aerodynamics were.

Tuesday will be a big day for us. That's when we'll have a big meeting and talk about how the cars ran. Then we'll incorporate what we want to do in Atlanta. We'll talk about what springs and shocks we're going to use.

What will help us a great deal is that we ran Atlanta last year under these rules. So we left there with a solid base of knowledge of what we need to do.

We just hope we don't have to use the provisional again.