Columnist Rusty Wallace: Practice will be the time to adjust

Rusty Wallace

Thursday, March 2, 2000 | 10:46 a.m.

Rusty Wallace, driver of the Miller Lite Team Penske Ford Taurus, is writing a daily column exclusively for the Las Vegas Sun in conjunction with Sunday's CarsDirect.com 400 at Las Vegas Motor Speedway.

Well, race weekend is almost here for us drivers in the Winston Cup Series. Everything starts Friday about 10 o'clock in the morning when we hit the track for our first practice.

I'll be getting out to the race track probably around 8:30 in the morning, making sure that everything is going well and everybody is comfortable and that the car made it through inspection. I'll get in the race car and make sure the seat belts are adjusted right and that everything is looking good in the car.

After that, I'll talk with Jeremy Mayfield, my teammate, and the rest of the team and we'll discuss how the cars are set up. We already did all that at the shop in Charlotte, but we'll make sure everything got done the way we thought it was supposed to get done.

Then we'll go out and practice and hopefully, right off the bat, the car is going to be great right out of the trailer. Jeremy did a two-day test session here in Las Vegas and he ran really, really strong, but he didn't do any qualifying attempts.

What he basically worked on when he was here testing was all race setups, so once we get to the race track we're going to have to get the car running fast for Friday afternoon's qualifying session. After that's over, we'll put Jeremy's race setup in the car and get right after it.

I'm real confident that everything should go well Friday when we get on the race track and we'll see if it runs fast. If not, we'll start adjusting different things, whether it's shocks or springs or whatever, but we'll do all the adjustments it takes to get the Miller Lite Ford Taurus running fast.

Both Jeremy's and my car have been in the wind tunnel and we know what the numbers are on both the cars and we know that they're real close. We also know that the chassis we run are a little bit different and we're working hard right now to come up with a common chassis. I expect to have both of us running the same chassis within the next two months.

We're working really hard on that right now and we have a big meeting on Tuesday, as soon as we get home from Las Vegas, to talk about the chassis. Hopefully we'll get these new chassis on-line real fast.

We're going to do everything we can on Friday to get these cars qualified and hopefully grab the pole for Sunday's race.

If you're coming out to the Busch Series race on Saturday and staying around for Winston Cup Happy Hour, drop by my souvenir trailer outside the track and say hi. Rusty Wallace, driver of the Miller Lite Team Penske Ford Taurus, is writing a daily column exclusively for the Las Vegas Sun in conjunction with Sunday's CarsDirect.com 400 at Las Vegas Motor Speedway.