Columnist Rusty Wallace: Cold weather wreaked havoc on our car

Rusty Wallace

Monday, March 6, 2000 | 10:34 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.

Other than the weather Sunday, it was a good week for us in Las Vegas. We enjoyed ourselves and we had a fine time.

One negative is that we didn't qualify as well as we wanted to (19th). All week long I just couldn't get the speed out of the car that I wanted to. We struggled all week long. But we did get the car handling pretty good Saturday night and also for the first part of the race. Then we had our first pit stop. After that, the car started pushing and it stayed pushing the rest of the day.

I think part of the problem was that the temperatures got so cold that the track cooled off. That usually makes the cars lose the front end, which mine was doing.

I was real disappointed that the weather didn't clear up so we could get back out there. We were going to make some chassis adjustments and try to get up to the front. It was pretty apparent to me that the chassis we had in the car needed some help. But we wanted to get the thing better and hopefully get the car up front as close as we possibly could.

I thought there were three or four other cars out there that were real hot rods -- the 99 car (winner Jeff Burton), the 6 car (Mark Martin), the 20 car (Tony Stewart) -- a bunch of them I thought were pretty good. Ours was good, but we started struggling. Whenever you start adjusting around a car that doesn't have the right setup in it, you can only do so much with it.

By finishing 15th Sunday, we dropped to eighth in the point totals. But we're still only 77 points out of the lead. What we have to do now is go to Atlanta and hit it hard and make up for some lost ground.

I have to admit we did get a little lucky there at the end when we decided not to pit. We were sitting there something like 18th. We decided to stay out on the track while a bunch of cars peeled off. That moved me up. Some of those cars went from some real good positions back to behind me. But it was a gamble. I think those drivers thought the track would dry out and if they got out first that would put them in the lead of the race.

We may come back here and test here. Jeremy Mayfield, my teammate, did the test and was happy with it. We used his setup and I think it worked pretty good. The whole thing is we have to get our cars handling better. That's the key. We have good aerodynamics and we have good engines. We just have to get our cars handling better.

It's been fun writing this column for the Sun again this year and I enjoyed meeting a lot of the NASCAR fans in town this past week. I look forward to doing both again next year ... with a little better weather, of course. This is the last in a series of columns by Rusty Wallace, driver of the Miller Lite Team Penske Ford Taurus.