NASCAR champ Jarrett struggles in 2000

Steven Wine

Friday, Nov. 17, 2000 | 10:02 a.m.

HOMESTEAD, Fla. - Since the Daytona 500 is the Super Bowl of stock car racing, anyone who wins it has had a great year.

Right?

Wrong, Dale Jarrett says.

A year ago, he cried with joy after clinching his first Winston Cup championship at Homestead. He got off to a fast start in 2000 by winning Daytona for the third time.

But he hasn't won much since.

Jarrett's only other victory this year came at Rockingham, N.C. He finished 17th Sunday in the Pennzoil 400 at Homestead, where Bobby Labonte replaced Jarrett as NASCAR champion.

Going into the final race of the year on Sunday in Atlanta, Jarrett ranks fourth in the Winston Cup standings.

"Daytona's great, but there are a lot more races, and we haven't accomplished the things we know we're capable of," Jarrett said. "We just haven't performed well this year. We never ran good enough to challenge for the championship. We had our moments, but more times than not we struggled to make a top five. It's been difficult, but I think we've learned a lot."

Jarrett has finished in the top five 15 times, compared with 25 times in 1999. The two first-place finishes are his fewest since 1995.

Labonte, meanwhile, has won four races and finished out of the top 20 only once. Jarrett has failed to crack the top 20 six times.

"Even when we were hanging around there, it wasn't like we were as good as Bobby and his team," Jarrett said. "They've just been very good all year long, and they deserve to win the championship."

Jarrett drives for Robert Yates, who said their Ford has been overtaken by teams that developed better engines and chassis setups.

"We finished out the season last year sitting on technology that was getting old," Yates said. "We were afraid to make changes. We felt like we needed to maintain what had gotten us that far. We squeaked out the season, and once we got the job done, we went more freely to new things."

With experimentation came setbacks. The year started well at Daytona, where Jarrett won the Bud Shootout Qualifier, the Bud Shootout and then the 500.

Three weeks later, Jarrett started on the pole in Atlanta but blew his engine, and the team decided to go back to the car that won the NASCAR title in 1999. There were 16 consecutive top 10 finishes, but no wins.

Jarrett was in the thick of the points race until the Southern 500 on Labor Day weekend, when Labonte came from 37th place at the start to win. Jarrett finished fifth.

"Going into that race, we were 60-some points back," Jarrett said. "We outran him all day for over 400 miles of the race, and all of a sudden he beat Dale Earnhardt and Jeff Burton and me. He beat everybody and gained points instead of losing some points. That was a big turning point, and he has pretty much outrun all of us since then."

The following week, Jarrett limped home 31st at Richmond. For the Yates team, the message was clear.

"It really didn't hit us until about Richmond that, hey, we've really got to go after new stuff," Yates said. "There are too many guys out here who are running the cars quite differently."

Experimenting resumed with a new engine and chassis. The team is now building new cars.

Jarrett has finished in the top three in the Winston Cup Series every year since 1996, so his team is confident about contending for the title next year. A review of what went wrong in 2000 will help, Jarrett said.

"We need to learn right now for next year," he said. "We need to make sure we're learning some things that are going to be beneficial to us as we get ready to start the 2001 season and try to win a championship there. We need to look from the beginning of the season to the end and look at each type of race track, and analyze exactly what we can do better to start next year."

The victory at Rockingham last month showed the team is on the right track, Yates said.

"We've got a good many miles on something that's better than what we raced with last year," he said.

Yates described the 2000 season as "mildly disappointing." But after talking for several minutes about the ups and downs of the year, he smiled.

"We didn't fall out of business," he said. "We won the Daytona 500. We have to keep reminding ourselves of that."