Thursday, Feb. 1, 2001 | 10:37 a.m.
NASCAR Winston Cup drivers and their speeds from Wednesday's test session at Las Vegas Motor Speedway:
Todd Bodine: 171.592 mph
Rusty Wallace: 170.347
Michael Waltrip: 169.811
Robert Pressley: 168.644
Dale Jarrett: 168.112
Jeremy Mayfield: 167.702
Mike Wallace: 167.182
Robby Gordon: 167.079
Ricky Rudd: 166.718
Ron Hornaday: 166.667
Ryan Newman: 165.593
By most accounts, Dale Jarrett had an outstanding NASCAR Winston Cup season last year. He won two races including the Daytona 500, had 24 top-10 showings in 34 starts and finished fourth in the series points standings.
By his own account, however, Jarrett failed to achieve the consistency that led him to his first Winston Cup championship a season earlier.
After winning four races and finishing out of the top 20 only two times in 1999, Jarrett and his Robert Yates Racing team had six finishes out of the top 20 last year.
"If we would have performed at the level that we did the year before, we would have been able to repeat last year but we didn't do that," Jarrett said Wednesday during a break in testing at Las Vegas Motor Speedway.
"It didn't have anything to do with winning it the year before and (the pressure of repeating) making it more difficult; we just didn't perform."
While some would say a fourth-place finish in the highly competitive series is an achievement in itself, it marked Jarrett's lowest finish in five seasons.
Jarrett's problems actually started last winter during a two-day test at LVMS, after Goodyear came out with a new tire for the stock cars.
"Goodyear brought a new kind of tire out and we just never found what it took to make the car work on a consistent basis. We just struggled with it all year," Jarrett said.
"We had four years worth of notes of being very successful and that new tire just eliminated all of those notes, basically. We were very reluctant to go away from what we knew and what had worked for us because we had been so successful. We just didn't react quickly enough and that just got us behind."
Although Goodyear again has released a new tire this season, Jarrett said the changes are less drastic than they were a year ago.
"Last year was a total construction change and this year it's more just a compound (change)," he said. "They're just making the tires harder, making it to where we don't have tires for every different racetrack; we can use these tires at different tracks.
"That should give us more time on them and allow us to be better prepared and know more about the tires that we're dealing with. I don't think it's going to be as big a deal as it was last year but I think it's going to increase the competition a little bit because everyone will be more familiar with what we're running."
In two days of testing at LVMS, Jarrett said he was pleased with what the team accomplished.
"It has been a really good test," Jarrett said. "This is one of the better tests we have had in a while. Last year we went to testing and tried to really learn something about the tires but we kind of got frustrated because we never could really find what we needed.
"This is a brand-new car and we've started doing most of our chassis in-house now and they've done a really good job with this car; it's the best car that I've driven in quite a while, so we're pretty happy."
And that, along with new sponsorship from UPS, has renewed his team's spirits heading into the Feb. 18 Daytona 500.
"We expect to win races and we expect to challenge for the championship," Jarrett said. "That's all that you can hope for is to put yourself in a position to challenge."
archive
