Columnist Rusty Wallace: Off-season dedicated to preparation for title run

Rusty Wallace

Tuesday, Feb. 27, 2001 | 10:18 a.m.

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

It's sort of hard to believe that we've already run two races this year and we're ready to head to Las Vegas -- one of my favorite stops on the whole Winston Cup circuit.

The off-season was very short for me, it seemed, but everything went pretty good during the winter. We had a little bit of time off and now the guys have worked real hard preparing the cars and doing all that type of stuff to get us ready for a 36-race season.

Believe it or not, I didn't do anything real special during the off-season. We did a little snow skiing and relaxed a little bit -- actually, we did a lot of relaxing -- but as far as going on vacations or doing different things that most people do, I didn't do that this winter.

Right now, with our race schedule the way it is, we're down to having about six weeks off from the last race in Atlanta to the time we start testing in mid-January.

I did a lot of new contracts with different companies and I find myself flying around the country talking to those people and doing photo shoots and commercials and a lot of neat things. It ate up most of the off-season but I feel like I'm pretty organized and I believe we're ready to go for the 2001 season.

I think we can win this doggone championship this year and we're really focusing on it.

We're looking real good right now. We finished third in the Bud Shootout, we were fifth in 125-mile qualifying race at Daytona, we were third in the Daytona 500 and seventh Monday at Rockingham.

Although we didn't win Monday's race at Rockingham, I feel good for the guys at Dale Earnhardt, Inc., for getting that win with driver Steve Park. After all they've gone through the past eight or nine days, they deserved it.

I wish I could have won it myself, but that happens. We got a seventh out of it and I thought it was gonna be a lot better than that, but we just didn't get there.

The second half of the race was a lot better for us than the first half. I was just so doggone loose throughout the day; I just couldn't get enough pit stops. There weren't enough cautions in the race, so we couldn't work on the car.

Some of the stuff I did was just not right, but at the end we got where I needed to be. We needed one more adjustment to loosen the Miller Lite Ford up a little bit because we overshot and I think I would have been right on then.

But that's water under the bridge and now we turn our focus to this week's UAW-DaimlerChrysler 400 in Las Vegas.