Columnist Rusty Wallace: New faces may help secure win

Rusty Wallace

Thursday, Feb. 28, 2002 | 11:15 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-Daimler-Chrysler 400 at Las Vegas Motor Speedway.

We've got a different look this year on our No. 2 Miller Lite team with a new crew chief, Bill Wilburn, and three or four new crew guys. Right now, they're all jelling good and meshing together and I like that; I'm real happy with what I'm seeing so far.

Bringing aboard a new crew chief is a big change, it really is. We didn't want to lose Robin Pemberton -- I'm real happy with Bill Wilburn -- but I had a huge comfort level with Robin.

Robin had been my crew chief for seven years and I was shocked when he left to become general manager at Petty Enterprises, but I couldn't think of a better choice to replace him than Bill Wilburn.

The best of all worlds would have been to have Wilburn being the crew chief and Robin back running the team -- that would have been really neat. Robin is real good with aerodynamics and I would have loved to have him heading up our entire aero program, but we just couldn't work that out to make it happen.

Robin's probably one of the only guys who has decided to leave that we all sat down and talked about it and said, 'I don't blame you for wanting to get off the road.' He was on the road so much in the past and he wanted to spend more time at home with his family.

We shook hands and we let him out of his contract. Robin's just a great guy and I have nothing but respect for him. We still get along great. In fact, he's one of my better friends, I'd say, and he'd still probably love to see us win. He's a guy that you can still go drink beers with anytime. There are some guys that have been with me and left that I wouldn't want to drink a beer with, but Robin's a cool guy.

There's absolutely going to be a learning curve with Bill, but the neat thing about him is that he's very aggressive and he will try anything. If you tell him it might be better to turn the car upside down, that it might run better that way, he'd say, 'Let's get it over, boys.' He really will do anything in the world.

In the 125-mile qualifying race at Daytona, he made the call to take two tires instead of four there during the last pit stop and there wasn't any second-guessing on my part. We went back to last year's notes and everybody took two tires, but everybody pitted earlier in the race than they did this year.

When we pitted and he called for two tires, I said, 'OK, we're getting two tires' -- there was no argument. But we had a ton of laps on those tires and we were at the end of a fuel run and that was the time to put four tires on it. Maybe we should have put four tires on it, but it's going to take some time to learn and we learned our lesson in the 125.

Maybe I shouldn't have let them talk me into taking only two tires, either. Looking back on it, we should have sat down and talked about it beforehand and ran every possible scenario.

But like I said, it's going to be a learning experience for all of us. All I can say is that I've got all the confidence in the world in Bill Wilburn and I really think we're going to work well together.