Columnist Rusty Wallace: Let’s hope for some better luck

Rusty Wallace

Friday, March 1, 2002 | 10:12 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 UAW-DaimlerChrysler 400 at Las Vegas Motor Speedway.

I'm pretty confident going into Sunday's race, but I thought the same thing last year and look what happened to us.

I thought I had a real good car last year until I got wiped out about four or five laps into the race with my teammate at the time, Jeremy Mayfield. That was a really bad deal because I thought it was going to be my day.

I felt real good about my chances going into that race and I had moved up to about sixth or seventh in the first couple of laps and then it happened. Man, I don't think I've ever been involved in a deal like that so early in a race.

I was going down into Turn One and I was on the top side of the track and Jeremy got underneath me and somehow he lost it. He got up in my quarter panel and spun me and I hit the wall really hard. It tore up the car really bad and I had to park it after about eight laps.

We didn't test in Vegas in January like a lot of teams did, but my teammate this year, Ryan Newman, tested here and he ran real fast. I'm going to take the same exact setup he tested here and put it in my car. Ryan was happy with how he tested here, so we're just going to copy his setup for the race.

I finished third my first time we ran here in Vegas in 1998 and I really haven't had the results the last few years. I finished dead last last year and the year before that we finished 15th ... but I expect this year to be better, I do, because of the test.

My qualifying hasn't been great here for some reason, but we hope to do better today. To me, this is a hard racetrack to get going fast at, for some reason. But Ryan ran good out there -- really good in qualifying trim -- and we'll have strong motors, so I expect to do well.

You've got to have the total package to win this race and we hope to have the whole deal working for us this time around. By total package I mean good handling, a strong motor, a good qualifying run, fast pit stops, track position and maybe even throw in a little luck; all that goes into the total package that I'm talking about.

I hope you all enjoy the race and I'll talk to you again in my final column on Monday. It'd sure be nice to tell you all about how I won the race. 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.