Columnist Rusty Wallace: Late caution hurt chance for top-10 finish

Rusty Wallace

Monday, March 4, 2002 | 9:10 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.

It was a great run today going from 38th to 11th.

I had to start so far back, my car went through three or four different runs. I started off good, I really thought, and then all of a sudden it got real tight. Then I got loose, then I got tight again.

At the very end I felt like we had the car pretty damn close. All I needed was track position.

The last pit stop on lap 233, we elected to establish track position because we were struggling so hard all day long. So we put on two right tires instead of four, which vaulted me from 15th to second at one point.

I have to give credit to our crew chief, Bill Wilburn for talking me through the last 20 laps. That pit stop was 6.926 seconds, which helped a lot.

One thing I did not need was that last caution flag on the 233rd lap.

That last caution flag let everybody's tires cool back off and then get a run at me. It was tight coming across the line there that last lap. Bobby Labonte's in the grass, Jimmy Spencer's on the bottom blocking me off, it was the real deal.

If the caution didn't come out, I might have finished fifth, because I was feeling pretty steady right there.

But we got it all done. It was an exciting race. It was all in all a good day. I'm glad that I was finally able to finish the race versus what happened last year when me and my teammate, Jeremy Mayfield, crashed.

I really do like coming to this place, I always do run pretty good here. The first race, we finished fourth in the Elvis Presley car in 1998.

We've had good runs off and on here. I'll tell you, this place is really funny. It's real flat and now, versus when it was new, there are two grooves out there. You can run high and low. There was a lot of passing out there today.

The race was special because I had a few new friends out there watching me.

I met the comedian Carrot Top last week while I was filming a commercial and he came out and hung out a little bit with us. We had all kinds of people here today. Vince Neil from Motley Crue was here, Goldberg the wrestler was here. We had Pam Anderson here.

They were all hanging. Every one was hollering at me asking, "What the hell are you doing in a driver's meeting with Pamela Anderson and that gang hanging out behind your truck?" It was funny. I said, "That's where I need to be, in the meeting so I don't get distracted."

Thanks again to the guys at the Sun for letting me share my thoughts with you this past week. God willing, we'll do it again next year. Rusty Wallace, driver of the Miller Lite Team Penske Ford Taurus, wrote a daily column exclusively for the Sun in conjunction with Sunday's running of the UAW-DaimlerChrysler 400 at Las Vegas Motor Speedway. He finished 11th.