Columnist Rusty Wallace: Las Vegas always brings good times

Rusty Wallace

Monday, Feb. 24, 2003 | 9:56 a.m.

Editor's note: Rusty Wallace, driver of the Miller Lite Penske Racing Dodge Intrepid, is writing a daily column exclusively for the Sun in conjunction with Sunday's UAW-DaimlerChrysler 400 at Las Vegas Motor Speedway.

I can hardly believe that this weekend will be the sixth time we've raced at Las Vegas Motor Speedway and the sixth year I've been doing these guest columns for the Las Vegas Sun. It just seems like yesterday that we pulled into that brand-spanking-new facility for the first time.

I know I probably have said this every year but I mean it: I really love coming to Vegas. The track is just a really fun racetrack to run on and it's real wide so you can do a lot of passing. I love going to the area because there's a lot to do out there right now. It's one of the most fun places we go to all year because it's just such a great town.

I'll be coming out on Wednesday and I'm actually going to golf a little bit and do a lot of fun things and -- hopefully -- win the race. I have a lot of things scheduled for my sponsors out there so there'll be plenty of opportunities for the fans to meet me and get an autograph or a picture.

As far as the track itself, I believe the track has changed, from a driver's perspective, a little bit because the track has aged a bit and it has not got as much grip as it did when we first came out here. I believe that's good for racing; I think it lets the cars pass a little easier and move around a little bit better.

We've been doing a lot of testing with the new Dodge and I believe that we've learned enough so that when we get to Vegas, we'll be able to adapt fairly easily to the track. I did not test out in Las Vegas at the end of January but my Penske Racing teammate, Ryan Newman, had a good test out there and I think we'll have a really good handle on that track when we get there.

Everybody always asks me about the similar body styles of these Winston Cup cars now and I think that this weekend's race out there is going to be a real key race for everybody. We've been to Daytona with the superspeedway car and we saw what happened there; it looked like the Chevys were pretty dominant out there -- although my Dodge ran awful strong, too.

We qualified good and ran good at Rockingham but I think the Vegas race is very key because it's such a big racetrack that takes a lot of horsepower. It's real smooth and I think aerodynamics are going to be very, very important. So everybody will be looking, after the Vegas race is over, how equal these body styles really are.

We've run two races now and we finished 25th at Daytona and sixth at Rockingham. Sunday was a much better race for us -- although I wish we could have won that race. We led something like 182 laps and that Dodge of mine was a bullet; it was flying. It was handling perfect and the motor ran great.

About three-quarters through the race, it got too loose and I could hardly touch the throttle. We tightened it up on a couple of pit stops and it would tighten it up, but it lost the front end. I couldn't fix both things.

It was a good run the first time out -- a good evaluation for the first time in a Dodge on a downforce track like we'll have in Vegas. It had a lot of power and handled good. The race was both a little bit disappointing and encouraging. It's disappointing we didn't win but it's encouraging we ran so strong. But, all in all, we came out of there with a sixth-place finish and 160 points so we're sitting 11th in points coming to Vegas.