Columnist Rusty Wallace: New bodies may force changes at some tracks

Rusty Wallace

Friday, Feb. 28, 2003 | 10:22 a.m.

Rusty Wallace, driver of the Miller Lite Penske Racing Dodge Intrepid, is writ' ng a daily column exclusively for the Sun in conjunction with Sunday's UAW-Dai' lerChrysler 400 at Las Vegas Motor Speedway.

Appearances

Today

Well, it's finally here -- race weekend in Las Vegas. We qualify today, have our final practice Saturday and the race is Sunday.

As I have said before, Las Vegas is a track that takes a lot of horsepower. It's got super-long straightaways, it's a very smooth track and it has a lot to do with aerodynamic balance. We'll be looking at that very closely this weekend.

We'll go to Atlanta next week and that's a super high-speed, high-banked track so I'd say after Atlanta is over, we've pretty well run the gauntlet on every kind of downforce track we run.

If there's any complaining going on, you'll hear it after we run Atlanta. I think you're going to hear some things after Las Vegas; some teams won't be happy with their car.

With the cars' new bodies this year, I think we're all going to be paying close attention to how the cars run here. I heard a ton of stuff about how strong the Chevrolets are at Vegas but during the test out there in January, there really weren't any Dodges out there in abundance to run with the Chevys.

When we went into Rockingham, I thought the Chevrolets were going to be incredible. They were OK but they weren't anything like I thought they were going to be. A Ford won the race and I believe the Ford and Dodge are real close in design.

We'll have to see how we stack up because in this sport, you've got to fight for your rights. If you know you're not right, you've got to get talking right away. You've got to call NASCAR and say, "Let's look at the wind-tunnel data. Let's take some of these cars to the wind tunnel. Let's see how equal they are."

I'm campaigning that NASCAR cut the rear spoilers off and soften up these tires as fast as they possibly can. It'll definitely help at tracks like Vegas, Homestead, Michigan and California. It's already pretty good racing, but it'll make it better racing. That's the biggest thing we're going to fight when we get to Las Vegas, those front ends taking off on the car.

On a related subject, I just want to say something about some comments I made last week. You guys might have seen a lot of stuff on the Internet claiming I started a lot of discussion claiming the Chevrolets were cheating at Daytona. I didn't say it evidently the way it was written; I just want to clarify that.

Some team members insinuate that I was talking about them and they made some comments about it. I'm not making comments about any Chevrolet team -- I want to put that on the record today. I just thought there were a lot of peculiar things going on and NASCAR has informed me they're going to be wide open and looking at everybody at Talladega.

I'm not going to say it was Chevrolet, I just think some peculiar things were going on with Ford and all kind of different makes that didn't make sense with the way they qualified and the way they ran in the race and things like that. I did say the word Chevrolet but I didn't just mean it was Chevrolets. I saw a lot of peculiar things across the board, and the NASCAR guys did, too.

If you're going out to the race, have a great time. I hope to get my Miller Lite Dodge into Victory Lane on Sunday and that'll give us a lot to talk about on Monday.