Columnist Brian Hilderbrand: Grazing LVMS wall just minor setback for Biffle

Wednesday, Jan. 29, 2003 | 9:31 a.m.

Brian Hilderbrand covers motor sports for the Las Vegas Sun. His motor sports notebook appears Friday. He can be reached at bh@lasvegassun.com or (702) 259-4089.

Just when Greg Biffle finally was starting to feel good about his preseason testing, the NASCAR Winston Cup rookie hit a bump in the road.

Actually, it was the concrete wall between the third and fourth turns at Las Vegas Motor Speedway.

Biffle was just about to take a break in testing for lunch Tuesday when a tire blew out and he grazed the wall with his No. 16 Roush Racing Ford. The car suffered only minor damage and Biffle was able to get back on the track Tuesday afternoon.

"We blew a right-front tire -- we don't know what did it or what happened; there's no cuts in it," Biffle said.

"Thank goodness it blew going in the corner early so I had a chance to kind of slow down some. If it had blown out as I turned down in, it probably would have gone up and -- splat."

The incident put a damper on what had been a good morning test session for the 2002 Busch Series champion, who is moving up to Winston Cup this season with Roush Racing.

"Other than (the blown tire), the test has been pretty decent," Biffle said. "We feel pretty happy with where we're running right now.

"We're just a little bit behind getting started building cars and stuff like that (but) that's the growing pains of a brand-new team ... but we've been pretty happy with our car here so far."

That was more than Biffle could say after a three-day test earlier this month at Daytona International Speedway.

"Daytona did not go very good," Biffle said. "We were one of the slowest cars there. We've borrowed a car from Matt Kenseth's team to take back to Daytona.

"It was their third car; they've got two good cars and then they've got a third car that's mediocre and we've taken their third car that they've loaned to us and we're going to make a go of it with that."

Steve Park (167.053) and Tony Stewart (165.776) rounded out Tuesday's top five.

Stanton Barrett posted the fastest lap among the Busch Series drivers at 163.527 mph.

The Winston Cup champion will receive a minimum of $4.25 million from Winston and NASCAR in 2003, a $500,000 increase over last year. Drivers finishing second through fourth each will receive more than $1 million at the annual awards ceremony in New York in December.