Columnist Rusty Wallace: Man, maybe our luck will change in Atlanta

Rusty Wallace

Monday, March 3, 2003 | 10:10 a.m.

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

Needless to say, I wasn't too pleased with our 40th-place finish in Sunday's race. We started off with a car that was too tight and ended up getting wrecked out about 175 laps into the thing.

The front end was real, real tight when we started the race. We put a spring rubber in it Saturday to try to correct the problem and I wasn't real sure what we had for the race. Our guys kind of screwed up and didn't get the car set up right, so I had to guess at the set-up and the set-up we guessed on was too tight. We ended up pulling the spring rubber out of the left-rear spring during one pit stop Sunday but when we did that, somehow the guys didn't get gas in the car and we went down two laps.

We eventually got one of the laps back but we were still one down. The car was finally getting loose and we were running good -- we got it coming through the pack real good and strong -- and I was passing the 4 car, Mike Skinner, on the outside and he must have lost the front end. When he lost the front end, it slid up into my left-rear quarter panel, spun me out and we wrecked a hell of a lot of cars. So, it was a bad deal; definitely not a good Las Vegas week, that's for sure.

I didn't sense anything at all coming before we got wrecked. I was way up high on the racetrack and I never thought he would lose it on the bottom and slide that far up and get me, but he did. When you're on the bottom of the racetrack, it's really tough to get enough aerodynamic downforce to your car to keep a lot of grip on it.

Evidently, his car just got loose, out from underneath him, and that was it. I'm not mad at anybody -- it was just one of those racing deals.

The weekend didn't really start out that great, either. I didn't qualify the way I wanted to but I'd say what really killed me was Saturday night's practice, when we went to debrief the car and the numbers that I thought were in the car weren't in there. I'd say that was the beginning of the problem right there. The set-up numbers were not where I thought they were and when we found that out, we started making some adjustments and some guesses for the race and we guessed a little bit wrong.

Other than that, I would say, all in all, after I got it adjusted, the car was pretty strong on Sunday. I really think I had a top-five or top-six car -- at the worst -- the way it was running. But we got in the wreck and that was it. We had a lot of uncharacteristic things happen to the team on Sunday so we'll go back and see if we can correct it and make it better.