Thursday, Nov. 13, 2003 | 10:27 a.m.
Brendan Gaughan isn't letting the pressure of a tight, four-way battle for the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series championship get to him.
Two days before what could prove to be the biggest day of his racing career -- Friday's season-ending Ford 200 at Homestead-Miami Speedway -- Gaughan was saltwater fishing in the Florida Keys.
Despite his precarious hold on the series points lead, Gaughan's confidence couldn't be higher going into the 134-lap race. He holds a slim 26-point lead over veteran driver Ted Musgrave and only 39 points separate the four contenders for the championship.
Gaughan, 28, has been in this position before. In 2001, Gaughan held a 40-point lead in the NASCAR Winston West standings going into the season finale at Irwindale (Calif.) Speedway. Rather than worrying about where he had to finish the race in relation to the other contenders, Gaughan went out and won the race and his second consecutive Winston West championship.
"We had to do this in 2001 at Irwindale to win that championship," Gaughan said. "This is exactly how we won it; we came in very confident to the last race, to a track we knew we were good at and that's kind of the same thing here.
"That's the way we want to do it. We don't want anybody else to do a victory burnout on our championship celebration."
Although he finished 11th in last season's race at Homestead-Miami Speedway, the 1.5-mile oval has undergone massive changes since last year, increasing the banking in the corners from 6 degrees to 20 degrees.
"It's my kind of track," said Gaughan, who scored four of his six victories this season on 1.5-mile banked tracks. "I'm sure glad they changed this track. It reminds me a lot of Michigan and Texas and I can't think of two better places for it to remind me of. We're going to be really good."
Gaughan proved that Monday when the Truck Series teams tested for the first time on the newly configured track. Gaughan posted the top unofficial speed during the session at 168.224 mph in his Orleans Racing Dodge truck.
Gaughan, who hasn't had the luxury of being able to race conservatively in the latter stages of the season because of the tightness of the points battle, said he doesn't plan to change his race strategy on Friday.
"We're still going out there to win races," Gaughan said. "We want to win the war ... and the only way to win this war is to try to win the battles.
"Right now, it's too tight; we have to go out there and try to race like we have been. The only way to win this championship is to go out there and do what the team has been doing all year."
That is a lesson Gaughan said he learned from John Thompson while he was a walk-on member of the Georgetown University basketball team in the mid-'90s.
"All we're going to do is exactly what Coach (Thompson) taught us back then: Stick with what got you there," Gaughan said. "When (Thompson) won his national championship in 1983, Patrick Ewing got him there and he stuck with him. When we won our Big East championships in the '90s, Allen Iverson got us there and we stuck with him.
"You don't change what got you there."
As the points leader going into the final race, Gaughan said the pressure Friday would be on the three drivers behind him in the standings.
"We just have to worry about ourselves and that's fun," said Gaughan, who can clinch the title by finishing fourth or better. "We don't have to worry about anybody else... we just have to do all the things we know how to do and we don't have to change a thing.
"They (contenders Musgrave, Travis Kvapil and Dennis Setzer) have to change, they have to try to go twice as hard, they have to hope we have bad luck ... they have a lot of things they have to root for."
Even though he is poised to become the youngest champion in the nine-year history of the Truck Series, Gaughan tried to downplay the importance of Friday's race.
"Everybody always wants to say stuff like, 'it's the biggest day of this' or 'the biggest day of that,' " Gaughan said. "It's a day that we built these race teams for. We put a race team together that we feel very confident in and we're excited (because) we think we've got a shot at it; that's what we're here to do.
"Yes, it's going to be a great day. Yes, it's a big day as far as the race team goes. But as far as calling it the biggest day in (my) life ... I don't know about going that far.""
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