Park out to disprove his critics

Thursday, April 1, 2004 | 9:33 a.m.

Two and a half years after suffering a severe head injury in a crash during a NASCAR Busch Series race, Steve Park still is trying to prove that he can drive at NASCAR's highest level, the Nextel Cup Series.

Park was released from Richard Childress Racing at the end of last season after a seven-year Nextel Cup career in which he won two races, four poles and more than $12 million but left many in the garage area believing that he "wasn't the same" after his accident.

By driving the No. 62 Dodge this season for Las Vegas-based Orleans Racing in the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series, Park is trying to prove his critics wrong; he said he long ago proved to himself that he is every bit as capable of driving a 3,400-pound stock car as he was before his crash on Sept. 1, 2001 at Darlington Raceway.

Park, 36, acknowledged there is the perception among some NASCAR team owners and competitors that he never fully recovered from the head injury that temporarily left him with double vision and a speech problem.

"That perception is not going to be crossed until you win races," Park said Thursday while in Las Vegas to test with Orleans Racing at The Bullring at Las Vegas Motor Speedway. "The funny thing is, the confidence I have that we're going to win races with this team is high and then once we win one, two, three races, then the next story is going to somebody else. They're going to have to (say) 'Steve Park is back. All right, let's talk about something else.' "

Park thought he had answered his critics in 2002, when he returned from a six-month layoff while recovering from his injuries and qualified fourth for the Nextel Cup race at Darlington. Park, driving for Dale Earnhardt Inc. at the time, was leading the race in its early stages when he was tapped from behind by Stacy Compton, spun into the outside wall and was then hit from behind by Ricky Craven.

"People don't realize it has been over two years since my accident and when I first got back in a racecar at Darlington, I felt 100 percent," Park said. "People said, 'Did you come back too early?' I qualified fourth at Darlington in my first race back after six months and I was leading that race when I was taken out by a lapped car.

"Right before that, people were like, 'He's back,' and all of a sudden you have a wreck with a lapped car and it's, 'Uh, you think he came back too early?' That's just part of the sport we're involved in."

Even though he competed in 37 Cup races after returning from his accident, Park could not find a ride in the Nextel Cup Series at the end of last season and in January signed to take over for Brendan Gaughan in the Orleans Racing truck. Despite being the victim of other driver's wrecks that deprived him of two possible top-five finishes in the first two races of the season, Park said he is enjoying racing again for the first time in two years.

"With no opportunities (in Nextel Cup), I wanted to get involved with a Busch team or a Cup team that was a front-running team," he said. "You don't want to be a 20th-place Cup team just to race Cup. I don't race cars or trucks to run 20th and when a position came open here at the Orleans team, I knew that I could go there and run up front and get back to winning races.

"That's what puts a smile on my face when I get up in the morning -- knowing that on any particular day you can run up front and win races; that's something that I lost the last two years in Cup. It makes it hard to get up on Sunday knowing that if everything goes right, the best you're going to finish is 20th."

Putting the team's bad luck to date aside, Park said he is confident he can duplicate the success Gaughan enjoyed last season when he won six races and was a contender for the Truck Series championship.

"We put ourselves in a position to be a truck that can win at Daytona and a truck that can win at Atlanta and, due to circumstances, just got run into by rookies and inexperienced guys," Park said. "But we can walk away with the confidence knowing that if we had better luck, we had a truck to run in the top five and put ourselves in position to win.

"There are a lot of positive things going on right now. We're going through a little transition period with just a few new people but we've shown the last two races that this combination is going to work good."