Columnist Brian Hilderbrand: Coca-Cola race has local flavor

Friday, May 28, 2004 | 8:55 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.

Las Vegas will be well represented in Sunday's Coca-Cola 600 NASCAR Nextel Cup race at Lowe's Motor Speedway as three native sons are set to take the green flag in the longest race on the series' schedule.

In addition to series regulars Kurt Busch and Brendan Gaughan, Kyle Busch qualified for his second Nextel Cup race of the season and will start 27th -- five spots ahead of his older brother. The younger Busch will be driving the No. 84 CarQuest Chevrolet for Hendrick Motorsports in the Coca-Cola 600.

Kyle Busch also will compete in Saturday's NASCAR Busch Series race at Lowe's and said the prospect of racing 900 miles in two days should prove to be a challenge.

"Well, it's going to be tough," Busch said. "We're going to have a fun day (today), practicing and qualifying the Busch car and then racing Saturday and racing again Sunday. It's going to be a big weekend. It's going to be a long weekend, but it's also going to be a fun one.

"I'm not really taking anything different this weekend as far as steps go to get prepared for the race. I'll try to keep myself hydrated better this weekend and maybe take some good drinks, some Gatorade and some other stuff like that, that the Hendrick guys will help me out with."

Busch, 19, made his Nextel Cup debut in March at Las Vegas Motor Speedway but completed only 11 laps before retiring from the race after scraping the outside wall coming out of Turn 4 on several occasions. He will make his second Cup start on the same track he finished second in his Busch Series debut last May.

Jimmie Johnson, the defending Coca-Cola 600 race winner, was the last driver to make a qualifying run Thursday night and bumped Ryan Newman off the pole with a lap of 187.052 mph. Newman will start second and Jeff Gordon, a three-time winner of the 600, will start third.

Steve Park, who drives for the Las Vegas-based Orleans Racing in the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series, attempted to qualify the No. 7 Ultra Motorsports Dodge for the Coca-Cola 600 but was 42nd out of 52 drivers and did not make the race.

Gaughan, who came up through the off-road racing ranks, said he is looking forward to the grueling 600-mile race.

"I've raced 24 hours alone in a racecar -- it was a lot tougher at Baja," Gaughan said of the Baja 1000 desert race. "Six hundred miles is a long distance for a NASCAR event. The big deal is you have to have good engines. We've got good horsepower, now we've got to keep that reliability up.

"This team is good at doing all the extra things you need to do in a 600-mile race, so I don't see the extra 100 miles being a problem."

Gaughan this weekend is driving the same No. 77 Kodak Dodge he drove to a career-best sixth-place finish at California Speedway earlier this month.

But it was clear that Biffle still was annoyed five days after the fact that Busch put him and several other cars out of the race when Busch bumped Biffle from behind early in the race. Biffle blasted his teammate during an interview on the television broadcast of the race.

"Well, I think getting wrecked on the straightaway by your teammate certainly would be something to set a guy off," Biffle said. "That would be like your neighbor burning down your house by accident -- you're gonna be upset. I was upset about it and it wasn't right for that to happen. We have five teammates ... so it's bound to happen that teammates are gonna get in an accident together ... but, hopefully, those incidents are few and far between and they're truly accidents.

"Kurt and I have talked it over. We've discussed it and we're moving on. We've got to worry about winning the (Coca-Cola) 600 and not what happened last week."

Busch, who called the incident a "stupid mistake," said it was easier to patch things up with Biffle because the two have been teammates since Busch moved into the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series in 2000.

"It's been real easy to work through this because of how long I've known Biffle and with our relationship in the Truck Series and then moving it into the Cup deal," Busch said. "So we've got things ironed out. We're two gentlemen and now we're on to the next week."

"We made a mistake on this one," Truck Series director Wayne Auton said after reviewing in-truck camera footage of the race. "It is regrettable and we're doing everything we can to make sure this doesn't happen again. We apologize to Carl Edwards and everyone associated with the No. 99 Superchips Ford, including their fans."

Auton said NASCAR would not alter the results of the race.

Edwards said he was appreciative that NASCAR owned up to the mistake.

"NASCAR officials, like officials in all other professional sports, have a tough job," Edwards said in a prepared statement. "I have personally seen how much goes on and how fast decisions must be made by race control officials.

"They made a mistake in the heat of the moment that turned out to be a critical one for me and I lost a race on account of the mistake. I appreciate that they accepted responsibility for the mistake in a public way."

"I'm very happy to continue to drive with Target Chip Ganassi Racing for the next few years," Dixon said. "They've always proven that they were committed to winning and we did that together. There is more that we can do together. I want to defend my championship and I want to win the Indianapolis 500. We can now concentrate exclusively on doing that this year and next year and the year after that as well."

Dixon will start Sunday's Indianapolis 500 on the inside of the fifth row.

Ken Ungar, the senior vice president for business affairs for the IRL, said that the two sides have discussed the possibility of moving the starting time of the Indianapolis 500 so the race would be televised in prime time on the East Coast.

"We've committed, as part of this relationship, to looking at the issue of start time to maximize the audience for the Indy 500," Ungar said. "That is something we will be looking at in the future."

The Indianapolis Motor Speedway, at present, does not have lights for night racing and Ungar admitted that lighting the 2 1/2-mile track would be "a huge logistical hurdle to overcome."