INSIDE MOTOR SPORTS
Dead End Ahead?
Mark Martin cuts Jeff Gordon's point lead, but the superspeedways
loom
by Ed Hinton
Posted: Wed October 7, 1998
With two victories in the last three races, including Sunday's
crash-filled UAW-GM Quality 500 at Charlotte Motor Speedway, Mark
Martin has seized momentum from points leader Jeff Gordon in
their duel for the Winston Cup championship. But Martin fears his
late surge will come to a screeching halt in the next two races,
the Winston 500 at Talladega this Sunday and the Pepsi 400 at
Daytona on Oct. 17. Talladega and Daytona are the two longest
tracks on the circuit and the only ones at which NASCAR requires
carburetor restrictor plates to hold speeds below 200 mph.
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Gordon (24) finished fifth at Charlotte on Sunday after escaping
a multicar crash with little damage.
(Nelson Kepley/AP)
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Martin and his team owner, Jack Roush, know that their Taurus
will be at a disadvantage against Gordon's Monte Carlo on the two
superspeedways because Roush's restrictor-plate engine
development isn't as advanced as that of Gordon's Hendrick
Motorsports team. "We don't have much of a chance at Talladega
and Daytona," Roush said Sunday, after Martin had cut Gordon's
points lead by 25, down to 174, with six races remaining. "I'm
afraid this is going to throw ice water on our championship
hopes."
But the Roush-Martin team shouldn't give up yet. The
engine-stifling restrictor plates often force drivers to run in
huge packs because they have difficulty accelerating away from
one another. That causes crapshoots that can leave the hares
wrecked and the tortoises with the spoils.
Martin finished 38th in the Daytona 500 last February and 23rd in
the DieHard 500 at Talladega last April. Though Gordon finished
16th and fifth, respectively, in those races, he dominated at
Daytona before hitting some debris and damaging his front air dam
just past the halfway point.
Says Martin, "We did test at Daytona before the July race [the
Pepsi 400, which was postponed until October because of raging
summer wildfires in Florida], and we made significant progress
with our car. But since then we're not sure we've made any
progress. We should be in better shape than we were, but we're
certainly not where we want to be."
Issue date: October 12, 1998
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