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We're very close Texas is where our team will put it all together
Posted: Monday March 27, 2000 03:55 PM
We were pretty disappointed and we were pretty happy at the same time Sunday at Bristol. A fourth-place finish in NASCAR Winston Cup racing these days isn't anything to sneeze at, but we really, truly felt we had the best car on the race track all day long. Once we worked our way to the front, we were great. All we had to do was work the lapped traffic and, most of the time, pull away from the guys behind us. The car was that good. The only time anybody made up any time on us is once when we got a little loose, and a couple of times when I let up some to take care of the car. Right there at the end, everybody shot down pit road with 60 laps to go. We got four tires, while several teams got two tires. Our thinking was the four tires would take care of us in the final 60 laps. The bottom line was that there were another couple of cautions, one pretty long one, in the final 60, and that took away some of our four-tire advantage. We were good, though, we were really good. If you pay close attention, the Mobil 1 Taurus has been pretty stout the past several weeks. It isn't always showing in the finishes, but we're seeing it on the track. If our luck changes a little, we're going to be really tough the rest of the way. At Las Vegas a few weeks ago, we worked our way from the back to sixth, but the rain kept us from running a full race - one we think we could have been at least a top five. At Atlanta the next week, we went from the back to the top five in nothing flat, then had a transmission problem that cost us 15 laps - even though we were as fast as anybody on the race track before and after the problem. We were great at Darlington, but somebody slammed us from behind in a wreck I thought we had missed early in the race, and it cost us. Finally just about everything came together at Bristol. We want to keep that going at Texas, which has been a really good track for the Mobil 1 team, and has been really good for me. I don't know there is any one reason any driver does really well at particular tracks. Speedways like Texas and Darlington (S.C.) and Pocono (Pa.) just seem to work for me and they work for this race team. We feel like we can run well everywhere, and we have run pretty well just about everywhere. Part of it is the frame of mind you are in, but it goes further than the driver. To be a particularly good race track for a driver, it has to be a good race track for the whole race team. That package has come together in the three races we've had at Texas so far. You have to have a lot of power from the engine. You have to have a really good chassis. And you have to have a really good feel in getting the car around the place. We've won half the (Winston Cup) poles in Texas history, and we'd really like to take a shot at raising that number to 67 percent. This Mobil 1 team is certainly capable of that just about anywhere but especially at Texas.
Texas definitely has a fast way around the place. I'd love to be able to sit here and tell you exactly where it is but, for one thing, I don't know I'd want to pass the word to anybody else and, two, it's almost impossible to describe. The line around any race track a lot of times is like when you get in your passenger car and go someplace where you've gone a hundred times before. If somebody asked you how to get there, you couldn't tell them. You don't know the names of some of the roads and you don't really remember how far it is from this left turn to that right turn. You can drive there yourself almost blindfolded but you can't tell them - all you can do is show them. It's the same way figuring the line around a race track. I know where it is and I know how to find it. To be able to tell anybody else, I'd have to show them. You just can't put it into words. There is definitely a line there. It changed some but not a bunch when they changed the race track. You have to feel around for it but, once you get it, you know you have it. There is a definite, distinct feeling to the right line around Texas. If you are going to qualify well there, you have to be able to feel that line. Luck has been a pretty big factor for a whole lot of teams at Texas and, to tell you the truth, I don't think that's going to change much for this race either. The place is so fast and you have so many cars running so close together that if anything does happen, you have really got to work hard to miss it. It's easy to get caught up in other people's mistakes at Texas -- really easy. We feel pretty good about the Mobil 1 team's chances at Texas this time too. We've proven ourselves there, all we need to do now is close the deal. We feel we're going to be good because we've been good. With a little good luck, maybe we can park this Mobil 1 Taurus in victory lane. Jeremy Mayfield is in his third season in driving the Mobil 1 Ford Taurus on the Winston Cup circuit. His column appears weekly on CNNSI.com.
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