|
 |   |
|
EVENTS Fantasy Central Inside Game Video Plus Statitudes Your Turn Message Boards Email Newsletters Golf Guide Cities 
CNNSI.com GROUP
COMMERCE
|  |
All pistons are firing Recent runs have us wishing season would continue
This Mobil 1 Taurus bunch might be the only team in NASCAR Winston Cup racing not happy to see the end of the season this week in Atlanta. We feel like we’re really on a roll right now. We’re coming off a second-place finish Sunday at Homestead -- our third second-place finish in the last five races. When you look at that, and you look at how well we’ve been running, how could we be excited about time off. Man, let’s start Daytona now! We’re starting to put everything together and it’s showing on the race track. We were the second-best car at Homestead. Tony Stewart won the race and they had the best car. We were arguably the best car at Phoenix, where we finished second to Jeff Burton. We were definitely the best car at Rockingham but we had a problem with the alternator and lost the battery late in the race. Without that, I honestly feel we would have won the race. We were good at Talladega, a lot better than we got the chance to show, but we broke a valve spring in the engine and never got to find out what we had for them. And at Charlotte, we were the second-best car there and we finished second. So you look back over the past five races, and we should have won two and finished second twice. We’re heading the right way and we’re excited about the future. I wouldn’t go as far as to say we’re the favorites to win the championship in 2001 but I would say we are somebody you had better figure will be in the hunt for it. Yes, I will be back in the Mobil 1 Taurus in 2001. I have a contract that says I will be back for at least the next two years and my plans are to stay with Roger Penske for a long, long time. The rumors kind of grew on us all a lot quicker than we really realized and they got kind of out of hand. But I’ve spent the last few weeks telling everybody my plans are for a red Pegasus and a big No. 12 on the side of my car. We’ve had a lot of distractions this year and, without those next season, I think we’re going to be in great shape to do some great things. There is a reason for just about everything you do in this sport; at least, there should be a reason for everything you do in this sport. You have to know your goals and you have to know what you need to do going into any race. It’s important not to get off that track, whether it’s the last race of the season or the first race of the season. Atlanta is the last race of the season but the way a lot of us on this Mobil 1 team are looking at it, it is also the first race of next season. It is our last shot at one more pole and our last shot at one more win for this season but this race can be pretty important as far as next year is concerned too Our main goal is to win the race. Nothing really surprising about that. But we also want to make sure we’re on track for everything we want to do next season. Yeah, there is plenty of time for work in the shop and for some testing and all of that kind of stuff before we get to Daytona next year, but this is a pretty solid first step in that direction. We have 500 miles of racing left this year, and we have a lot of laps of practice time on Friday and Saturday this week. We have to take advantage of all of that. We’re pretty excited right now. We’ve been running pretty good all year, but it’s just started showing up again in the finishes the past few weeks. A lot of good things happened to us this year but enough bad things happened that they really cut into the good things. Once we started overcoming the bad things, a lot more good things happened. You look back at this season, look back at just the past few races, and you see what I mean. We finished second at Homestead but only after a caution came out at a bad time for us and put us a lap down. We were able to overcome the bad thing that happened. At Rockingham, we were the best car out there and were the class of the field. We were going to win the race. But we had an alternator problem that killed the battery, and we didn’t win a race we definitely should have won. Once we get to the point that we’re able to overcome the bad things regularly -- because bad luck happens to every race team from time to time -- then we’re going to be somebody to reckon with for the championship. Right now, we’re somebody to reckon with week to week. We want to be in position next year to be somebody to reckon with for that head table in New York. We look back on this year and it was definitely a strange one. Every time something really good happened, it seemed like something really bad happened right behind it. I guess the nice part about that is every time something really bad happened, it seemed like something really good came with it. We won some races and we won some poles. That consistency is the main thing we need to work on for next year. We fell out of a string of races there in the late summer but, keep in mind, we were leading or running near the front in almost all of those races. That gives us a pretty good feeling about next year. But since they don’t give you as many points for almost being there, we have to work hard on finishing what we started. And we have to think hard about points racing. This is a points-racing deal. Every track pays money depending on where you finish, and there’s usually a pretty nice trophy that goes to the winner. You run for pride, you run to show what you can do, you run as a team for each other. But you are out here for points. That’s everything, plain and simple. There are some teams that don’t seem to really start thinking about points until towards the end of the season. We haven’t been like that at all, and I think that has made a difference for us in the past, a positive difference. You have to be as worried about points in March as you are in November. But every year you’ll see guys working as hard as they can to fix a tore up car in a race like the second Rockingham or second Atlanta, where they would have packed it up and driven home in the first Rockingham or first Atlanta race. Those points are just as important in March as they are in November. That’s one of the reasons you see guys like Bobby Labonte sitting there on top of the pile -- they raced for points in the Daytona 500. That’s the kind of attitude you have to have. In 1998 we missed finishing in the top 10 by a lousy 36 points. All winter long we were thinking about six (finishing) positions. Over a whole season, if we had picked up one position in one of about every five races, we would have been in the top 10, on stage at the Waldorf at the banquet, the whole deal. Looking back, there weren’t any instances where we just gave up. In fact, I remember cutting a tire at Texas that year after running away with the race and wrecking the car, but everybody working like the dickens to get us back on track. But in your mind you can go back and think, ‘If we’d done this or if we tried that. . . ‘ That sort of thing. Making good decisions and having good judgment is just a key part of this sport. It’s got to be there, not just from the driver but from the crew chief, the crew guys, the owners, everybody. You can’t give up. You can’t have a real disappointment and just call it a day. You have to scrap and fight and work hard to get anything and everything you can. Man, one position can be the difference at the end of the year. Passing somebody to pick it up. . . beating somebody out of the pits to pick it up. . . just working to fix a problem and going back out to run to pick it up. It doesn’t matter how you get it, but you have to do everything you can to get it. You look at the teams that have won championships, whether it was recently or years ago. Look at what Darrell (Waltrip) and some of those teams were like. Look at what Bobby (Labonte) and his team has. They are really great race teams, no doubt. But they did two things better than anybody else. One, they were able to take advantage of really good cars. And two, they never gave up and they kept fighting on their bad days too. And three, they started racing for points during testing at Daytona. They didn’t wait until the end of the season. My career has been spent scrapping to get to the front, just like Peter’s (Sospenzo, crew chief) and so many of the guys on this Mobil 1 Taurus team. Every race is important, whether it’s the first race of the season or the last race of the season. Every lap is important. We have some pretty high goals, you know. This last race of 2000 is our first shot at 2001. Jeremy Mayfield has won two races this season while driving the No. 12 Penske Racing Ford. His diary appears weekly on CNNSI.com.
| ||||||||||||||||||||
