Sofa Sideline – Darlington – Great Old Track

Darlington – the oldest track on the
circuit and infamous for being hard on equipment and tires, but its one of those
racetracks where you have to drive to survive, let alone win. Ward Burton had a
great car and drove a great race. It was good to see the Bill Davis team get it
"all together" and produce a great run. (Let’s see some more!) With
less than ten laps to go in the race, Burton took the lead from Bobby Labonte
just as the caution flag was coming out.

Two separate accidents caused the red flag
to be thrown, and the cars stopped on the race trace for over 8 minutes as the
clean up crews worked on the track. The first incident occurred when Jimmy
Spencer attempted to drive under Sterling Marlin, resulting in Spencer spinning
out and hitting the front stretch wall. At the same time Ron Hornaday, Joe
Nemechek, Terry Labonte and Mike Wallace got tangled up between turns three and
four.

This set the stage for a five lap
showdown. With two laps to go Burton pulled away from Labonte, as Jeremy
Mayfield running third, hit the turn four wall and wound up finishing 12th. Then
right behind that, Dave Blaney drove under sixth place Dale Earnhardt Jr.
causing the number 8 to hit the wall and Dale Jr. wound up in the 14th position.
Earnhardt Jr. had a tough day to say the least after receiving a warning from
NASCAR resulting from incidents with Stacy Compton and Ron Hornaday earlier in
the race. Let’s see Jeff Gordon passed Labonte and bounced off the wall with the
white flag and caution coming out at the same time; Bobby said he thought he was
going to wreck. Tony Stewart managed to drive through all that was going on to
finish in fourth place. What a mess – too confusing for me. (I can’t even fix
this paragraph!)

I was always one of those fans that
thought it was good to have a finish under green. You always feel somewhat
cheated if it ends under yellow. But, you can certainly see why everyone was
complaining at the end of that one. I really like the racing at Darlington, but
hated seeing all those cars get messed up at the end. I guess "that’s
racin’."

Rounding out the top ten were; Bill
Elliott 5th, Ricky Rudd 6th, Kevin Harvick 7th, Jerry Nadeau 8th, Kenny Schrader
in 9th place and Terry Labonte finishing 10th.

Other notes:

After what happened to Steve Park during
the Busch race on Saturday, we just want to breathe a big sigh of relief. Glad
to hear that the injuries to Steve were not life threatening, and we wish him
the best and a speedy recovery. That was scary, and when I saw what happened,
wondered if something happened to the steering wheel. I guess that it’s not out
of the realm, as Benny Parsons gave a little demo as to that possibility during
the race on Sunday. Regardless it was just odd what happened. Kenny Wallace did
a commendable job filling in for Steve, until something happened to the car. It
was a good boost for Kenny, and it showed that he has the capabilities given the
right equipment.

Congratulations to Jeff Burton for the win
at the Southern 200 on Saturday. Word has it there will be several fines set
down this week after the many altercations or "incidents" that
happened during the Busch series race. Apparently there was an after race
altercation between Kevin Harvick and Chad Little, as well as Kevin Grubb’s
complaint about Rich Bickle just "dumping" him in the wall after a
supposed earlier incident between the two. And then there was Scott Wimmer
running into and onto Greg Biffle after the race was over causing major damage
to both cars. Wimmer later apologized to Biffle and there appeared to be no hard
feelings, but apparently Wimmer had not sufficiently slowed his car after the
race.

Strange weekend – was there a full moon?

That’s it.

Next weekend – night racing at Richmond.
Can’t wait!