| |
 Inside Motor Sports
Posted: Tuesday July 06, 1999 02:45 PM Joyner-Kersee Jumps In | Spotlight: Alex Zanardi At the Pepsi 400, Dale Jarrett kept rolling toward the Winston Cup title By Ed Hinton
Only halfway through the season, Dale Jarrett is looking more and more like a lock to take the Winston Cup. By winning last Saturday night's Pepsi 400 at Daytona International Speedway, Jarrett increased his Cup lead over Bobby Labonte, who finished fifth, to 177 points. Jarrett's Ford Taurus is running so strong that it would take a series of flukes for him to lose the championship.
"We've got a lot of confidence," Jarrett says of himself and his Todd Parrott-led crew. They showed it under fire on Saturday when Parrott ordered only a four-second splash of fuel and no tire change on Jarrett's final pit stop, with 17 laps remaining on the 2 1/2-mile track. As a result Jarrett went back out with the lead, and he had just enough gas to finish. After taking the checkered flag, he ran out of fuel on the backstretch. Because of a crash, the final three laps were run under caution, so Dale Earnhardt motored helplessly behind the pace car and Jarrett. Earnhardt believes he could have muscled his Chevrolet Monte Carlo into the lead had the race finished under green, but Jarrett disagreed, noting that in the laps before the final caution, "I could see behind me that Earnhardt wasn't getting much of a push [aerodynamically] from anybody. I was able to keep him where I needed to keep him." In each of the past six seasons, the Winston Cup points leader at the halfway point has gone on to win the title. The throngs of Gordon boo-birds who are sick of seeing him dominate the series can rest assured that a new champion will be crowned in '99. None of the current top four in the standings -- Jarrett, Labonte, Mark Martin and Jeff Burton -- have won the Winston Cup. Gordon is fifth, a whopping 394 points behind Jarrett, and a driver hasn't come from that far back at the halfway point to win the title since Richard Petty in 1972.
Safety Concerns: If the track magnate who hosts five of the Indy Racing League's 11 events gets his way, Indy cars could be sporting fenders as early as next year. If fenders aren't added, Speedway Motorsports Inc. chairman Bruton Smith won't rule out discontinuing IRL races on his tracks near Atlanta, Charlotte, Fort Worth (two events) and Las Vegas. "I don't want to go there -- yet," Smith said last week when asked if he would continue to stage IRL races with open-wheel cars. Smith says his primary concern is safety. It was at his Lowe's Motor Speedway, near Charlotte, that three spectators were killed and eight others injured by a flying tire and other debris during an IRL race on May 1. At all six of Smith's tracks, NASCAR racing is the main source of revenue. Smith has seen how stock cars' fenders help contain wheels and tires that break off in crashes. However, racing-safety experts speaking on the condition of anonymity told SI that putting fenders on Indy cars could create an even greater danger: airborne cars. The designs developed in a project headed by Smith's right-hand man, Lowe's Motor Speedway president H.A. Wheeler, are similar to those of Le Mans-prototype sports cars. On June 12 at Le Mans, a Mercedes-Benz sports car kited about 60 feet into the air and flipped five times. Last October at Road Atlanta, a Porsche prototype did a high-flying backflip. The experts said that whenever aerodynamic downforce becomes greater on the rear of such a car than on the front, kiting is possible. Both accidents occurred on road courses, neither near a grandstand. Because IRL races are run on oval tracks, with grandstands in close proximity, kiting could be disastrous. Both the IRL and rival CART have implemented tethering systems to keep broken-off wheels attached to cars. But Smith says he is still worried that the Charlotte crash and a similar accident at a CART race 10 months earlier at Michigan Speedway, in which three spectators were killed and six more were injured, have put open-wheel racing "in danger. And I think that endangers all motor racing." He has sent copies of an Indy car design with fenders to IRL founder Tony George and to the organization's executive director, Leo Mehl. At a time when the IRL is trying to reduce speeds by lowering maximum engine rpm, Mehl, formerly Goodyear's top racing-tire engineer, says he is concerned that fenders "would make a car go faster." Exposed tires "create a lot of drag," he explains. "When you cover them up, you don't know how many miles per hour you're going to pick up, but you'd pick up a lot." Fenders would also allow IRL cars to race closer together. Two open-wheel cars that make contact run the risk that one spinning tire will "climb" another, causing the cars to flip. Relatively safe fender-banging is one reason that NASCAR has become vastly more popular than Indy car racing. But driver Tony Stewart, the 1997 IRL champion, who has switched to NASCAR, fears that fenders would give some IRL drivers a false sense of security. "If you put fenders on IRL cars, they're going to become absolute weapons," says Stewart. "There are guys who don't use their heads and don't use their mirrors. Fenders would give them a license to be more dangerous than they already are."
Joyner-Kersee Jumps In: Jackie Joyner-Kersee never had much difficulty attracting sponsors during her career in track and field. Last week, however, the three-time Olympic gold medalist took on the money-raising challenge of her life. During the next several months Joyner-Kersee needs to secure about $30 million in commitments to fund the NASCAR Winston Cup team she is forming with her husband and former coach, Bob Kersee. Although African-American-owned teams have been getting open-door treatment from NASCAR as it seeks to diversify, corporate America hasn't responded with the funding necessary to break into the elite Winston Cup series. Former NBA star Brad Daugherty has been operating a NASCAR Craftsman Truck series team since 1995, and NBA Hall of Famer Julius Erving and former NFL running back Joe Washington have teamed up to field Busch cars since '97. They have adequate sponsorship for the lesser series in which they compete, but no black owner in recent times has secured Winston Cup-class funding. Joyner-Kersee Racing plans to go straight into Winston Cup next season, forming the first black-owned team in NASCAR's top series since the late Wendell Scott retired in 1973. To be competitive, Cup teams require about $10 million a year -- $8 million from a primary sponsor and another $2 million from secondary ones -- in three-year contracts. "Whatever entities I have to bring together to get the job done, I'm willing to do that," Joyner-Kersee says. Kersee, who will manage the team, has talked with the marketing staffs of the other black-owned teams and says he doesn't believe racism has been an obstacle to sponsorship. No black driver has competed regularly in Winston Cup since Scott drove his own cars. The Daugherty and Washington-Erving teams employ white drivers because there is a dearth of black prospects. Kersee says he's looking for the best available driver, period. "We're not a black team," says the 45-year-old Kersee, who has been an ardent NASCAR fan since childhood. "We're going to be a NASCAR team, and we're going to get the best people possible."
Issue date: July 12, 1999
| |||||||||||||||||
Copyright © 1999 CNN/SI. A Time Warner Company. Terms under which this service is provided to you.
| |||||||||||||||||
