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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Waltrip Tries To Go Full Circle

Mike Harris Associated Press

Despite his three Winston Cup titles and 84 career victories, Darrell Waltrip feels a little like an outsider these days.

The 48-year-old racer hasn’t reached victory lane since winning the rain-shortened Southern 500 in September 1992. He often has struggled just to keep the DarWal team, for which he has been owner-driver since 1991, competitive.

Last Sunday at Talladega Superspeedway, Waltrip brought the crowd of nearly 150,000 to its feet midway through the Winston Select 500 when he zoomed into the lead. He didn’t keep the front spot long, but Waltrip did run a solid race on NASCAR’s longest and fastest track, finishing fourth.

That’s the same place he finished a week earlier at Martinsville Speedway, the shortest and slowest track on the Winston Cup circuit. It was also his third top-five finish in four races after failing to come in better than seventh in the first five events this season.

Waltrip said he could have done even better at Talladega - maybe contended for the victory - had he received help from one of the other Chevrolet drivers.

“I haven’t run enough at the front with these guys lately for them to understand that I can run up front,” Waltrip said. “I saw that a little at Daytona (in February), and I saw it a lot (Sunday). Nobody wanted to run with me.”

Points watch

Nine races into the 31-race Winston Cup schedule, there’s a logjam at the top of the standings.

Not only are seven-time series champion Dale Earnhardt and 23-year-old wunderkind Jeff Gordon tied for the lead with 1,314 points, but the top 10 are separated by just 257.

Mark Martin, who won last Sunday’s Winston Select 500 at Talladega, is nine points behind in third place, followed by Daytona 500 winner Sterling Marlin, who trails the leaders by just 62. Rusty Wallace and Ted Musgrave, tied for fifth, are 126 points out of the lead.

The series continues today at Sears Point Raceway in Sonoma, Calif., with one of only two road races on the schedule.

What attrition?

If you looked only at the final standings from last Sunday’s Winston Cup race at Talladega, you might think that nothing much took place.

Thirty-nine of the 42 cars in the field were running at the end of 188 laps around Talladega’s 2.66-mile, high-banked oval. Of those, 36 were within four laps of Martin at the end.

The only cars that failed to finish the secondfastest Winston Select 500 were those belonging to Derrike Cope and John Andretti, who were involved in a crash on lap 65, and Ken Schrader, whose engine blew after 137 laps.

The attrition rate was so low that Marlin, who had an early engine problem and spent 43 laps behind the pit wall for repairs, wound up 39th despite getting back onto the track and finishing.