Second A Lift For Stricklin, Team Owners

Leading a race and finishing second can do wonders for a driver and team who have been struggling all season just to reach the top 10.

That’s what happened to Hut Stricklin and the Stavola Brothers team last week at Darlington, where Jeff Gordon passed Stricklin late in the race and pulled away to the victory.

But Stricklin, 35 and in his eighth season as a Winston Cup regular, was delighted.

“We’ve been working real hard on trying to get our team turned around,” said Stricklin, whose runner-up finish was his first top 10 of the season and his best result since he ran second at Michigan in 1991 for Bobby Allison’s team.

It was also the first finish as high as second for the Stavolas since Sterling Marlin was second in the 1993 Pepsi 400 at Daytona.

“We came into the season basically forming an all-new team, even though the Stavola Brothers had been around for quite some time,” the driver of the No. 8 Circuit City Ford said. “We had a lot of people leave, then I brought a lot of new people in with me from the 26 team,” which Kenny Bernstein folded at the end of last season.

“We just basically formed a brand-new team. We would like to be a lot higher in the Winston Cup standings, but we’re not. But we feel real good about the rest of the year because we feel like we’re coming up on some race tracks that should be real good for us and that we should do real well at.”

Stricklin said he had mixed emotions about finishing second.

“I want to win. I’m so hungry for a win it’s unbelievable,” he said. “I’m disappointed that we didn’t win. But, on the other hand, I’ve got to look at our program and where we’ve been all year and say, ‘Well, maybe second is not so bad after all.”’

Sweeping up

Gordon became only the second driver ever to win three straight races at Darlington Raceway, joining Dale Earnhardt. Now, The Kid has a chance to make some more history this weekend at Richmond International Raceway.

The 25-year-old defending series champion could become only the second driver to sweep both Richmond races in a season since the track was reconfigured to its current .750-mile, D-shaped oval in 1989.

That victory at Richmond in the spring was a key one for Gordon, who now leads the stock car series with seven victories this season.

At the time, Gordon had started the season with finishes of 42nd and 40th and was 43rd in the standings, trailing leader then-leader Dale Jarrett by 270 points.

The Richmond win was the first of six straight top-three finishes, including three wins, that moved Gordon solidly back into the championship race. Going into Saturday night’s race, he is second, trailing Terry Labonte by 24 points.

“We found out this year that you just never give up,” Gordon said.

“Richmond is one of the best tracks we run on all year because it does have the short track characteristics, but it also has more of an intermediate speed to it.”

Horse race

The Manufacturer’s Championship battle in the Winston Cup series has turned into a real horse race, with Chevrolet going into Richmond leading Ford by just one point, 172-171, with eight races remaining.

Ford had taken the lead with the victory by Rusty Wallace two weeks ago at Bristol, Tenn.

The odds are with Chevy, which is the defending champion and has won 11 of the last 13 titles and 19 of 24 overall.

But Ford has been on a roll, winning six of the last eight races, with only Gordon able to break through for Chevrolet. He has won twice during that stretch.

New kid

Speaking of Gordons, there is also a growing anticipation of the arrival next season of Robby Gordon, a 26-year-old Indy-car star who will replace Kyle Petty in the cars fielded by Felix Sabates.

The older Gordon, no relation to Jeff, is known for his aggressive style and irreverence for authority.

Michael Kranefuss, co-owner of the Kranefuss-Haas Racing team in Winston Cup, helped nurture Robby Gordon’s career in his previous role as director of Ford’s motorsports program.

“He’ll step on some toes,” Kranefuss said. “He’ll make some people mad. But that’s Robby.”

Winless quintet

With only eight races remaining this season, five drivers who won in 1995 have yet to reach victory lane in 1996.

Surprisingly, a member of that group is Mark Martin, who has 11 top-five finishes.

“It’s hard to believe we haven’t won yet this year because we’ve been so close so many times,” Martin said. “But the cars have been great, the team is working together real well and we just have to believe that the wins are going to come.”

The other 1995 winners who have yet to take a checkered flag this season include Ricky Rudd, riding a string of 13 consecutive seasons with at least one win; Kyle Petty; Bobby Labonte and Ward Burton.