Pain Can’t Spoil Schrader’s Effort

The official clock said Ken Schrader came up 1.005 seconds short of winning the Daytona 500. Car owner Andy Petree measured his driver’s performance by a different standard.

“He and I are real close,” Petree said as he gulped hard, shook his head and rubbed his eyes. “This is probably going to make us closer.”

Schrader, bidding for his first Winston Cup victory since June 1991, drove the entire 500-mile distance Sunday, less than three days after fracturing his sternum in a crash.

Outfitted with a flak jacket, a hard plastic shell on top of it and an electric impulse kit to help control the pain, Schrader drove his Chevrolet Monte Carlo to a fourth-place showing, matching his best finish since 1996.

After the race, while Dale Earnhardt was celebrating in Victory Lane several hundred yards away, Schrader pulled into the garage area. His celebration consisted of mustering enough strength to crawl gingerly out of the car.

“I really didn’t think he should be driving the car at all,” Petree said. “To make that charge and a run like that, I can’t put into words what it means to me.”

Schrader was injured Thursday when he slammed head-first into a concrete retaining wall during the Twin 125s.

Little moves up

The seventh-place finish for Spokane’s Chad Little is his best in his 124-race Winston Cup career, and just his fourth in the top 10.

Little’s previous best finishes were an 8th on the short track at Bristol, Tenn., in 1997 and an 8th on Talladega, a super speedway, in 1992.

Just starting at Daytona was a huge improvement for Little compared to 1997, when he failed to qualify for NASCAR’s biggest race.

Nice guy second

Finishing second to Dale Earnhardt in the Daytona 500 is not the worst thing in the world, noted Bobby Labonte. As long as he’s second.

“I had a feeling all winter he was going to win it,” Labonte said. “I should have gone out and bet on him.”

Not that it wouldn’t have been nice to beat him.

“I guess (Jeff) Gordon had a problem that kind of slowed him down a little bit. We kept shooting through cars there at the end. It was super fast,” Labonte said. “I got to Earnhardt and he was running about the same speed.

“I’ve got to congratulate him. When he didn’t win last year at Atlanta, I figured he was going to win the race he hasn’t won all his life. This was the one.”

That’s racin’

Geoff Bodine was naturally disappointed when Dale Jarrett got into the side of his Ford on pit road on lap 108, he said, but he wasn’t mad.

The incident knocked both cars well back.

“I was coming in and he was trying to get out of the crowd that had just come in I think, I don’t know that, but he swerved and just pulled right into the side of me. He didn’t do it on purpose, obviously. It’s just a mistake, and those things happen a lot on pit road.

“We’re pretty disappointed about it, but that’s racin’.”

Say, Daytona, oh, 400?

Larry McReynolds, crew chief on Earnhardt’s Chevrolet, was having palpitations late in the race, even with his driver out front.

After the last round of green-flag pit stops, McReynolds and his crew got Earnhardt out first, but he knew Earnhardt’s history of spectacular failures.

“It’s all out of our hands now,” McReynolds told CBS-TV. “I feel like I’ve got the best that’s ever drove at Daytona, but he’s got 15 cars behind him.

“Durn, I wish they’d shorten this race.”