Gm Teams Upset By ‘Ford Advantage’

Teams fielding General Motors cars were angry last week when NASCAR gave Ford an eighth-inch more on its front air dam. Now, after Sunday’s Primestar 500 at Atlanta Motor Speedway, the GM teams are downright irate. , Race winner Dale Jarrett led a Thunderbird onslaught that saw Fords take five of the top six positions. The T-Birds led all but 43 of the 328 laps - with pole-winner Robby Gordon out front for 42 laps early in the race and defending series champion Terry Labonte on top for one lap, both in Chevys.

“Those (Ford) guys are capitalizing on what they’ve been given,” said Chevy driver Darrell Waltrip. “They will until the tables are turned. My car is so aerodynamically out of whack right now that’s it’s impossible to race.

“You get around a group of cars and I hit the wall one time because the cars in front of me took all the air off. It raised my front end off the ground and I hit the wall.

“That’s the way the Chevrolets are right now,” the three-time Winston Cup champion said. “We’ve got no front downforce. They (NASCAR) keep giving it to (Ford). It’s so unfair. They lead all the laps, and it’s their own fault they don’t win all the races.”

Waltrip was referring to the fact that Jeff Gordon won the first two races of the season in a Monte Carlo before Rusty Wallace put Ford in the winner’s circle at Richmond.

Richard Childress, owner of the Chevrolets driven by Dale Earnhardt and Mike Skinner, said, “Let the record speak for itself. Look at the laps led. That’s all you’ve got to do. They’re going to have to do a major overhaul, I think, on the rules to get the cars back competitive.”

The Ford teams, of course, do not agree.

“As it always is, it’s back and forth (between makes),” Jarrett said. “We’re going to hear it. They are going to be complaining because we got an eighth of an inch on the air dam, but it really doesn’t do much good because you can’t run the air dam much lower than 4 inches anyway or it will drag off. It’s really a moot point.

“Right now, we just have good race cars. We worked hard on them. I’m sure something is going to change, but we’ll just race with what we’ve got and see what they get.”

Things may indeed change after NASCAR has time to evaluate the data it got earlier this week from wind-tunnel testing one Ford, one Chevy and one Pontiac Grand Prix.

It’s a start

Earnhardt is feeling a little better about things now that he has a top-10 finish under his belt in 1997.

After getting off to the worst start of his career, the seven-time Winston Cup champion built on an early charge that carried him from 26th to third in last Sunday’s race at Atlanta Motor Speedway and went on to finish eighth.

That isn’t the type of finish that Earnhardt is generally proud of, but he and the rest of the Richard Childress Racing team are hoping it will be something of a jump start.

“We should have gone to the front Sunday, but you can’t go to the front when the car’s pushing like it was,” Earnhardt said. “You can’t make it do what you need it to do.

“But at least we gained some on the leaders. We just need to keep making gains and we’ll be OK.”

Earnhardt moved from 24th to 16th in the standings and now trails Dale Jarrett by 199 points after falling 232 behind Jeff Gordon, the previous leader.

Provisionally speaking

Several Winston Cup teams are breathing easier now that the first four races of the season are over.

At each race, four provisional starters - from among the cars that fail to qualify - are added to the rear of the field on the basis of their standing in the top-40 car-owner points.

Until the fifth race of the season, those provisionals are selected using the previous year’s top-40.

Entries that had no backup but now have points going into next week’s race at Darlington, S.C., include Kyle Petty in 13th place, rookie Mike Skinner in 25th, rookie David Green in 38th and Derrike Cope in 40th.

“We made the first four races and now we’re solidly in the points,” Petty said. “I’d have to say we’re really pretty happy with our start.”

Listening in

NASCAR tries to keep its teams from getting too technologically advanced, but that doesn’t keep stock car fans from taking advantage of available technology.

There were already numerous spectators at the Winston Cup tracks using scanners - either bought or rented - to listen in on the teams’ communications.

Now, thanks to a company called SportsCom, Inc., you can also listen from home.

FanScan Access Cards, similar to prepaid calling cards, will be available beginning April 2. Each card will have 20 units of time and a PIN number.

To use it, people will dial an 800 number, enter their PIN and listen to a scanner broadcast of race communications just as if they were at the track.

Stat of the week

Terry Labonte, who was ninth at Atlanta, is the only driver to finish in the top 10 in all four races this season.

In fact, the two-time series champion, is riding a string of 10 consecutive top-10 finishes dating to the race at Martinsville, Va., last September.