Wallace Hits High Gear

Rusty Wallace speaks faster than most people under normal circumstances. Get him excited, and the former Winston Cup champion picks up even more speed.

And Wallace is revved up these days, talking fast, leading the points race and delighted with the changes that have turned Penske Racing South - a team he partially owns - back into a championship contender. He hasn’t been this enthusiastic for years.

“I was probably as pumped up in ‘93,” Wallace said.

That was when Wallace and the Parrott boys - former crew chief Buddy and crewmen sons Todd and Brad - were working together and won 10 races.

“Everything was so right, so perfect, it almost seemed like it got easy,” Wallace said.

He won the Winston Cup title in 1989 and finished second to Dale Earnhardt in 1993.

The team chose to switch from Pontiac to Ford the next season, and the changeover hardly slowed it down. Wallace won eight races and finished third in the points.

But things have not gone as well since. He did win five races in 1996, but his finishing position in the points has gotten progressively worse - fifth, seventh and ninth.

“There are guys who’d love to have the seasons we’ve had in the last three or four years,” Wallace said. “But we’re not happy with them. We expect more from ourselves. We want to win races and championships.”

Last year was especially tough. He won only once, and had a variety of problems, including seven engine failures.

“We had some high rollers who wouldn’t listen when you’d tell them something was wrong,” Wallace said. “And we had some talented young guys who we were trying to bring along, but they wouldn’t get it.”

That led to a housecleaning.

“I like to say we got rid of all the bad blood,” Wallace said. “The engines are different, a lot of the shock-absorber technology is different, our engineers are different, and this teamwork thing is working.”

He was alluding to the deal uniting his team and Penske-Kranefuss, which Wallace’s principal owner, Roger Penske, bought into during the winter.

That makes Wallace and Penske-Kranefuss driver Jeremy Mayfield teammates.

“We hit a home run with Jeremy,” Wallace said. “The only better guy I could have as my teammate would be one of my brothers.

“We drive the same. If he gets out of a car and says it feels perfect, I can get in and drive it and it feels perfect to me.”

Communications lag

A lot was expected of rookie Kenny Irwin Jr. when he took over the No. 28 Robert Yates Ford at the beginning of this season.

After a slow start, Irwin showed flashes of brilliance when he led the most laps and finished a solid fifth in Monday’s rain-postponed race at Atlanta Motor Speedway.

“The biggest problem that I’m having is not communicating to the guys what the car is doing,” said Irwin, a former U.S. Auto Club short track star and last year’s NASCAR Craftsman Truck rookie of the year. “I know the car is loose or pushing or whatever, but so many of the drivers in Winston Cup can tell their crews how to fix it, and I’m not at that point yet.

“That’s why I think you’ve seen us struggle in a few races. I’ll tell them it’s pushing or getting loose or whatever. But the driver needs to be able to tell them, ‘Well, maybe we need a pound of right front air, or we need to go softer on the rear spring.’ And I just can’t do that yet.”

String snipped

When Sterling Marlin failed to qualify for the race at Atlanta, it ended a string of 332 consecutive Winston Cup starts for the two-time Daytona 500 winner.

Part of the problem was that rain washed out the scheduled second round of time trials and the entire 43-car field was set on the basis of the first qualifying session.

Also missing the cut was Spokane’s Chad Little, who had finished 10th the previous week in Las Vegas and was ninth in the points. After missing the Atlanta race, Little fell all the way to 25th. Marlin is 34th in the standings.

Moore wins pole in Miami

Greg Moore broke the 25-second barrier while turning a lap of 217.541 mph to take the pole position for the Grand Prix of Miami.

The 22-year-old Canadian’s lap was clocked at 24.856 seconds on the 1-1/2-mile oval at the Metro-Dade Homestead Motorsports Complex in Homestead, Fla. He’ll start today’s 225-mile race alongside Andre Ribeiro of Brazil, who made his debut with Marlboro Team Penske a good one with a lap of 214.665.