Lepage comfortable with McClure situation -- for now
By Stephen Thomas, CNNSI.com
March 24, 2001
4:20 PM EST (2120 GMT)
BRISTOL, Tenn. -- The best thing Kevin Lepage could have going for himself right now is that he's not Robby Gordon.
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The No. 4 Chevrolet last won a race in 1998.
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Lepage was hired earlier this week to replace the departed Gordon in the No. 4 car for Sunday's Food City 500.
Lepage's trial run with the Morgan-McClure Motorsports team is taking place at the temperamental Bristol Motor Speedway.
He qualified dismally, forcing his temporary bosses to take a provisional to gain entry to the race. All that would seem to indicate that Lepage's tenure with the Kodak team could be very brief indeed.
And yet, while team owner Larry McClure, the man responsible for Gordon's ouster, won't directly discuss the ingredients that made his short go-round with that driver so stormy.
McClure all but says that Lepage's immediate future with the team will be less dependent on tangible results than on his ability to prove himself.
"Certainly, I'm interested in a good race car driver," McClure says, "a driver that'll fit in with the race team and has the same goals that we have. I just want somebody to drive [the car] and give me everything they've got and not have a bunch of baggage with 'em."
It is yet to be determined whether or not Lepage has baggage of his own, but what he certainly has is a wealth of experience as a replacement driver.
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Kevin Lepage has 96 career Winston Cup starts -- 79 of them came for Jack Roush.
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"I replaced Mike Wallace in the No. 91 car, Ted Musgrave in the No. 16 car, and I replaced Rick Fuller in the No. 40 car in the Busch Series," says Gordon, a native of Shelburne, Vt. "It's not like it's anything new to me."
That's all well and good, of course, and while it means that Lepage understands the demands and difficulties of stepping into the breach, it doesn't really make his transition into the No. 4 any easier.
By race time Sunday, he will have had all of about four hours in the car -- Friday and Saturday's practice sessions and qualifying -- and he and crew chief David Ifft are fairly desperate to develop something of a rapport in no time.
"We didn't have days," Lepage says, "we had hours."
The apparent standard that Lepage has to meet and beat to continue at least another week -- "this could be a race-by-race deal," McClure says -- is not terribly demanding. In his five races with the team, Gordon's best finish was a 20th-place that he earned in Atlanta. And while improvement is hoped for, it's not demanded by the gun-shy Morgan-McClure team.
"This team needs to go forward," McClure says. "But I don't have any pressure on Kevin that he's got to go out there and finish in the top 10. I'm going to sit and watch and observe and see how he communicates and see how he races."
The Morgan-McClure team and Lepage are hopeful that their driver's experience at Bristol -- he started badly in 1998 and finished 10th -- will be enough to help them both overcome Sunday's start from the 42nd spot. Nevertheless, Lepage is also nothing if not cautious in what he expects from himself Sunday.
"If we've got a car that's capable of passing race cars, then we're going to pass race cars," Lepage says logically. "If we've got a car that's capable of running 30th, that's what it's going to be.
"We're just going to come in and try to make this race team proud to have me in the car," he continues. "Sunday night I'll figure out what I'm going to do, whether I'll be in the Kodak car at Texas or the Busch car. One way or another, I'm going to Texas."
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