Park believes all pieces in place for success

WATKINS GLEN, N.Y. -- With all the drama, misfortune and frustration that's dogged the No. 1 Pennzoil team during the past year, Steve Park doesn't look to movie scripts or novel outlines for comparisons.

He's more subtle than that. He flips open a cookbook.

"It's like having all the ingredients, having a bad chef and not making it work," said Park of his 2002 struggles. "And then taking the same ingredients, having a good chef and baking a great cake. We have the ingredients to win, we just need to mold them together and do that."

Last week's efforts were edible. Park finished seventh at the Brickyard 400. It was his first top 10 this season, and his Dale Earnhardt, Inc., bosses -- director of motorsports Steve Hmiel and vice president Ty Norris -- see it as the opening to a series of momentum-building scenes.

"I think we're headed to a lot of good," Hmiel said.

"I'd say we absolutely have turned the corner," added Norris.

	Steve Park won the Watkins Glen race in 2000. Credit: Autostock

None too soon, according to all involved. Park starts 36th in Sunday's Sirius Satellite Radio at The Glen, but the road course of Watkins Glen International is the site of his first Winston Cup win (in 2000), and that's another positive morsel for a team ranked 39th in the current points standings with nine finishes of 30th or worse.

"We're not laying down or rolling over," Park said. "We're just going forward and trying to find and know what we need to make the team better."

After four months of mostly misery, the No. 1 team thought it had turned a corner two weeks ago at Pocono. The week prior to the race, a clear-the-air team meeting that included the No. 1's track and shop crews, Norris, Hmiel, Park, crew chief Paul Andrews, DEI head engineer Dave Charpentier, and engine builder Richie Gilmore, had set the stage for resolution. It wasn't an uncomfortable or unpleasant episode, according to Norris, but it didn't spare feelings or egos, either.

Working off that background, Park found himself fourth-fastest in Saturday's final Pocono practice. He started 14th, but contact with Rusty Wallace sent him barrel-rolling halfway through the first lap, a wreck that ended with a frightening slam against a guardrail. Although he emerged unhurt, albeit with an eventual 43rd-place finish, he said the weekend's positives were more significant than the negatives.

"And everyone's got a little bit of a hop in their step now," Park said. "I think the motivation is probably something we haven't seen all year long because we've had such a bad year."

"That's what was so disappointing about Pocono," Hmiel said. "The first thing was, 'Oh my God, we've hurt Steve again.' But then when he got out, it was like, 'Darn, we had a really good car.' The racer in me came back out."

Both Hmiel and Norris say much of what's happened this season on the track isn't Park's fault, including the spectacular Pocono wreck. A flat tire was to blame for the 32nd at Loudon. Wrecks also undid Park at Richmond and the Pepsi 400 at Daytona.

Yet, there have been no defections; only two minor crew changes since last season. Park and Andrews say they have a solid relationship, and Hmiel has spent much of his past seven weeks helping the No. 1 team much as he did Michael Waltrip's team before the No. 15 hit on a winning combination.

"I can just come in and shoot from the hip and they'll take about 60 percent of it and go with it," Hmiel said. "And if one thing works, that's great."

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"That's the main thing," said Park. "Nobody has given up on the process of making the cars better and making them run the types of setups that we need to run to be competitive."

Most of Park's trouble dates back to last August, when he sat 10th in the Cup standings as the series headed for Darlington's traditional Labor Day weekend. There, a violent Busch series crash ended his season, and the effects of a brain bruise kept him out until the fifth race this season -- coincidently, the spring event at Darlington.

Reclaiming his seat turned out to be the easiest part of the comeback.

Gone, in his absence, was the effectiveness of everything the No. 1 team had mastered before: setups, tire changes and chemistry.

Park, Andrews and Charpentier had seemed flawless in their strategy and their communication.

"Every time they rolled a car off the truck, they ran fast, they qualified fast, they raced fast," Hmiel said. "They almost finished each other's sentences."

But once Park returned this season, the team had trouble just finishing races.

"It's usually the little things when they're put together right that makes things successful," Andrews said. "That's what we had before Steve got hurt, is all the little things were right, and all the big things were right, too."

Rather than abandon months of notes and experience, the team muddled through old setups and combinations to make sure they were obsolete. Then they had to figure out what did work and how to apply it to current situations. The price was all those ugly finishes. And although he's confident he didn't rush his comeback, Park has heard the sometimes-not-so-subtle criticism that he's still not fully recovered and should retire.

"Throw in the rumors of the team being for sale and me leaving the team, it just adds to the tension among the team," he said. "And it's something that I feel just hurts the whole organization."

Re-acclimating to both the mental and physical racing grooves hasn't been easy, either.

"Some of that is going to be hard to regain after the injury he's had," said Hmiel. "He's definitely better than he was 30, 60, 90 days ago. And we think in 30 days, he'll be right back where he was."

He may also have a new contract, or he could be job-hunting. Norris said the initial June 15th deadline on Park's contract situation arrived too soon. So did other internal deadlines that followed.

"Because we really believe that this is the team that can be put back together," Norris said. "So that's the reason for the hesitation. You almost don't want to make a decision until it's positive and that's what we're trying to do right now."

The decision to re-sign Park or bid him goodbye will happen before the end of the season. Good finishes, chemistry and obvious progress are the only caveats. Norris said he's treating the stretch of races from the Brickyard to the end of the season as Park's yardstick. Everything before that won't count.

"I think we're trying to do all the right things to make it work because Steve's been a big part of our company and Paul Andrews is the foundation of that No. 1 team," Norris said. "And we're going to try to keep all that together if we can."

"I want to be back," Park said. "I just feel strongly about this team and I just feel like we can win. We have a great group of people and we know how to win. We've won in the past so we just need some direction and motivation to do that."