Sprague won't make Winston Cup start at LMS

NAZARETH, Pa. -- NASCAR Busch Series driver Jack Sprague had more success dealing with the indefinite delay of his NASCAR Winston Cup debut with the new Haas CNC Racing Chevrolet team than he did losing the Busch Series point lead Sunday.

	Jack Sprague

The new Cup team, owned by Gene Haas, that was announced a month ago at Talladega Superspeedway, entered a No. 60 Haas Automation Chevrolet for Sprague in the May 26 Coca-Cola Racing Family 600 at Lowe's Motor Speedway.

The entry was withdrawn May 13, after the team tested at the 1.5-mile Lowe's oval.

"We just didn't feel like we were prepared enough and quick enough to go there and do it," Sprague said. "So we're going to hold off and get our stuff better prepared and go test again."

On Sunday, Sprague fell from the Busch Series lead to second, 31 points behind race winner Jason Keller after he was involved in an accident that broke the radiator on his No. 24 NetZero Chevrolet. He finished 26th after making repairs.

Dennis Connor, crew chief for both of Sprague's programs, said there was no quick fix for the Cup team's planned first outing. HCR initially announced a five-race program for this season, after which it will run a full Winston Cup schedule in 2003.

But Connor stressed that both operations agreed that the Winston Cup team, which employs Hendrick Motorsports cars, engines and technical support -- as well as most of Sprague's Busch Series crew -- should not impact this year's Busch championship run while preparing for next season.

Sprague tested both a brand-new car built by for the Winston Cup program and a car acquired from Hendrick Motorsports' No. 25 operation.

"The characteristics of the two were totally, totally opposite," Connor said. "One was very, very tight and the other was scary loose. All the Winston Cup gurus (at Hendrick's) couldn't come up with a good explanation for why there was that difference.

"Instead of making a bad decision on which car to take and wind up getting a big surprise, we just elected to try to get some answers to our questions by doing some more testing.

"We want to be really prepared for the Winston Cup effort when we do it, similar to what Jimmie Johnson and the 48 team did last year. When they finally did run, they were ready and it showed."

Connor said team manager Joe Custer and Haas put no pressure on he and Sprague to run at Charlotte, even though the team's announcement was geared toward the high profile 600 race week.

"When you get right down to it, so much success in racing is psychological and so much a team effort that we were concerned that going to Charlotte and putting on a poor performance would really do a lot of damage to the team from a morale standpoint," he said.

Connor and Sprague have been together for three Craftsman Truck Series championships and 20 victories so struggling is not something they easily accept.

"It was even doing damage to Jack and I -- we weren't happy campers," Connor said of the poor test. "We're just too darned accustomed to being too good, really. It's going to be hard for us to run our first Winston Cup race and start Winston Cup racing.

"He expects to go to the race track and be the quickest car and be subject for the pole and lead laps and be subject to win the first race because that's the mentality we've been operating under for seven years.

"I feel the same way and I concluded in the test over there that we weren't gonna be subject to sit on the pole and we weren't gonna be very good. In fact, if a whole bunch of things went wrong we weren't even gonna make the race (so) it just wasn't the thing to do."

Connor said both cars would ultimately be taken to a wind tunnel, the team would build another new car and then take an existing car from Hendrick's No. 24 (Jeff Gordon) or No. 48 (Johnson) stable and test at Kentucky Speedway July 29 and 30.

He said the team also had tests scheduled at Darlington Raceway and Kansas Speedway and would make a decision after that on which race to run to replace the Lowe's event -- with the possibility it would do both.

If it is to run five races this season, it has to also replace the September New Hampshire 300.

"The only test dates we could get between now and Sept. 15 were in June," Connor said. "There is absolutely no sense in going to test more than three months before we're scheduled to race."

The additional races the team originally planned to run are in conjunction with Busch Series events at Lowe's Motor Speedway, Atlanta and Homestead.

"The desire of the Haas people is to help the (Busch) team rather than hinder it, so there's no pressure to do those five races," Connor said. "We're still planning to do five races with the first potential one being Darlington."