Rusty's Rundown: Slow start makes tough year

One of the toughest things in Winston Cup Series racing right now, with all the parity involved and with the cars running as equal as they are, it's awfully tough to come back from a slow start like we've had and some of the other guys have had.

Now I'm not saying it can't be done. It surely can be done. Look at Tony Stewart last year. But if you're off just a little bit at these first few tracks, and you get behind early, you might spend all year playing catch-up. And you surely don't want to be doing that. You want to be setting the trend, setting the pace, not trying to figure out how to get to a level that the other guy's at.

	Credit: Autostock

We're a little bit behind in the standings right now, but I'll tell you what: We had a great car at Rockingham and a good car down there in Daytona, but we didn't run the way we wanted to run at Las Vegas. There are cars throughout the series that have had great runs but also had bad luck. Like Jeff Gordon. He got caught up in a wreck at Vegas, and so did Dale Jarrett.

There were cars that have really come on that had some really bad first couple of races, like Dale Earnhardt Jr. and a couple other people. So you can see, as I'm telling you, it seems like nobody's gotten a grip of this thing and just ran with it. I really expect, as the year goes on, when we get to around 20 races into the season, that the same guys are going to start lining up again.

The same guys, on the established teams, are going to be up there once we start getting some points laid down. Right now, early in the year, you can be 100 points behind, or 150 points behind, and make it up fairly quickly. But I'll tell you, nobody wants to start the year behind in points, because instead of defending you always have to come from the back again.

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It's made no easier by the fact that you have to have help, either. You have to have real fast pit stops and you simply cannot make mistakes. We made a tragic mistake at Las Vegas. We had a really good car there, but made a pit stop and I left pit road, and Billy Wilburn called me on the radio about five minutes later and said, 'Hey man, you're going to hate this, but we only got six gallons gas in the car. You're going to have to pit and we're going to lose a couple laps.'

That was a hard thing to take. But there are a lot of guys that go through similar problems. You've got to have a really good support team: Fast pit stops, good engines, and the driver's got to drive the hell out of the car. You can't afford to have any slip ups with how competitive it is.

And one of the biggest things -- that you obviously can't control -- is you've got to hope your competitors start having problems. Generally, that's necessary to make up ground. There are tracks I love to go to that helps make that ground back up. Whenever I get to go to the Bristols, the short tracks, I love it. When I get to go to the road courses, I love it. When I go to the Poconos and Dovers, I love it. But then there are places I've run well, but don't have the finishes to show for it, like Darlington.

See there, Darlington: I'm going into this weekend's race thinking I can't screw up, that I have to make this the race of my life to keep getting these points.

I think everybody's in a position right now that any bad luck really hurts. How'd you like to be my teammate Ryan Newman, who in the very first race of the year he's on his roof and finished last? Or a guy like Gordon who had the same problem happen a couple times this year, and they weren't even of his own doing?

And Junior had a couple tough weeks there to start the year. These are top-rate teams, teams that are ready to set the world on fire and immediately have problems. My team is in that bunch, too.

But you know what? I've watched this happen 1000 times and you get in a ditch and just have to dig yourself back out. I firmly stand on this: the good teams will always rise back to the top by the time it's all said and done. It's not easy, by any means. But it'll happen. Always does.

Rusty's Rundown appears weekly on NASCAR.com. For more info on Rusty Wallace, please visit his Web site at www.rustywallace.com.