Strong run ends without victory for Wallace

ROCKINGHAM, N.C. -- For 219 laps in Sunday's Subway 400, it looked like Rusty Wallace's long losing streak was going to come to an end.

Wallace's led 182 of those first 219 laps around North Carolina Speedway, easily pulling away from the field. Even when Wallace dropped from the lead on pit road during cautions, his No. 2 Interpid roared back to the front to re-take the top spot.

	Rusty Wallace finished sixth in Sunday's Subway 400. Credit: Autostock

But during a long green-flag run past the halfway mark, Wallace's car dropped like a bad song on the pop charts. He went from first to ... well, he pretty well disappeared from the leaderboard.

Wallace rallied to finish sixth. He was disappointed and encouraged crawling out of his car.

"It's a little bit of both," Wallace said. "It's encouraging we ran so strong. There were times when I would look in the mirror and couldn't even see the second-place car at the beginning of the race it was running that good."

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But as the laps piled up, so did the rubber on the track. Wallace noticed it, and he knew he was in trouble.

"Uh, oh, something's weird going on here," Wallace remembered he said to himself.

He wasn't wrong.

"I could feel it trying to mess me up a little bit," Wallace said. "It was getting loose, it would spin a tire, then it would push a little bit.

"As the day went on and the track got rubbered up, I could see it changing."

Wallace rocketed to the lead from his eighth starting spot on lap 27, slipping past Ricky Craven. He led four times for 182 laps, the most of any driver Sunday.

"That thing was a damn bullet," Wallace said. "It was just flying. The motor ran great, the thing was handling perfect."

VIDEO CLIPS Victory Lane Play video Final laps Play video Busch is runner-up for the second straight week Play video Kenseth ends up third at The Rock Play video McMurray is highest finishing rookie Play video Earnhardt Jr. has trouble all day long Play video Earnhardt Jr., Nadeau tangle Play video Sprague gets into K. Wallace Play video The Subway 400 gets under way Play video

All good things must come to an end, of course.

"About three-quarters of the way through the race, I could see the track getting real black," Wallace said. "I had the thing really turning good. It just got too free on me. It got so loose you could hardly touch the throttle."

Wallace and crew chief Bill Wilburn worked to correct the problem, but the damage was done. Plus, he was stuck in traffic, making getting back to the front even more difficult.

"We tightened it up on a couple pit stops," Wallace said. "It would tighten it up, but it made it lose the front end. I couldn't fix both things."

But Wallace wasn't pulling his hair out in the garage area. He knows he had a good car, especially considering this was Penske Racing's first event on a non-restrictor plate track running a Dodge. Good things could be coming, and maybe that losing streak will come to an end soon.

"It was a good run for the first time out," Wallace said. "It was a good evaluation for the first time in a Dodge on a downforce track. It had a lot of power, handled good and proved it could lead."

But it hasn't proved it could win. Yet.