 | 2003 Winston Cup Series | | | | | | | | | | | | |  | |
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"I was thinking, 'Man, don't spin.' He lost it. After I checked up, I got nailed in the rear end myself and caused a helluva wreck.
"That wreck took me out of the top 10 in the points, a chance of going to New York. I can always come back and recover in one day from a bad week, and I haven't recovered yet this week from that deal. That was a bad deal last week."
Wallace said he would seek out Stewart this weekend.
"I haven't talked to Tony about it yet, but I will," Wallace said Friday morning. "I've been out in Vegas at the SEMA show, and I wasn't in the mood to talk to anybody this week. I got back home yesterday morning, and I haven't had time to call anybody really."
Should Matt Kenseth end up clinching the Winston Cup championship, and it looks like he will, some suggest that car owner Jack Roush won't be in a celebratory mood because of his past friction with NASCAR.
Nonsense, said Greg Biffle, who won the Craftsman Truck Series title for Roush in 2000, Roush's first championship.
"Well, if you saw him after I won the truck championship, when he was dancing with the band, he was pretty excited," Biffle said.
Roush has been campaigning for an updated Ford cylinder head, and NASCAR gave it to the manufacturer earlier this week.
The Ford engine, Roush said, was a 1992 design, while the Chevrolet engine was updated in the mid-1990s and the Dodge engine that came out in 2001 was based on the Chevy.
"The architecture of those engines is better and performance-wise has more potential than the engine that we've got," Roush said. "We're handicapped on not having as much power as we need and not having enough downforce and aero function as we need, based on our car.
"Next year, the car should be competitive. We've done enough testing that we think we know what we need to do to make our car be as good as the cars we're racing against.
"And NASCAR has in fact, effective last Monday, given us a consideration where we can have the same valve-train geometry, the same valve-guide positions, the same port height as the Chevrolet and the Dodge that will allow us to have a better performing cylinder head and, I believe, close the gap on the engine."
Todd Bodine was third in Friday's Winston Cup practice at 154.409 mph but slowed down considerably and ended up 27th at 153.548. What happened? Bodine blamed the tires.
"We unloaded really good," Bodine said. "We made some minor adjustments and went right back to where we unloaded. We put the stickers on, and it was terribly loose in practice. So we made some very minute adjustments in tire pressure for qualifying and put another set of stickers on it, and it pushed so bad it was ridiculous. It's just inconsistency in the tires."
After Brian Vickers qualified his No. 25 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet, he wanted to ask Ryan Newman for a freebie.
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| Vickers will share the front row with Ryan Newman to start Sunday's race. Credit: Autostock |
Vickers got beat by Newman last week at Phoenix, and then put the No. 25 on the provisional pole at Rockingham. Newman, who had the fastest car in practice, was to qualify last, and Vickers didn't want to take any chances.
"Just to give me one," Vickers said jokingly. "There's going to be like five cars in the Bud Shootout because of him."
But Vickers never got to talk to Newman.
"I don't think he would've given it to me, anyway," Vickers said.
Ricky Rudd worked with crew chief Ben Leslie for the first time Friday, and "things went pretty smooth," Rudd said. He qualified 24th at North Carolina Speedway, his best qualifying effort on a speedway since starting 19th at Kansas.
"To me, we're a lot closer than we have been in recent weeks, but it's not an overnight fix," Rudd said. "It's more of like starting a rebuilding process. The best thing Ben can bring to the table is we've been behind in engineering resources, and they've got the whole Roush engineering camp over there.
"Ben knows what's available and what's not available, so areas where we're weak on, we can pull from that. This is sort of a start."
Ricky Craven's No. 32 Pontiac has been using a unique fire prevention system in the trunk of the car for the past few weeks. Built by FIRE Panel of Scottsdale, Ariz., the system uses a dry chemical powder similar to material used in household fire extinguishers.
The powder is packed in two hard plastic shells which are mounted with heavy-duty Velcro inside the trunk at the rear of the car. In case of a rear impact, the plastic breaks and spreads the powder through the trunk, covering the fuel cell and preventing a fire from starting
The system has been used in military aircraft and helicopters, and has been tested on police cars. Craven hasn't had any rear-impact crashes yet, so it hasn't been tested in a real-time scenario.
NASCAR has also been working with the system and allowed PPI Motorsports to use it.
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