Survival of the fittest: Ill Reutimann perseveres (cont'd)

"One notch above death, I think, is where we're at right now," Reutimann said. "Any time you finish up here, you're not exactly ready to go run a marathon or nothing. I won't have any problem sleeping.

"This place is tough. You have to stay on your toes the whole time. Everybody is racing hard and the track was cold, so it was fast and you've got to drive the crap out of the thing the whole time."

For Reutimann, that meant the whole 500 miles he only fell out of the top 20 once, for a short segment between laps 200 and 300 when a lug nut issue caused an early pit stop.

Reutimann's illness cropped up literally overnight. He said he first began to feel something Friday evening during the Nationwide Series drivers' meeting, but he wasn't bad during the Dollar General 300, where he finished 20th.

"I thought maybe I was just coming down with something or whatever, and then [Friday] night about three or four in the morning I woke up feeling really bad," Reutimann said. "Then I got up [Saturday] and it just got worse and worse. Around one o'clock I was starting to wonder how things were going to go."

That afternoon his team contacted fellow Cup driver Dave Blaney, whose Prism Motorsports team didn't qualify. Blaney, wearing a matching Aaron's uniform, stood in the back of the team's pit stall until the restart after their final pit stop, at lap 295, when he picked up his helmet and trudged away with Reutimann set to start in 18th.

Ironically, that was about the same time that Reutimann said he felt his worst.

"With about 30 [laps] to go, we were struggling pretty bad," Reutimann said. "I was good and I was like, 'Man, I'm fine, I'm going to be okay.' Then it was just like I fell off a cliff there. The yellows helped a little bit. I was having a hard time concentrating and kept getting sick [but] towards the end, the car got better and better as we went.

"The guys did a good job and they gave me a good car to drive. If it would have been something really, really bad then we wouldn't have been even remotely competitive, so I'm proud of my guys."

Beyond having Blaney on stand-by, Reutimann said besides the IVs and padding the right side of his head rest a little more, he did nothing special to either prepare for, or get through the race.

Reutimann said it was Saturday afternoon before he realized he might need relief, and right before race time before he took the IVs.

"That's all you really could do," Reutimann said. "You could do that or you could get out [of the car]. Those were the two choices. It doesn't matter who you are, nobody ever wants to give up your ride.

"Dave Blaney was there and I appreciate him coming down. Dave probably would have run better than I did, really. I waited my whole life to go Cup racing -- so as long as I still have a pulse, I'm going to stay in the car if I can -- as long as it's not going to affect the overall performance of the car.

"If I'm just not doing the job then I need to get out because it's more than just me involved here, it's a lot of other guys."

Blaney said he felt a lot of empathy for Reutimann, who he saw when he arrived at the track between 3 and 4 p.m.

"He looked bad, but he said he was going to try to go all the way, and they just wanted me here, just in case," Blaney said while the field circulated under caution, just before he left the pits. "I can relate -- nobody wants to get out unless you have to. I didn't want to see David get out of that car, but if he did, I'd be happy to jump in it."

In the end, it didn't happen, and Reutimann's crew chief Rodney Childers had one more reason to believe in his guy.

"He's hard-headed," Childers said through a grin. "He did a really good job. The best of the guys that have been in this sport for a long time don't have a clue what it takes to stay in the race car like that -- some do, some don't. But you can't really ask any more out of him. To get a top 15 out of a guy that can barely walk and barely knows where he's at is pretty good.

"The guys did a good job and we had a really good car. It was a team effort and there'll be other days where I'm not feeling so good or somebody else on the team's not feeling so good and it's the same kind of deal -- we all stick together and do the best we can do every single week and that's really all that matters."