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| | Wednesday, October 18 McReynolds, Skinner can't Earn first win | |||||||||||
| By Larry McReynolds Special to ESPN.com Editor's note: Veteran crew chief Larry McReynolds will provide a weekly column on ESPN.com, taking you inside the garage for Mike Skinner and the Lowe's No. 31 Chevrolet team. We tested at Rockingham last Tuesday and ran almost 300 laps and had a pretty productive test. I'm hesitant to say it was good or bad but we deemed it productive.
For me, Sunday's race was about me going to Daytona and Talladega next year not as a competitor but as a broadcaster. We need to be able to go to Daytona and broadcast our first race for Fox with a race like what we had yesterday, not what we had in Daytona this February or even what we had at Talladega in April, because you knew that Jeff Gordon was going to win that race with eight to ten laps to go. I'm very disappointed not in what we accomplished but in the outcome of our day. Could we have done anything different? I don't know. I think we did everything we could to put ourselves in position to win that race. A big part of what went on yesterday is probably one of the biggest things I'll miss about being a crew chief next year -- strategizing and trying to match wits with all those guys on pit road, trying to get a step ahead of them. There was a lot of that yesterday. I'll tell you, when I climbed off that pit box, I wanted to just go sit down in a room and close the door for several minutes. I sat in the rental car with the doors closed and the windows rolled up and just thought, man, what a mind-draining deal that was. I love that part about being a crew chief and I'm going to miss it very much. We only had three cautions for 13 laps Sunday, which equates more into strategizing. Track position was important but I think where you aligned yourself was more important. Dale Earnhardt proved that. That man was 18th with ten laps to go and he showed that he is the master. He is The Man. Even though I was only part of winning one restrictor-plate race with him, I'm just proud to say I was able race with him at some of those tracks because he is The Man. There's no doubt about it. I don't think there's anybody as good and probably never will be at restrictor plate race tracks. We had to cycle through two green-flag stops, at laps 49 and 100, and that's where the strategy came in. We needed to run to about lap 133 or 134 to get to the end. We pitted under green on lap 100 and the caution came out on lap 104. It was a moot point pitting again because tires were not that much of an issue so we stayed out. The caution came out again on lap 116 and we only had about 12 laps on the tires and 16 laps on the fuel but we felt, like all the competitors did, that we needed to get fuel. Some cars came in and did a gas-and-go. We elected to get gas and change right-side tires. We still restarted the race in pretty good shape. We knew then that we could only run to about lap 169 or 170. We got a few dancing partners who were going to come in with us on lap 168 but that's when the biggest incident of the day happened. Cars started getting together coming onto pit road, Mark Martin and Bobby Hamilton in particular. Mike made the decision to not pit because of what was going on and that he knew a caution was coming. It wasn't a bad move and he had about a millisecond to make it, but he could have come onto pit road and we could have got the stop done like Jeff Gordon did. We wouldn't have gone a lap down because all we were going to do was a gas-and-go. We needed about four seconds of fuel, about seven gallons, to get to the end of the race. Mike stayed on the race track but we weren't in danger of running out because we had two or three laps left. We came in the next lap and Mike wanted four tires. I said no way. He said he was a little bit loose but I told him we would put fuel in the car and put a round of bite and pull a tearoff off the windshield to try to get him track position and get lined up to make a run at the leaders at the end. The gas-and-go stop worked out well but it was probably where I ran it against the edge. I knew we needed to get four seconds of gas. The second our gas man, Brian Englehart, engaged the can, I started counting: "One-thousand one, one-thousand two, one-thousand three ..." I felt like the anticipation and differential between saying one-thousand four and Mike reacting would add another second of fuel. Everybody did a great job and, like I said, I knew we needed seven gallons of fuel. Fortunately, we ran three or four more laps of caution because, when they weighed the gas can and gave me the amount that they put in the car, it only came up to 5.8 gallons. I immediately called Mike on the radio and told him to start conserving fuel during the caution laps. I have never punched so many numbers on a calculator, probably hunting for numbers that weren't there. The caution laps gave me a bit of a comfort zone. We restarted the race in fourth and Mike worked his way to third. I think everybody was thinking the same thing, that we were in a good position in third. Richard Childress called Mike on the radio and told him not to commit himself too soon. Maybe we could have waited a little longer to make that commitment. Maybe not. Nobody knows. You could replay it 40 times and probably come up with 40 different results. But we made the commitment and had the lead with two to go. But here came the Man in Black, with Wallace and Nemechek in tow, and we ended up finishing sixth. Again, I'm tickled to death for RCR. It was the first time Dale Earnhardt has won the Winston No Bull 5 bonus. It's what being a part of multi-car team is about, being happy where we can share the success of our teammates. At the same time, I'm pretty disappointed that we weren't able to even salvage a top-five finish. That would have been only our second top-five of the year and would have qualified this team for the No Bull 5 next year in Las Vegas. I know everybody was happy but disappointed. It's like having two sons on a baseball team and one strikes out three times and the other hits the game-winning home run. You feel both good and bad and that's what everybody felt when we walked into the shop Monday morning. I was very curious about how close we cut the fuel on the gas-and-go. Even though the race was over and we had enough to finish, I don't think I would have slept a wink Sunday night if I'd known then how little we had. We came in Monday morning and drained the fuel cell dry. It had five ounces of fuel left. We obviously used some fuel on the cool-down lap but that was close. We would have run out of fuel if we would have run fewer caution laps there at the end. The Good Lord was with me on that deal because I had the option of keeping him there as long as my voice would let him. I didn't want to be in Gordon's position, leading with 15 to go, but I felt that restarting fourth or fifth was a pretty good position to be in. It would have been a wonderful final chapter to Larry McReynolds' 2000 season with the 31 team to have won that race. I was thinking about that with five to go because there was nothing else I or this team could do -- it was pretty much in Mike's and the spotters' hands at that point. But to win Mike's and this team's first race at Talladega, which I consider my home track, and to beat The Man on his home turf (and it is his home turf. He's never lived there but it is his home turf) would have been pretty awesome. Probably the most flattering thing in my life, other than maybe winning the Western Auto Mechanic of the Year Award in 1991, was Larry McReynolds Night on Friday at Birmingham International Raceway, a track I spent the first 14 or 15 years of my life living a block and a half from. Linda and the kids were there with me, as was almost all of my family from Birmingham. A lot of my friends were there, some I hadn't seen in years. Two drivers whom I won track championships with in the 1970s, Richard Orton and Dave Mader, were there. The car owner that taught me so much about racing, Bobby Ray Jones, and Charles Finley, the first man I ever worked for at the salvage yard, were there. My aunt and uncle, Noreen and Butch Mears, who first put me to work on a race car were there with my grandfather, who is 103. It was probably one of the most overwhelming nights to see everyone who came out. In 1980, I won the Jimmy Morris Sportsmanship Award at the track, an award that was named in honor of a local racer who was killed towing a race car to Montgomery, Ala., in the 1970s. It was an overwhelming honor when I won it and something I had never encountered. But the biggest thing that flattered me about it was the list of people who had won the award. Neil Bonnett, Bobby Allison, Donnie Allison, Red Farmer. To know that my name was linked with that group of people was overwhelming. They gave me a plaque Saturday night signifying Larry McReynolds Night that had a picture taken when Jimmy Morris' son and daughter gave me the trophy that day. As I told the crowd when I accepted the award, yes, it was Larry McReynolds Night but, with the people who were there with me, it was my chance to honor them because they are the reason why Larry McReynolds has been able to accomplish what he has. I didn't do it by myself. It was the Charles Finleys and the Bobby Ray Joneses and the Noreen and Butch Mearses and the Richard Ortons and Dave Maders who gave me the opportunity. With their help and my determination and eagerness, I got into Winston Cup racing and was able to accomplish what I have. | ALSO SEE New rules, old result: Earnhardt wins Winston 500 McReynolds: 31 is also an unlucky number McReynolds: Problem with pits | |||||||||||
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