Winston Cup
The '98 version of the Brickyard 400 is in the books, along with another $1, 637,625.00 in prize money for Jeff Gordon. By now, everyone that gives a flip knows that Jeff won the Winston No Bull 5, one-million-dollar bonus, his sixth race this season, and the 35th of his career. He is also the only two-time winner of the five Brickyard 400 races that have been run. Three of the five bonus races are in the books, the next will be the Southern 500 at Darlington, Sept. 5th, and the last will be the Winston 500, at Talledega on Oct. 11th. The five drivers that are eligible for the bonus at Darlington are Jeff Gordon, Mark Martin, Bobby Labonte, Mike Skinner, and Dale Earnhardt, because they were the top five finishers at the Brickyard.
Goodyear has a little egg on their face, due to the inner sidewall tire failures that were associated with several team's race setups. Some of the setups apparently put too much stress on the right front inner sidewall, causing it to blow while cornering, which caused quite a few mishaps and disappointments. Both drivers of the Penske/Kranefuss teams, Rusty wallace and Jeremy Mayfield, blew there right fronts, taking both cars out of contention for the win. The TV announcers brought up the fact that the tire might be bad, but then there were no more comments made about it. NASCAR, along with Goodyear, won't allow any bad publicity. That's what I'm here for - to tell you the truth, as I see it.
As far as I could tell, there was only one car that might have stood a chance of holding off Gordon (other than Mayfield) and that was the No. 88 car driven by Dale Jarrett. His crew chief lost the race for him because of fuel mileage. Apparently Todd Parrott doesn't take full advantage of practice sessions. Dale ran out of gas on the track, and by the time he managed to coast into pit lane and get pushed 250 yards by his exhausted crew to his pit stall, he was four laps down. His crew had to run up pit road, which was extremely dangerous, and then push the car 250 yards back to where they started (the Texaco crew helped). He managed to hold off Gordon to get those laps back, but by the time he was on the lead lap, the race was winding down, and there just wasn't time for him to work his way up through the pack. He did manage to go from 29th to where he finished at 16th, in just a few laps.
