Auto Racing : Labonte Still Has the Look of a Champion

Life as the Grand National stock car racing champion has been hectic for Terry Labonte since he clinched the championship last November at Riverside, but it hasn’t appeared to slow him down.

Labonte dominated the Busch Pole Clash for 1984 pole winners here Sunday to win $65,000 for driving 50 miles in a shade over 15 minutes. After taking the lead on the fourth lap, Labonte led all the remaining 16 laps to win three $5,000 lap prizes and the $50,000 winner’s purse.

“All that traveling around was nice, but it was getting a little old,” said Labonte, a quiet Texan known as the Ice Man on the NASCAR circuit. “It was nice to be back racing today.”

Trips to New York (pick up check for $206,000 as Winston Cup champion), Long Beach (Skoal All- America team banquet), Chicago (Lathrop Boys Club benefit) and Corpus Christi, Tex. (deer hunting) took most of his time while crew chief Dale Inman and the Stratagraph Racing Team were back in Thomasville, N.C., building a new Piedmont Chevrolet for the Daytona 500.

For Sunday’s sprint, the team elected to race a year-old car that was up for sale, and save the new car for next Sunday’s 500.

“That car had finished second three or four times and was the only car we had that had never won,” Labonte said, “so we were going to sell it. Now that it’s a winner, maybe we’ll save it for Talladega.”

Labonte started 11th in the 12-driver field, but found a hole down the backstretch on the first lap and charged up to second place behind Cale Yarborough.

“I had some good breaks getting to the front so soon,” he said. “I caught a draft and passed a lot of cars in a hurry. I didn’t expect that to happen, and I didn’t expect to stay in front, either, once I got there. I figured who ever I passed for the first lap prize, would pass me back for the second one.”

Labonte used a 195 m.p.h. draft to pull by Yarborough’s Ford in the third turn of the fourth lap to win the first $5,000 bonus. Yarborough tucked in behind Labonte and the two continued to pull away from the other cars as they stormed around the 2.5-mile, high-banked tri-oval at record speeds.

“I was right where I wanted to be,” Yarborough said. “I could have tried to lead that second money lap, but that would have put Terry right back behind me and in the right position at the end, so I stayed in second because a win is more important than a couple of $5,000 bonuses.”

Yarborough’s plans ended when his car began overheating and he pulled into the pits on lap 12. Yarborough, the two-time defending Daytona 500 champion, has appeared in all seven pole winner races and has yet to win.

“I knew Cale was having some problems at the start because I got water on my windshield while I was following him,” Labonte said.

This left Labonte nearly a half-mile ahead. Freewheeling in front, he ran 199.1 m.p.h. on lap 15.

Behind him, however, Joe Ruttman’s Chevy coughed up its engine and brought out a yellow caution flag that enabled the also-rans to close ground behind Labonte. It didn’t make any difference, however, as once racing resumed, Labonte seemed to have little difficulty in holding off Darrell Waltrip and Bill Elliott, who Saturday set a stock car speed record of 205.114 m.p.h. during qualifying.

Waltrip, who won the 1981 Clash, summed up the event succinctly: “It was kind of a boring race.”

Glenn Sears, a power-plant mechanic from Apex, N.C., who had never been inside the Daytona Beach International Speedway before this week, scored a surprising win in the ARCA 200 Sunday, beating out a pair of neighbors from Hueytown, Ala., Davey Allison and Red Farmer, who dashed each other’s hopes of winning with a fender-banging incident five laps from the end.

Allison, 23, is the son of Grand National veteran Bobby Allison, and Farmer, 55 and up (“I don’t how know old Red was when he won his first race, but Betsy Ross made the checkered flag,” said Bobby Allison), was winning races here in the early 1960s.

“I was going along minding my own business and wondering what to do at the end when Red and Davey got together and that gave me room,” said Sears, 26. “Red was running so strong I’d never have won if they hadn’t hit each other.”

Allison finished second, Farmer third and pole-sitter Ken Ragan of Unadilla, Ga., fourth.