MOTOR RACING ROUNDUP : Gant Stretches Fuel Mileage Into Victory at Michigan

Harry Gant’s ability to stretch his gas mileage paid off again Sunday in the Champion Spark Plug 400 at Michigan International Speedway. In it he proved timing can be everything.

Gant topped off his tank twice during a caution period midway through the race, the strategy paying dividends in the final laps when he was racing as the competition was getting necessary fuel in the pits.

“A lot of it just goes back to Harry,” said crew chief Andy Petree, who determined the strategy that allowed Gant to win $71,545 and average 143.056 m.p.h. “Every team he has driven for has gotten good gas mileage. We just got good mileage again today.”

It was a day that began with driver Darrell Waltrip delivering an invocation that brought tears to the eyes of many of the 90,000 on hand, reminding them that what they were about to see was dangerous and pointing out that it had killed Clifford Allison, the brother of Davey Allison, on Thursday.

It ended with Waltrip finishing second, 4.94 seconds behind Gant; and Allison fifth on the day before his brother’s funeral at Bessemer, Ala.

Gant was at the back of the lead lap and had nothing to lose on his second stop during the mid-race caution, on the 97th lap.

From there, he had one stop to the finish, with the final 102 laps being run under green-flag conditions. The other cars needed two stops for fuel.

The question was whether Gant could run 51 laps between stops. Asked if he was worried about taking that chance, Gant said, “Not really. You either win the race or you finish fourth or fifth. You just hope you’re right and you don’t use more fuel on this run than you did the one before. But the guys did tell me to start saving fuel with about 20 laps to go.”

Gant’s engine was sputtering and cutting out most of the last lap, but he used the lapped cars of Hut Stricklin and Ken Schrader as drafting partners to help get him to the finish.

“Going into the third turn, the engine almost quit,” Gant said. “But I got into the corner and it came back. It would sputter on the straightaways but kept coming back in the corners, and we had a pretty good lead.”

Bill Elliott finished third, extending his series lead over fifth-place finisher Allison to 37 points. Allison ran his first full race since July 4, despite still hurting from injuries received in a race crash at Pocono on July 19, as well as the emotional burden of his younger brother’s death from a race car crash on Thursday.

Britain’s Nigel Mansell clinched the world Formula One championship, driving his Williams-Renault to a second-place finish in the Hungarian Grand Prix at Budapest.

Ayrton Senna, the defending champion from Brazil, won the race, completing 77 laps around the twisting 2.466-mile Hungaroring circuit in his McLaren-Honda in 1 hour 46 minutes 19.216 seconds for an average speed of 107.157 m.p.h.

Mansell finished 40.139 seconds behind Senna but earned enough series points for an insurmountable lead in this year’s Formula One points race.

With only five events remaining, Mansell has 92 points and Italian Riccardo Patrese, his Williams teammate and closest challenger, has 40.