MOTOR RACING ROUNDUP : Totally in Charge, Petty Wins at Rockingham

For a guy who came into Sunday’s race with his confidence at a low ebb, Kyle Petty seemed to have things under control on the way to a dominating victory in the AC Delco 500 at Rockingham, N.C.

Petty led 484 of 492 laps at North Carolina Motor Speedway on the way to that victory that vaulted him from sixth to fourth in the NASCAR championship battle.

After starting from the pole, Petty, 32, had to fend off only a brief challenge from Ernie Irvan late in the race to win by 0.97 seconds--about six car-lengths--in a record-setting performance over the 1.014-mile oval.

That Irvan was even that close was because of the race’s only two caution flags, which brought Petty’s Pontiac Grand Prix back to the pack.

“I wasn’t all that confident when the green flag dropped,” Petty said. “But when Ernie didn’t really blast through there, I got some confidence. Then we had our usual 3 o’clock swoon, and he got back up toward me some. But we were able to stay out front pretty well.”

Petty averaged 130.748 m.p.h., breaking the track record of 127.292 m.p.h. set by Davey Allison last fall.

Car owner Felix Sabates reportedly watched the race from a hospital bed in Charlotte, N.C., after an emergency appendectomy earlier in the week. It was reported that because the hospital did not have the cable television necessary to pick up the race, Sabates hired his own satellite-dish truck and ran his own service into his hospital room.

He saw Petty’s second victory of the season, the sixth of his career and certainly the most dominating.

“I took off at the beginning,” Petty explained. “Halfway through the race, Ernie came back on me, but then we evened out again. We were timing Ernie and Mark (Saturday) and thought they were going to be awful tough, but I guess we were a whole lot better than we thought we were going to be yesterday.”

Said Irvan: “Kyle really got the handle on this racetrack. We came close to what we wanted to do, but not quite. I had plenty of opportunities--if I could catch him--to catch him, but I couldn’t do it.

“I kept wondering how I was going to pass him if I did catch him. We were both running the same groove. But I didn’t have enough to get there anyway.”

Ricky Rudd wound up third, a lap behind the winner, followed by series point-leader Bill Elliott, Sterling Marlin, Harry Gant and Brett Bodine.

It was also a rich victory for Petty, who for the third time in as many years earned the Unocal 76 Challenge bonus by winning from the pole at Rockingham. This time, the bonus was $98,800, raising Petty’s earnings Sunday to $153,100.

The day began with the top six drivers separated by only 114 points in the race for the Winston Cup title and ended with five still only 113 apart and Mark Martin probably out of the championship picture after crashing on the 435th lap.

Elliott, who came in leading Davey Allison by 39 points, now holds a 70-point edge over Allison, who finished 10th. Elliott can clinch his second championship by finishing sixth or better in the remaining races at Phoenix and Atlanta.

Italy’s Riccardo Patrese won the Japanese Grand Prix after Williams-Renault teammate Nigel Mansell, already the 1992 Formula One champion, yielded the lead to him on lap 35 at Suzuka, Japan.

Mansell had to drop out 10 laps later with a fire in his engine. He never has completed a race at Suzuka.

“It would have been nice to have a 1-2 (finish), and I think everyone gathered what I was doing,” said Mansell, who had won a record nine races this season.

With Mansell out, Gerhard Berger of Austria finished second, 13.7 seconds behind the winner. His McLaren-Honda teammate, three-time world champion Ayrton Senna of Brazil, dropped out in the third lap with engine failure, and Honda failed to win the final race on its home turf. Honda has announced it will leave Formula One racing at the end of the year.

Patrese completed 53 laps around the 3.665-mile Suzuka circuit in 1 hour 33 minutes 9.553 seconds.

The victory, his first at Suzuka, gave him 10 points in the drivers’ standings, boosting him to second place with 56, far behind Mansell’s 108, but ahead of Senna’s 50.