NASCAR NOTEBOOK : Gant Hopes to Bow Out With One More Victory

Harry Gant, preparing for his final run at Daytona International Speedway, says there’s one more goal he’d like to achieve before ending his career.

“To win one Winston Cup race this year. That’s it. That would satisfy me totally,” Gant said Thursday. “It doesn’t matter where. Just anywhere.”

Gant, who hasn’t finished better than seventh in a race this year, plans to retire in November after 30 seasons in racing. He has mixed feelings about leaving the Winston Cup circuit.

“I don’t feel any different in the car now than I did 10 years ago, but the travel and motel and being gone all the time are things that start getting to you after that many years,” Gant said. “You know you’re going to miss a lot of people, friends you’ve made over the years.

“Getting in the race car, that’s going to be the thing that I don’t know how it’ll affect me.”

Gant, who had a qualifying speed of 186.784 m.p.h. (26th best) for Saturday’s Pepsi 400, has never won a Winston Cup race at Daytona. He did win a modified NASCAR race here in 1977 and lists it among his most memorable moments on the 2 1/2-mile high-banked trioval.

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Daytona sweeps: Sterling Marlin, who shook the label of being perhaps the best driver who had never won a Winston Cup race when he took the Daytona 500 in February, thinks he has a good shot at becoming only the fifth driver to win both big races at Daytona in the same year.

Fireball Roberts won the Daytona 500 and Firecracker 250 in 1962, and Cale Yarborough and Lee Roy Yarbrough were back-to-back 500-400 winners, in 1968-69. The last driver to accomplish the double was Bobby Allison in 1982.

Marlin returned to Daytona this week with plenty of good-luck charms.

“We got out my uniform from the 500. . . . I’ve got the T-shirt I had on, but I can’t find the rest of my underwear. I don’t know where they went, but I’d like to find them with the luck we’ve had lately.”

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Remembering Davey: The next two events will be emotional for Ernie Irvan, who acknowledged he has given some thought to how it will feel to compete at Loudon, N.H., site of Davey Allison’s last race, and at Pocono where the No. 28 car sat out to mourn Allison’s death last year.

Irvan, now well established as the driver of the Robert Yates Racing Thunderbird, said it will be difficult to block out the memories, but “we’ve got to keep on doing what we’ve been doing.”

“I have thought about Loudon, where we last saw Davey,” Irvan said.

“We started next to each other, and we shared a pace truck before the race and rode around the track. And I think about us squirting each other with squirt guns in the garage last year.

“(NASCAR flag man) Doyle Ford came up and he or Davey had a squirt gun and we were firing it at each other. He was parked on one side of the workbench and we were parked on the other. And we’d hide behind the bench and act like kids.”

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Show car: Wally Dallenbach failed to make the field at Michigan two weeks ago in the same Pontiac his team failed to qualify at Atlanta earlier this season. The car didn’t make the trip to Daytona for this weekend’s race.

“We did what we should have done earlier and made it a show car,” Dallenbach said.

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Not lately: Two teams have monopolized Victory Lane at Daytona International Speedway since the track opened in 1959.

In 71 races, including the Daytona 500 and the Pepsi 400, the Wood brothers have won 12 times and Petty Enterprises 11 times on the track--but not lately.

The last victory by a Wood Brother car was in July, 1983, when Buddy Baker won. The Petty team last took the checkered flag for any race in July 1984 with Richard Petty behind the wheel. Both Baker and Petty have since retired from driving.

Next behind the top two teams in victories at Daytona are Junior Johnson, Harry Melling and Smokey Yunick, with four victories each.