Kulwicki Set Pattern for Jarrett

The late Alan Kulwicki will be on a lot of minds this weekend at Phoenix International Raceway, where his improbable run for the 1992 Winston Cup championship got a big boost.

Dale Jarrett, in particular, can take heart from Kulwicki’s charge from third to the championship in the final two races that season.

Jarrett is third going into today’s Dura-Lube 500, trailing leader Terry Labonte by 76 points and second-place Jeff Gordon by 44.

Kulwicki, who died in a 1993 plane crash, trailed Bill Elliott and Davey Allison by 278 points with six races remaining in 1992.

However, he gained 193 points over the next four events and trailed leader Elliott by 85 and runner-up Allison by 70 entering the next-to-last race of the season at Phoenix.

The unfortunate Elliott cracked a cylinder head and finished 31st at Phoenix, while Allison won and moved to a 30-point lead and Kulwicki ran a strong fourth and moved into second place, 30 points behind.

Two weeks later, in the season-finale at Atlanta, Allison was taken out in a crash ignited when a deflating tire caused Ernie Irvan’s car to spin in front of him. Elliott won the race, but Kulwicki’s second-place finish, combined with the five bonus points he got for leading the most laps in the race, gave him the championship by 10 points--the closest 1-2 finish in Winston Cup history.

Paul Andrews, crew chief on Kulwicki’s Ford Thunderbird that season, remembers the late charge vividly.

“We just never thought it was over in 1992,” Andrews said. “We knew our chances weren’t good, but we never thought it was over and we never really quit. We just kept doing the things we had been doing all year to get us where we had been. We really didn’t change anything we had been doing, or change attitudes or anything else. We just kept moving forward.”

Andrews thinks Jarrett has a shot chance of emulating Kulwicki’s title run.

“Of course, the way the season has gone this year, the chances of both of those guys (Labonte and Gordon) falling out of a race is pretty slim,” Andrews said. “But it happened to Gordon (Oct. 6 at Charlotte). That’s what tightened up the points the way they are right now. So he’s got a good chance.”

THE PITS: Ricky Rudd won last Sunday at Rockingham despite a terrible day in the pits by his crew.

Rudd, the owner and driver of the Tide-sponsored team, said he was angry about the mistakes during the race, but got over it quickly after his visit to victory circle.

“Our guys normally have good days in the pits,” he explained. “It was just one of those situations where anything and everything that could go wrong was going to go wrong on that particular day.”

Now he and his team are in Phoenix, where Rudd is the defending race winner and must get his crew ready for another big race.

“My job is really a motivator, to try to pump them up,” Rudd said. “They take it really hard when they have an off day like that. But there are days when I have off days. You are going to have them.

“The way our pit crew works, these are guys who work on the car during the week and work on the cars back at the shop. So part of their job went great. They prepared a car that was capable of winning.”

HOME SWEET HOME: Most of the Winston Cup teams’ shops are located within a short distance of Charlotte, including about a dozen teams in an industrial park north of the North Carolina city.

But Morgan-McClure Racing is well away from the spiritual center of stock car racing. Its home is in Abingdon, Va., a stone’s throw from the Tennessee border and a two-hour car ride from Charlotte.

“We feel like our location is an asset to us,” said team manager and co-owner Larry McClure. “We’ve always done our own thing.

“I’d rather have people who want to move up there. I know if they move up there, they’re going to be committed. I don’t want to be down in Charlotte where you don’t know who’s going to be there from before lunch to after lunch.

McClure thinks it doesn’t matter where a team is based.

“You can race from anywhere in the United States,” he said. “I feel like we’ve got a better place to live. I don’t think it’s detrimental to us. If somebody’s interested in coming to work for our race team and we’re interested in them, and they want to make a commitment, they’ll move.”

POSSIBILITIES: With two of 31 races remaining, the race among the top 25 drivers in the Winston Cup standings remains extremely competitive.

It’s mathematically possible for all 25 drivers to either advance or fall one position or more before the season ends Nov. 10 at Atlanta Motor Speedway.