Rusty at Teamwork

Few race drivers like two-driver teams--they want to keep all their hard-earned secrets to themselves--and Rusty Wallace has been one of the most outspoken.

So why is Wallace now working so closely with Jeremy Mayfield in matching Ford Tauruses on the Winston Cup circuit?

“The Captain told me he wanted a second driver,” Wallace says matter-of-factly. “That was enough.”

The Captain is Roger Penske, owner of Wallace’s Penske South team and co-owner of Mayfield’s Penske-Kranefuss team.

“The two teams work in different shops in Mooresville [N.C.], not far apart, but Jeremy and I, and our crews work together as closely as if we were twins,” Wallace said. “That’s the way Roger wants it.”

The results, going into Sunday’s California 500 at Fontana--the 10th race of the season--have made both Taurus drivers happy warriors.

Although he has not won a race, Wallace’s consistently high finishes have him in first place in quest of a second Winston Cup championship--he won the first in 1989. Mayfield, whose highest finish was 13th last year, is second, only 36 points behind Wallace.

“Working with Jeremy on a two-car team has helped me so much that it’s almost embarrassing to remember how much I was against the idea,” Wallace said. “We meet every night after practice and go over all the technical data. He gets everything we learned, and vice versa.

“We even test each other’s car, looking for a little something in my car that he might discover, or something in his car that I might find.”

The partnership was forged during the off-season, when Carl Haas decided to sell his share of the Kranefuss-Haas team and Penske decided to buy it. Mayfield had been with the team for only one full season, having swapped rides with John Andretti in mid-1996. Andretti went from Kranefuss to Cale Yarborough, Mayfield from Yarborough to Kranefuss.

Penske broached the idea to Wallace when they were on a fishing trip to the Bahamas last fall, explaining that having a second team wouldn’t detract from Penske Team South because Haas was selling out completely, the team, buildings, equipment, everything.

“I told him I’d watched Jeremy and knew he had the makings of a fine driver, but even after I agreed to it, I wasn’t all that sure about what might happen until the race at Daytona,” Wallace said. “We’d helped each other get ready for the 500, but I was still sort of wondering what was going to happen down the road.

“Then Jeremy did something early in the race that showed me I had a good thing going. When you get hung out in the draft with those restricter plates at Daytona, you can go from the front to the rear before you know it. The cars are so close together, if you can’t squeeze in line, you keep going backwards.

“Well, I got caught out of the draft and it’s a helpless feeling. Then I noticed that Jeremy was throttling back to let me get back in line. There are a few other multi-car teams in NASCAR but that was the first time I’d heard of teammates helping each other like that. Usually, once the race starts, each guy is on his own.

“Later in the race, I had a chance to return the favor. I’m sure he must have got the same feeling I had about having a new teammate. Roger told us what he expected, that we were racing the field, not each other, and that’s how it’s been.”

At Daytona, Mayfield was second and Wallace fifth, the highest either driver had ever finished in NASCAR’s premier event.

Mayfield was the beneficiary of Wallace’s knowledge when the schedule took them to the half-mile oval at Bristol, Tenn., where Mayfield had never fared well. Before qualifying, Wallace detailed how to drive the track.

“People asked me, ‘How could you give away all you’ve learned?’ and I told them that Roger said we were going to help each other and to put everything on the table. And that’s what I did.”

Earlier this month, Wallace spent three days testing on Penske’s two-mile Fontana track, one day getting the proper feel for the surface, the second day working on qualifying and the third testing a race setup.

“The Taurus is totally different from the Thunderbird we ran here last year, and the engine is smaller,” he said. “So I’d say we are about 20% down on horsepower. I would guess that the pole speed will be about a half-second slower than the last time we were here. We worked extra hard on the qualifying setup because the cars are so close together that track position is more important than ever.”

Joe Nemecheck won the pole in the 1997 inaugural race, but Greg Sachs set the qualifying record of 183.753 mph on the second day, lapping the two miles in 39.183 seconds.

“When we first saw California Speedway, we heard it was patterned after Michigan, but once we got on the track, we found it was quite different,” Wallace said. “Here, the fastest way around is right on the white line [at the bottom of the track]. At Michigan, you need to be about a car length off the line.

“I’ll say one thing, this Fontana track is the benchmark for new facilities. It has the smoothest surface, the smoothest lines and everything about it is designed to help the racer, and please the spectators.”

Last year’s California 500 mirrored the frustrations that Wallace encountered all year. He finished 14th after qualifying 16th. For the year, he wound up ninth, his worst showing in six years.

“We had nine DNFs [actually 11] last year,” he said. “It may have been some kind of a record, but not one I will ever boast about. The bottom line is that we had a ton of engine problems. Some of it was because of human error, and part of that fell on my shoulders. I over-revved the thing a couple of times. We got in our share of crashes too.

“The reason I bring this up is that so far this year, we haven’t failed to finish once. The reason for the change started with our preparation before Daytona. Roger was unhappy with the results last year, so he set us down, told us what he wanted to accomplish, and we set out to do it.”

In nine races this season, Wallace had five top-five finishes and only once, a 33rd at Bristol, was he toward the rear.

“What pleases me most,” said crew chief Robin Pemberton, “is the ‘big picture.’ We’re still leading the points. The secret to that is dodging bullets and we’ve done a pretty good job. . . . It’s the team that avoids the most bullets at the end of the year that wins the thing.”

The multi-car team idea is not entirely new to NASCAR, but it got some attention last year when Jeff Gordon led Terry Labonte and Ricky Craven across the finish line at the Daytona 500 in a 1-2-3 Chevy finish for Rick Hendrick’s team.

“We share information, but we’re also individual teams,” Gordon said. “ . . . As far as driving styles are concerned, I like my car a little different from Terry, so there’s not always something to share.

“The place where the info’s truly shared is in how the chassis is built, and how the engines are built. All the work is done at the same location, so any ideas one of us has will be used by all of us.

“Once the race starts, hey, you’re on your own. But if one of us is having a bad run, or having trouble getting a drafting partner, we might communicate on the radio and work together. Some days you can, but most days it doesn’t work. It isn’t something you can plan, although the way Rusty and Jeremy are running together on the track it looks like they’ve got a plan.”

Car owner Jack Roush has stretched the team concept to five cars, drawing a lot of snickers from Winston Cup regulars who thought he had gone too far. However, when all five--Mark Martin, Jeff Burton, Johnny Benson, Ted Musgrave and Chad Little-- finished in the top 10 at Las Vegas, the snickers ceased.

To press his point, Roush added a sixth car to his team at Talladega, putting Busch Grand National points leader Matt Kenseth in a Ford Taurus, but Kenseth failed to qualify.

Who knows, maybe he’ll field seven at Fontana.