Suddenly, Elliott Has Become Accident Waiting to Happen

If he were a baseball player, he could thank the fans, then skip the all-star game and go fishing.

If he were in the NFL, even a trip to Hawaii might not entice him to the Pro Bowl.

Basketball, hockey, no way.

Bill Elliott has next week off, and the week after is the Winston, NASCAR’s all-star game, and he’ll drive because that’s what he does for a living.

But sometimes you have to wonder why.

He’s sore, and being without pain is becoming a distant memory. On Sunday, he added not insult but another injury to the one he suffered a week ago in an eerily similar wreck at Talladega.

Kyle Petty was around for Wreck II, as he had been for Wreck I. So was Dale Earnhardt. There was fire again.

When the spinning stopped and the fire was put out, Elliott’s car came off the track at California Speedway on a flat-bed truck, and he came off in an ambulance. He had been driven to the track, but he left in a helicopter, because it was the fastest way to Loma Linda University Medical Center, where he was tested for the kind of bruises you get trying to stop a cattle stampede with your chest; where he was treated for a broken finger and a broken bone in his foot; and where he received a CT scan, apt because the only thing he won Sunday was an award sponsored by a headache powder.

Elliott had been cruising along at about 180 mph, minding his own business on the 86th lap when he found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time. The place was Turn One, the time was when Dale Jarrett’s Ford blew an engine and dropped fluid on the track.

Jarrett merely drove to the garage, his day done.

Elliott was told on the radio that the safest place to be was high on the track, so he drifted up there, seemingly out of harm’s way. Then harm went his way in the personage of Petty.

“We came off of Turn Four and everybody was racing hard,” Petty said. “We were already two- and three-wide messing around. [Jarrett] just caught me and Elliott.”

Petty had his own problems, but soon found that his paled in comparison.

“I could hear somebody to my left trying to crank up after I was hanged up over there,” he said. “I looked over and saw Bill’s car on fire, and that concerned me because he’s got a bruised sternum. He’s real bruised in his chest, and I wasn’t sure if he could breathe or not. I tried to get out and I couldn’t breathe just because it knocked the breath out of me.

“That’s two big wrecks he’s taken. Our prayers are with him.”

A week ago, Earnhardt had been knocked into Elliott. This time Earnhardt merely spun, part of the strange scenario but not the problem.

“You have a totally anxious moment, because you’re really worried for Bill,” Joe Garone, the team’s crew chief said while a crowd gathered around the garage, watching the crew attack the car with power saws, its front a mangled twist of pipes and wires.

“He didn’t talk to us. I think he had the wind knocked out of him. I know he was sore. He was sore when he started [the race]. You forget about the car when you’re worried. Our only concern is the driver.”

That concern was exacerbated when Elliott sat in the car, apparently stunned. They teach you early in televised racing to take down the window net after a wreck as a sign that you are alive and well.

“When he’s sitting there and the net doesn’t come down, you wonder,” Garone said.

There was ample time for it. The race was red-flagged for 26 minutes 33 seconds.

It was the end to a miserable day for Elliott, a day that included running out of gas on the 49th lap, with a pit stop planned for the 50th.

“We had the gas pretty well figured, but I guess we didn’t figure it close enough,” Garone said.

His sound was empty, as he looked over his shoulder at cars started up again, driving around the track.

“We’ve got to figure a way to get this back home,” he said, looking at what has become a habit: hauling wreckage away from a track a second week in a row, with a car to get ready in two weeks for an all-star race for a driver who will still be sore.