Driver Puts Brakes on Plan

Butch Gilliland continues his Winston West season on Sunday in Monroe, Wash., where he will try to put behind one of the most disheartening performances of his career.

Gilliland planned to compete in five Winston Cup races this season for Jenn West Motorsports of Anaheim, which expected to run the full NASCAR Winston Cup series next year.

But in Gilliland’s three attempts, he has completed only three laps, all at Sears Point three weeks ago, in a car that should have given him 300 laps. An engine failure caused him to finish last in a field of 43.

Now, he says there’s no rush to expand into the Winston Cup Series. He is sixth in the Winston West Series, which resumes Sunday at Evergreen Speedway, a track he won at last season.

“I think one of the biggest mistakes people make trying to break into Winston Cup is going back east and trying to run a full schedule without being prepared,” said Gilliland, who won a street stock race last weekend on the dirt track at Perris Auto Speedway. “For our team, this is a business, it isn’t a hobby. To do it correctly, we have to have all our tools in place.”

Gilliland’s next Winston Cup race is scheduled Nov. 7 in Phoenix, and the team is considering racing Oct. 3 in Martinsville, Va. It decided not to compete at the Brickyard 400 Aug. 7 Indianapolis. If he competes in more than five races, he will lose his rookie status.

The race at Sears Point was the first Winston Cup race Gilliland actually got into this season.

The team formed in January and didn’t get a chance to test the car. As a result, Gilliland failed to qualify for the March 7 race in Las Vegas. Rain prevented him from making the California 500 field in Fontana a month later.

“We can run any five [races], it doesn’t matter, and I think we have the cars built that are capable of going to any track and doing well,” Gilliland said. “Our original goals were to run a full Winston Cup schedule next year, but we don’t have to. We want to make sure when we go back [to Charlotte to run a full Winston Cup schedule] that we’re fully prepared.”

But as far as lows go in the career of Gilliland, 42, the race at Sears Point was nearly rock bottom.

“It probably rates with the most disappointing moments in my career,” Gilliland said. “I’ve run 75% of a race, been in third place, and broke. Here, we never got a chance to show what we could do, but we were prepared and capable of running in the top 10 all day.

“We were as ready as any team could be. The ingredients were there for a top 10 finish and I believe we had a top 10 car. It was a big disappointment for me.”

It was also disappointing because of the circumstances that allowed Gilliland to even get into the race.

The top 25 advanced from Friday’s qualifying and Gilliland missed the cut, finishing 31st. Then he blew an engine during practice before Saturday’s qualifying. The Jenn West Motorsports team then provided a Herculean effort, switching out the engines in only 45 minutes.

Using the qualifying engine of Darrell Waltrip, Gilliland qualified 27th without any practice laps.

Then came the race, followed shortly by the heartbreak.