Stock Car Racing Never Grows Old for Marlin

Ryan Newman, Kurt Busch, Jimmie Johnson, Kevin Harvick, Dale Earnhardt Jr.... The names of NASCAR’s young lions trip lightly off the tongues of stock car racing fans, and the precocious drivers themselves acknowledge that they are having the times of their young lives.

But when the hot young Winston Cup stars take the green flag in their fast Fords and Chevrolets at noon today for the start of the NAPA Auto Parts 500 at California Speedway, they might want to check their mirrors often, just to make sure they aren’t being reeled in by an old-timey Dodge driver who’s actually having more fun than they are.

For them, it’s the first sweet smell of success. For Sterling Marlin, it’s the second time around, and if his success is nothing new, that makes it no less welcome.

“We’re having a big time,” said Marlin, 44, who drove his first Winston Cup race a year and a half before Newman was born. “I’m having the most fun I’ve ever had. It’s fun to show up and know you’ve got a great race car.”

It’s axiomatic that a good car gets better with the right driver and, from all appearances, Marlin is precisely the driver Dodge was looking for when it returned to big-time racing last year.

That wasn’t exactly the plan. Ray Evernham’s team was going to be Dodge’s standard bearer. But it was Marlin, driving for Chip Ganassi/Felix Sabates, who won two races, accounting for half of Dodge’s victories, who finished third in the season standings, behind four-time Chevy champion Jeff Gordon and feisty Pontiac driver Tony Stewart.

This season? Even better. Marlin has already won twice, at Las Vegas and Darlington, and leads the standings by 109 points over Ford driver Matt Kenseth.

“This past year and a half’s been really good for me,” said Marlin, a long-time Chevy driver. “When we signed up with Dodge, that kinda opened doors that weren’t open to us before. I don’t want to step on anyone’s toes, but Chevrolet’s gonna take care of the Hendrick and Earnhardt and Childress teams. We were kinda low on the totem pole. With Dodge, we came in and were the equal to anybody.”

In his first go-round as a stock car star, Marlin won successive Daytona 500s, in 1994, when he went on to the Winston Cup championship, then again in ‘95, the same year he scored the first of his two victories at Talladega, NASCAR’s other high-banked superspeedway.

This time around, Marlin has been hot on the smaller tracks. He won last season at Michigan International, the two-mile track after which California Speedway was patterned, and on the 1.5-mile high banks of Lowe’s Motor Speedway near Charlotte, N.C. The track at Las Vegas is 1.5 miles, at Darlington 1.3.

“Just shows that this team has a package for everywhere,” he said.

The car Marlin will drive today is new to competition but not new to the two-mile D-shaped track. Marlin tested it for two days here in March--well, a day and a half, as it turned out--and got a good feel for the track.

“For a day and a half, we ran our race setup and then we was gonna run our qualifying setup after lunch the second day but that got rained out,” he said.

So, when people ask why he didn’t qualify well here Friday--he was 25th at 184.280 mph, more than 3 mph slower than Newman’s pole-winning speed of 187.432--that might be part of the reason. A bigger part, though, might have been that he qualified late in the session, and under a bit of a handicap.

“It started raining on us,” he said. “[The car] bottomed out real bad. You don’t want to sail off down in a corner when it’s raining. We’ll be all right for the race. The car was a lot faster than we qualified.”

Marlin was 12th fastest in Saturday’s happy hour, the final practice, but in an early-morning session had been third fastest in his new car with its new color scheme. Folks used to looking for his familiar No. 40 “Silver Bullet” can watch for the same number, but the car--for this race and nine others this season--has been recast in gold, according to his sponsoring brewery’s wishes.

Which more or less goes along with the revival of Marlin’s career. If the first time around was silver, the second has been gold. The young lions might want to keep a close eye on him.

They also might want to cast a wary eye Gordon’s way. The defending series champion won six races last season but has won none in 2002. He hasn’t won since last September, a span of 17 races, the longest drought in his career since his initial victory at Charlotte in 1994.

Gordon is going through a widely publicized divorce but says that has not affected his driving.

“When something like this happens, we try not to dwell on the what-ifs,” he said. “What we’ve learned from these races is that we are just as competitive as we were a year ago. It’s just a matter of putting it all together.”

And this may be where it all comes together. Gordon has won two of the five Winston Cup races here and likes the track.

“Given our past success [here], I think we can really make a move up the point standings,” he said.

So, what with the young speedsters, a rejuvenated Sterling Marlin, a determined Jeff Gordon and the promise of a cool, overcast day--precisely what race car engines like best--the more than 100,000 fans expected ought to have plenty to hold their attention.