Jarrett Continues Rolling Up Top Five Finishes

Some may have written off former NASCAR champion Dale Jarrett as over the hill after his miserable 2003 season and a relatively slow start to this year.

Not so fast.

With a strong second half, the 47-year-old Jarrett narrowly missed out on the new 10-man, 10-race Chase for the Nextel Cup championship battle, and the Robert Yates Racing driver is showing signs that he could be a serious contender next season.

Going into today’s Banquet 400 at Kansas Speedway, Jarrett has two straight top five finishes -- fourth at Dover and third last Sunday at Talladega -- raising his total to six for the season. All of them have come since June. His last previous top five before he ran third at Michigan in June was a victory in the second race of the 2003 season.

The 1999 Cup champion wound up 26th in last year’s points, the first time he was out of the top 10 since finishing 13th in 1995. He goes into Kansas 13th and is only 78 points behind 11th-place Jamie McMurray with seven races remaining.

“I think that the important thing for this team right now is to try to get into victory lane again, and we’re a lot closer,” Jarrett said. “I mean, it’s been a long time since we finished in the top five back-to-back, so I feel like we’re gaining a lot as far as consistency and performance go.

“Maybe Kansas will be that place this week where we can get back to victory lane.”

That would be another big turnaround for Jarrett, who has not finished better than 30th in three previous starts on the 1.5-mile Kansas oval.

“Our finishes really haven’t reflected the way we have run at Kansas,” Jarrett said. “We have lost a motor the last two years we raced there and the first year we were racing in the top 10 and I got caught up in an accident and wasn’t able to finish the race.”

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The announcement last week that DaimlerChrysler’s new Dodge Charger will replace the Intrepid in NASCAR in 2005 brought back plenty of memories to NASCAR veterans who fondly remember the previous Charger era.

The old Chargers competed in NASCAR’s premier series from 1966-1977 and accounted for 124 victories, including six by the unique and much-loved winged versions. Thirty-seven of Richard Petty’s all-time record 200 victories and three of his seven championships came in Chargers.

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Longtime NASCAR star and two-time champion Terry Labonte, 47, has scheduled a news conference Tuesday at the Hendrick Motorsports compound in Concord, N.C., and he is expected to announce he will drive a part-time schedule the next two seasons. Labonte began his Cup career in 1978 and had a then-record string of 655 consecutive starts broken in 2000.