After 22 fruitless attempts in the Daytona 500, Rusty Wallace is running out of ways to lose NASCAR's biggest race. He has blown an engine, smacked concrete walls and barrel-rolled down the backstretch. He has come up short in a Buick in the 1980s, a Pontiac in the '90s and a Ford in the 21st century.
On Sunday, he'll take his final crack at winning the Great American Race at Daytona International Speedway — this time, in a shiny Dodge Charger.
At 48, Wallace is retiring at the end of the 2005 season. Despite an impressive resume that includes a championship in 1989, 55 victories and more than $43 million in winnings, NASCAR's perennially upbeat hard-charger faces the prospect of leaving stock-car racing without its most coveted trophy.
Mark Martin faces the same prospect. At 46, he'll try for a 21st and final time on Sunday to win his first Daytona 500, having declared 2005 his final season, as well.
That guarantees that at least one of the popular veterans will fail to win Daytona in an otherwise storybook career. To the drivers, mechanics and owners who have raced against them, it won't detract from their achievements.
"It might be the biggest race there is, but it's just one race," says Richard Petty, who won seven NASCAR championships and seven Daytona 500s before retiring in 1992.
NFL Hall of Fame quarterback Jim Kelly, who owns a team in NASCAR's Grand National ranks, sees it much the same, having coming up short in four consecutive Super Bowls with the Buffalo Bills.
"It's one race; it's one football game," Kelly said. "Even though Karl Malone didn't win an NBA championship, that shouldn't determine the success he had throughout his career. No one game should determine a person's career. In football, it's a team sport; in racing, it's a team sport."
Winning any NASCAR race is hard. There are a million variables over a 500-mile race that can scuttle top equipment and the best-plan plans: Flat tires, botched pit stops, the impetuousness of inexperienced drivers and the utterly unexpected — like the seagull that plowed into Dale Earnhardt's Chevrolet one year, fouling the car's handling in an otherwise promising Daytona 500.
The slightest glitch has even greater impact at Daytona and Talladega (Ala.) superspeedways, where NASCAR-mandated carburetor restrictor plates limit horsepower. In doing so, the plates keep the cars bunched up in thick packs and give almost every driver a chance of winning as long as they're still running with the leaders on the last lap.
Restrictor-plates are required on just four of the 36 races that comprise the Nextel Cup schedule. That's why car owner Jack Roush believes that winning the Daytona 500 doesn't signify much about a team's prospects of a successful season.
"The car combinations are not at all similar to what we race everyplace else," said Roush. "Unless you have brilliance in a pit crew or ineptitude in a pit crew, there's really not much of a relationship between the performance you'd expect from a team at Daytona as it would relate to the other places."
By extension, Roush argues, winning at Daytona doesn't signify much about a driver's ability. As Roush views it, the driver isn't much of a factor at Daytona — except to the extent that he is respected by his fellow racers, who can make his job easier by giving him room to maneuver on the track.
"You take that out of the equation, and it's almost a non-event for a driver," said Roush, who is chasing his third consecutive NASCAR championship but has never won a Daytona 500. "Not that a driver can't get hurt, or not that a driver can't make a mistake that would cause a problem. But the driver, for all the skill and ability and nerve and experience, has less effect on the outcome here than most places."
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Car owner Ray Evernham disagrees. "At Daytona, the car has got to handle, but the driver makes a huge difference in playing the [aerodynamic] draft right," said Evernham, who was Jeff Gordon's crew chief when he won the 1997 and '99 Daytona 500s. "The best drivers are going to come to the front here tomorrow for two reasons: Because they know how to play the draft, and they know how to get their cars set up [to handle well]. I think you still have to be a great driver to win at Daytona."
Luck also plays a role.
For Wallace and Martin, the bad luck began Thursday, when both got snared in a seven-car pileup during their 150-mile qualifying race. Wallace's No. 2 Dodge slammed headlong into the Chevy of Kevin Harvick, who triggered the pileup, then was thrown into the air by an on-rushing car. Martin's car was badly damaged, too, but his crew worked like mad Friday to repair it in time for Sunday's race.
Wallace will use a back-up that he insists is as stout as his primary car: Not as fast on the straightaways, but a tick faster in the corners, which is where he predicts the race will be won. As for his history of bad karma at Daytona, Wallace says he puts no stock in luck at all.
"I've had a lot of crazy stuff happen here — some wrecks and stuff," Wallace said. "And Thursday didn't help matters. But I'm not into all that hoodoo stuff. I'm a mechanical guy; I just drive the car. I don't reminisce and think and burn incense."
It was a 190-mph move that distilled the essence of Tony Stewart's genius behind the wheel — instinctive, gutsy and hair-raising.
Knocked low as he dueled door-to-door with challenger Carl Edwards coming out of Daytona International Speedway's fourth turn, Stewart found himself punted off the asphalt and onto the front-stretch grass — so slick when it meets treadless racing tires that it may as well be a sheet of ice.
Stewart managed to keep the nose of his car pointed straight, roared dead-ahead across the grass and braced himself for jolt as he popped back onto the asphalt in Turn 1 as a swarm of racecars rounded the corner. He not only dodged a collision; he roared on the win NASCAR's Hershey's 300 Saturday to claim his second victory in three days.
On Thursday he won a 150-mile qualifying race in his Joe Gibbs-owned No. 18 Chevrolet to lock in a fourth-place starting spot for Sunday's Daytona 500.
Stewart's move across the grass had broadcasters gasping for air and his peers invoking the hallowed name of the late Dale Earnhardt, who pulled off a similar shortcut across the grass en route to victory in the 2001 IROC race at Daytona.
The victory was Stewart's first in NASCAR's grand national ranks, making him just the ninth driver to win at least one race in each series of stock-car racing.