2000 Global Crossing @ The Glen at Watkins Glen

Qualifying was scheduled for Saturday, August 12, and it never happened. The session had already been pushed back by a string of rain delays, and when the rain kept falling through the afternoon NASCAR cancelled it and went to the rulebook. Without qualifying times, the first 35 starting spots went to the teams in the top 35 in owner's points, in order, which is how Bobby Labonte's No. 18 Joe Gibbs Racing car came to be listed as the pole sitter for a road race with no pole speed beside his name. Five drivers failed to make the field: Boris Said, Scott Pruett, R. K. Smith, Brett Bodine and Brian Simo. For a newcomer, the mechanism matters more than the names. NASCAR's owner's points accrue to the car number rather than the driver, and the rain-out rules of the era leaned on them, which rewarded full-time teams with a season of results behind them and left occasional entries with nowhere to go. The Sunday grid at the Glen looked like the championship table because, in effect, it was the championship table. It also meant that the practice sessions, including the second one the archive kept, were the only timed running anyone did before the green flag.

Steve Park led 53 of the 90 laps. That single number is most of the story. Watkins Glen is a 2.454-mile road course, and a driver who is in front for more than half of a 220.5-mile race there has been in control of it, not merely lucky at the end. Labonte led 15 laps from his points-awarded pole, Jeff Burton 14, Ricky Rudd 3, Mark Martin 2, Wally Dallenbach Jr. 2 and Robby Gordon 1. Martin brought the Roush No. 6 home second, Burton was third in the No. 99, Robby Gordon fourth for Team Menard, and Labonte fifth. Tony Stewart, Dale Jarrett, Joe Nemechek, Dallenbach and Matt Kenseth filled out the top ten.

Average speed over the distance was 91.336 mph, a figure that tells a newcomer what a road course is: at Michigan the following Sunday the winner averaged 132.597 mph, and nobody thought that slow. Park's winnings were listed at $124,870. It was his first career Winston Cup win and the only one he would take in 2000, delivered in the car owned by Dale Earnhardt, who finished the year's Bristol race in the same top five as his driver two weeks later. ESPN carried the race, with Bob Jenkins, Ned Jarrett and Benny Parsons on the call.

The original Racin.net page for this race was the speed chart from the second practice session. In a normal weekend that sheet is a footnote; you look at qualifying instead. At the 2000 Glen it was closer to the main document, because there was no qualifying to look at. Wikipedia still cites the old address as a source for the race, which is the reason the page has been rebuilt here rather than left to the web archive. A few things to know about what this page does and does not carry:

• No practice speeds are reproduced. Every number on this page comes from the Wikipedia race article.
• The pole is recorded as Bobby Labonte by owner's points, with no time attached, because none was set.
• The five drivers who missed the race are listed above as the article gives them.
• Nothing from the original site's text has been reused.

Rain set the grid on Saturday. Steve Park settled the rest on Sunday.

This was the 21st of 34 points races in 2000, the middle of a hard August. The series had come from Loudon and Daytona in July, went from the Glen to the two-mile oval at Michigan on August 20, then to the half-mile at Bristol on August 26. Three consecutive weekends, three different kinds of racetrack, and the same field expected to be fast on all of them. A road course asks a Cup driver to turn right, to shift gears, and to brake hard into corners that an oval never presents, and the results sheet from the Glen usually carries a few names that the ovals do not. In 2000 the names at the top were regulars: Park, Martin, Burton, Gordon, Labonte. Read that as the rain-out doing its work. With the grid set by points, the specialists who might have qualified their way in stayed home, and the weekend belonged to the teams that raced every week.