2000 goracing.com 500 at Bristol

Bristol measures 0.533 miles around, which makes 500 laps come to 266.5 miles. A short track in NASCAR's vocabulary is anything under a mile, and Bristol is the extreme case: a lap of about fifteen seconds, and a full field that is never more than a few seconds from the car ahead. Qualifying showed how little separates the front of such a field. Wallace's pole lap was 15.292 seconds, 125.477 mph. Jeff Gordon was second at 125.469, Steve Park third at 125.428, Mike Skinner fourth at 125.175 and Jerry Nadeau fifth at 125.109; the gap from first to second was eight thousandths of a mile per hour. Four drivers failed to qualify: Mike Bliss, Hut Stricklin, Carl Long and Ricky Craven. Craven had led 63 laps at Loudon in July, six weeks earlier, and now watched Bristol from outside the fence, which says something about how thin the margins were for cars outside the top teams that year. For a reader who has never seen the place, picture a concrete bowl with grandstands on every side, and understand that at Bristol the practice sheet the old site kept was as much about surviving traffic as about raw pace.

Wallace led 279 laps and Tony Stewart led 133; between them the No. 2 and the No. 20 accounted for 412 of the 500. Mark Martin led 46, Ward Burton 21, Sterling Marlin 6, Jimmy Spencer 5, and a handful of drivers, Dale Earnhardt, Jeff Burton, Bobby Labonte and Kevin Lepage among them, led one or two laps apiece, usually the sign of a pit cycle rather than a charge. The decisive move came late. On the final restart, with 40 laps to go, Wallace took the lead and held it to the flag. Stewart finished second, Martin third, Earnhardt fourth in the Childress No. 3, and Steve Park fifth in the car Earnhardt owned, two weeks after his Watkins Glen win. Jeff Burton, Elliott Sadler, Sterling Marlin, Dale Jarrett and Ricky Rudd rounded out the top ten.

The race took three hours, seven minutes and fifteen seconds, an average of 85.394 mph, which on a half-mile is a long night of cautions and restarts rather than a slow one. It was Wallace's 53rd Winston Cup win and his fourth and final win of 2000. ESPN aired the race live with Jerry Punch, Ned Jarrett and Benny Parsons in the booth.

The addresses Wikipedia cites for this race are the first and second practice speed charts from the old Racin.net. At Bristol a practice sheet is a strange document, because the quickest lap in a session often belongs to a car that found clear track for fifteen seconds rather than the car that will be fastest for 500 laps in traffic, and the sheet cannot tell you which is which. What this rebuilt page carries in their place:

• The qualifying top five and pole time from the Wikipedia race article.
• The finishing order and laps led from the same article's results table.
• The race time and average speed, cross-checked against Wikipedia's list of past winners of the Bristol night race.
• No practice speeds and no reused text from the original pages.

Wallace took the pole, then took the lead back with 40 laps to go.

Six days before Bristol, Wallace had won the Pepsi 400 presented by Meijer at Michigan, leading 118 of 200 laps on a two-mile oval where the pole speed was above 191 mph. At Bristol the pole speed was 125 and the track was a quarter of the length, and he won again, from the front, leading more than half the distance. Two wins in a week on tracks that have almost nothing in common is the kind of stretch that defines a season, and in Wallace's case it closed the account: number 53 at Bristol was his last win of 2000. Bristol's August race has been a night race since 1978, and it has been the sort of event a driver's career is measured against; sweeping the pole and the win there, and beating Tony Stewart, who led 133 laps himself, to do it, is a result that holds up on any list. The archive kept two practice sheets from the weekend. The record they lead to is this one.