2000 Pepsi 400 presented by Meijer at Michigan

Michigan is a two-mile, moderately banked D-shaped oval in Brooklyn, Michigan, and in 2000 it was one of the places where an unrestricted Cup engine could stretch its legs. Dale Earnhardt Jr. put the numbers on it. His pole lap of 37.667 seconds worked out to 191.149 mph, and the four cars behind him were all within a third of a second: Dale Jarrett at 37.903 (189.959 mph), Rick Mast at 37.915 (189.898), Ricky Rudd at 37.941 (189.768) and Bobby Labonte at 37.965 (189.648). Those figures come from the race article's qualifying table, not from the Racin.net sheets, and they are the only speeds this page will quote. The list of drivers who missed the show is longer than usual for the year and worth pausing on: Geoff Bodine, Darrell Waltrip, Stacy Compton, Kyle Petty, David Keith and Carl Long all failed to qualify. Some of those are among the most recognizable names the series had in 2000; a fast field at Michigan did not care. For a newcomer, that is the point of qualifying at a track like this. Speed is the only entry fee, and in August 2000 the price was somewhere above 189 mph.

Wallace's No. 2 Penske-Kranefuss Racing Ford led 118 of the 200 laps. Ricky Rudd led 42 in the Robert Yates No. 28, Bobby Labonte 19, and Earnhardt Jr. 13 from his pole; Kevin Lepage, Ted Musgrave and John Andretti each led a single lap, the kind of number that usually means a car stayed out during a round of pit stops. Rudd finished second, Labonte third, and Dale Jarrett fourth, which gave Yates two cars in the top four. Johnny Benson Jr. was fifth for Tyler Jet Motorsports and Dale Earnhardt sixth for Richard Childress Racing. Jimmy Spencer, Matt Kenseth, Ward Burton and Jeff Burton completed the top ten. Average speed for the 400 miles was 132.597 mph. The win was Wallace's 52nd in the Winston Cup Series and his third of the 2000 season, and he would add a fourth six days later at Bristol. ESPN televised the race with Bob Jenkins, Ned Jarrett and Benny Parsons in the booth; Motor Racing Network had the radio call.

Junior had the pole lap. Wallace had the other 118.

Racin.net published two pages from this weekend that Wikipedia still cites: the first and second practice speed charts. Practice at a superspeedway is where teams find out whether their qualifying setup and their race setup are the same car or two different ones, and a reader in 2000 who wanted to guess the pole would have opened those sheets first. They no longer exist here as speed tables. What this page carries instead:

• The qualifying top five and the finishing order, taken from the Wikipedia race article.
• Laps led per driver, from the same article's results table.
• The six drivers who did not qualify, named as the article names them.
• No practice speeds, and no text from the original pages.

If you came here from a Wikipedia footnote looking for the original practice times, the honest answer is that they are not on this site. The web archive may hold the old page; this one holds the race.

Michigan International Speedway had two dates on the 2000 calendar. The first was the Kmart 400 earlier in the year; this was the second, the 22nd of 34 points races, run one week after the road course at Watkins Glen and six days before the half-mile at Bristol. That sequence is a good short course in what a Cup team did in a season: a 2.454-mile road circuit at an average of 91 mph, then a two-mile oval at 132, then a 0.533-mile bowl at 85, on consecutive weekends with the same crews and, mostly, the same drivers. Wallace won the last two of those three. For Earnhardt Jr., the Michigan pole was a marker of speed rather than a result; he led 13 laps and the race went elsewhere. That happened to a lot of pole sitters in 2000, and Michigan's wide corners, which let a faster race car pass almost anywhere, made it more likely than at most tracks.