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Talladega Elliott Saturday Press Conference Bill Elliott will start on the outside pole for tomorrow's Winston 500 at Talladega Superspeedway. Elliott has enjoyed great success at the 2.66-mile track over the years, earning two wins and eight poles. He has finished in the top 10 in almost half (22) of the 47 races in which he's competed on the famed Alabama track. And, on April 30, 1987, he set a stock-car record with a qualifying speed of 212.809 miles per hour. BILL ELLIOTT -94- McDonald's Taurus- YESTERDAY, AFTER FIRST-ROUND QUALIFYING, YOU SAID THAT YOU WOULD KNOW MORE ABOUT HOW THE NEW RULES CHANGES WOULD AFFECT SUNDAY'S RACE AFTER SATURDAY'S PRACTICE. NOW THAT THAT PRACTICE IS OVER, WHAT DO YOU KNOW THAT YOU DIDN'T KNOW YESTERDAY? "I don't see it being a lot different-other than, yeah, you can make a run on the car in front of you. Like I said yesterday, I don't know what NASCAR is trying to accomplish, because I ran around in the pack, you can't get away from the pack. Then I backed way up and I caught back up to the pack. And, to me, it's going to be a difficult race from looking at it, and I'm saying that, but by positioning yourself in an area to win the race, because right now I don't know where you want to be. I don't think you want to be out front, not unless you want to cut somebody off bad enough. And the problem is, when you start cutting people off, and then the guy behind you don't lift, you know, you got a good run on him and then he cuts you off, then you're going to cause a situation. So, man, I don't know. It's your typical Talladega to me." WITH THE THROTTLE RESPONSE NOW... "A little. I mean, you ain't got tons. You don't have just light-the-rear-tires-up throttle response. Yeah, you got more, but, see, I don't know that it's a lot of throttle response, you got a lot of drag on the car. With a lot of drag on the race car, when you get behind other cars you're going to gain more than when as slick as the cars were here before, because they had to keep taking power off because the cars had gotten so aerodynamic-people had figured this spoiler stuff out, you know, it made the cars that much better. The way I see it, one guy, if he gets out there, he's kind of a sitting duck because all these other guys are gonna do is just back up and run at him, you know, it's gonna be a continuing deal. If one guy gets a little bit of a cushion, because the cars are so dirty, aerodynamically, that if he gets out there a little way, he's gonna really slow up. Well, that's gonna make all these other guys just look that much faster. It isn't necessarily that they engine-wise accelerate that much better, it's just that you're counting on that guy's dirty air to get you going. Plus, he's not able to get away because he's trying to lead the pack, he's in clean air so his car's the dirtiest and not getting any help-and then he's helping you make a run on him. Can 43 guys do that for 500 miles? I doubt it." IS THIS SIMILAR TO WHAT IT WAS LIKE 10 OR 15 YEARS AGO? WILL THE VETERAN DRIVERS HAVE AN ADVANTAGE? "I disagree. I don't know that anybody's got an advantage. It just depends on how good you get your car, and getting in the right place at the right time. I'd say the IROC guys probably got a pretty good handle on what it's been, because their cars are fairly dirty, they run a fairly good-size plate-but they run several seconds slower than what these cars are running here today. That makes the racing good and you don't put yourself in such jeopardy. Plus, you're only running 12 cars or whatever it is they run versus 43 guys running for the same hole. So, the odds of someone making a mistake is a whole lot better racing here Sunday afternoon." YOUR RECORD HERE SPEAKS FOR ITSELF. "I like Daytona better than I like here because it's a handling race track, it's a thinking race track. You gotta get your car working because, as a I said to someone yesterday, there isn't a handful of cars that normally can run a full green-flag run wide open. At some in point in time they get off bad enough that they can't run the corner wide open and that separates the field. Where here, your great-great-great-grandmother could run wide open for 500 miles, because the handling does not play that much of factor at this race track. That's why you see guys four and five deep. Now that the competition level has pretty well leveled out as far as the knowledge and the cars that are in the garage are all pretty good, then that just puts 43 guys there that's capable of winning the race." YESTERDAY YOU SAID YOU WERE MORE COMFORTABLE HERE AT 212 MILES PER HOUR THAN AT 190. COULD YOU EXPLAIN WHY? "When I ran 212 here, sure I was on the edge, but I had the car stuck to the race track a little bit better-because I had the power to pull it. You know, we could do whatever we wanted to with the spoiler back then, we could lay it down as far as you could stand it. When they started taking power away from us, then you had to really get the car freed up, loosened up. I can remember qualifying here, not so much since they put the spoiler on us here the last five or six years, I hadn't really felt like that's been out of control. With the exception of, several times we put a lot of shock on the car and soft springs and run on bump rubbers and all that stuff and that makes the car uncomfortable to drive. But, I'd say in the early '90s is when you'd really hang the car out, because you had a small plate, you could dictate the spoiler and, man, you'd run it just as loose as you could go."
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