Mayfield Taking A Plane To The ‘Subway Series’

Jeremy Mayfield, driver of the Mobil 1 Taurus on NASCAR’s Winston Cup Series, takes part in one of the world’s most important sporting events Wednesday night. Mayfield will be guest of the Commissioner for Game Four of the World Series. The New York Mets will host the New York Yankees in that game. He leaves Wednesday afternoon for the game, returning after the game Wednesday night. It will mark the first time a NASCAR driver has been the guest of Major League Baseball at any post-season event.

Mayfield drove a World Series/Mobil 1 Taurus the past two races, sporting the colors at Talladega, Ala., and Rockingham, N.C. While problems under the hood brought both races to disappointing finishes, the runs were strong for the team in both. At Talladega, Mayfield sliced through the field from the back and, drafting with team mate Rusty Wallace, made his way towards the top 10 before a valve spring broke in the engine just past halfway. At Rockingham, Mayfield won the pole and led the most laps. Clearly the dominant car, an alternator problem led the battery failure, costing the team six laps in the pits very late in the race.

It has been an up-and-down season for Mayfield and the Mobil 1 team. They are one of just a handful of teams to have won more than one race this season, and no team has won more 500-mile races this season. Mayfield has captured race victories at California and Pocono this year, and his four poles are second only to Wallace in NASCAR Winston Cup racing.

Q. The last part of the Rockingham race had to be a major disappointment.

JEREMY MAYFIELD - "Yeah, it was. It was for me and it was for all of the guys on this race team. We’ve all worked really hard, and it looked like everything was really coming together in that race. I don’t think there is any doubt we were the dominant car out there and that we were going to win the race. But we’d been having problems with the alternator since early in the race. We were just hoping it would hold off until we got finished. Another 40 laps or so, and we would have been home free."

Q. The whole season has been that was it seems.

JEREMY MAYFIELD - "Putting together back-to-back days with good luck has been tough for some reason. Somebody said afterwards that if we had started 35th, we probably would have won the race since we used our bad luck up early. But since we won the pole, we were in big trouble. It’s been that way all year. When things are going really good, something bad seems to happen. When things aren’t going so great, some really good stuff seems to happen. I guess we average out to a pretty good year but the ride through the year hasn’t always been a lot of fun. We’ve been calling it a ‘roller coaster year,’ but roller coasters are kind of fun. This is like a haunted roller coaster or something sometimes."

Q. What do you think about going to the World Series?

JEREMY MAYFIELD - "That’s going to be pretty cool. It would be a whole lot cooler if we were going up there as winners of the Pop Secret 400 but at least we had the World Series car up front for a long time. Everybody knew we were there. It’s the kind of thing you always want to do. I think every sports fan wants to see a World Series game, go to the Super Bowl, watch the Daytona 500, stuff like that. How can you not be excited?"

Q. You said you were pulling for the New York Yankees.

JEREMY MAYFIELD - "Yeah, they have a lot of history. . . a whole lot of history. Nothing against the Mets. I think (catcher Mike) Piazza is cool, and I like guys like that. If you’re going to go, you have to pull for somebody, so I guess I’ll go with the Yankees. I’m more of a Cincinnati Reds fan than anything. Growing up in Owensboro (Kentucky), they were right down the road - or right down the river, depending on how you got there. So everybody kind of pulled for them. They were sort of the hometown team. When I moved to North Carolina, so many people seemed to be Atlanta Braves fans, so I kind of got caught up in that a little bit too. If the Reds or the Braves were playing, I’d probably be pulling for them."

Q. The Mobil 1 team hasn’t done many specialty cars.

JEREMY MAYFIELD - "No, we haven’t. And that’s probably a good thing. When we do a special car, it’s been a really neat deal, a real first-class type deal. We’ve done three and all three have been first-class deals. We did the Kentucky Derby last year. I got the chance to go to Churchill Downs and meet the trainers and the jockeys, to see the horses. And even though we were in California while the Kentucky Derby was going on, we still felt like we were a big, big part of it. Then at the end of last year, we did a special car for Mobil’s 125th anniversary. Hey, how many times are you going to turn 125? So that was a big-time, first-class deal too. And now we’re adding the World Series to the mix. I don’t think there is a team out there who can top who we’ve worked with on these special cars."

Q. What about the last three races of the season - Phoenix, Homestead and Atlanta?

JEREMY MAYFIELD - "We’re going into all three planning on winning them. We’ve run well enough this year and we’ve run well enough times this year to be a major factor at all three of those tracks. Just because we’ve had some bad luck and just because it has been a roller coaster kind of year doesn’t mean we’ve given up or we’ve quit trying. This team doesn’t do that. We don’t hang our heads. We just keep on working harder. We’ll work our way through this and we’ll be a better team because of it. All of this helps us. We’re just getting stronger and getting better. What you saw most of the Rockingham race is just a sign of things to come."