| | Hello Philadelphia International Airport! And hello, Delaware. It's time for the second visit of the season to Dover Downs, the high-banked, one-mile concrete track.
And this week: NO RESTRICTOR PLATES!
|  | | Bobby Labonte hasn't allowed an occasional bad race slow down his march toward his first Winston Cup championship. |
It's the 27th stop of the Winston Cup season, the MBNA.com 400. This is always a grueling race. Tony Stewart won here in June, when only five cars finished on the lead lap -- Stewart, Matt Kenseth, Bobby Labonte, Dale Jarrett and Ricky Rudd. For the record, Jeff Burton, now second in points, finished 34th at Dover in June. In fact, Jeff has seven finishes of 20th or worse at Dover in his 13 starts there. I guess he knows why they call the track the Monster Mile.
Dover is not the real monster the championship contenders are fearing this week. Instead, it's the frightening consistency of point leader Bobby Labonte that is a scary sight for the drivers hoping to win the 2000 Winston Cup.
Labonte hasn't finished out of the top-15 in 14 straight races.
And while he has finished 15th in two of the last four races, he has increased his lead in the points.
In the 26 races this season, Labonte has four finishes of 15th or worse, but each time, he has rebounded in impressive fashion the following race. Bobby has had two very interesting four-race stretches; one in the spring, when things were just getting warmed up; and one this summer when the heat was on.
Of course, the heat is still on!
He came home 21st at Talladega in April, a dismal day spent riding around at the back of the pack before getting caught up in a multi-car crash. That crash also cost him the points lead for the first time in seven races.
The next week at California, Labonte's Interstate Batteries Pontiac never led a lap, but he roared to a second-place finish behind Jeremy Mayfield, and recaptured the lead in the quest for the Cup.
Strangely enough, in the very next race at Richmond, Labonte had his worst finish of the season. Bobby was in a vicious three-wide battle for sixth when he became a casualty of the physics of racing: too many cars and too little track. This pirouette by his Pontiac, and the ensuing pit stop for tires, cost him two laps, and the nearly cost him the point lead again.
He finished 26th, and left three points in front of Mark Martin.
But again, Labonte recovered nicely next time out with a sterling second-place finish at Charlotte.
A 15th-place run at Bristol was followed by his brutal crash in practice on Friday at Darlington. Two days later, he was the reigning king of the Southern 500 with his first ever win at the track.
Then the series returned to Richmond, where once again, Labonte was late into a strong run when he had to pit to fix a power steering problem. A top-five finish became a 15th-place finish. Still, Labonte actually increased his lead in the point race.
Last Sunday at Loudon, just like at California, Labonte never led a lap, yet he still finished second and stretched his lead another 10 points.
Now Labonte takes his mean team and their green machine back to Dover where they have been ... you guessed it, very consistent.
Bobby has six straight top-five finishes, including a win in June of last year. He has finished in the top 10 in 10 of the last 11 races at Dover, and nine of those top-10 finishes were fifth or better.
That's pretty good.
But, would you rather be Labonte or Mark Martin? Martin is chasing his fourth straight win in the September race at Dover. Now in June, Mark was finished 36th, two spots behind his teammate Burton. And back in June of 1996, he finished 40th. In the seven races in between, seven top-seven finishes, six of those in the top-five, including the three wins.
Last week at Loudon, Martin made his 450th career start in the Winston Cup series. He is currently eighth in Winston Cup points, and well on the way to his 12th straight season where he will finish in the top 10 in points. Martin has just one win in what has been an incredibly frustrating season, and that came at Martinsville, 18 races ago. He is also still looking for his first pole of the season. The last year Mark didn't win a pole was 1996.
But Dover could be a get-well race for Mark and his team. A year ago, he snapped a 25-race victory drought by winning. And in the overall scheme of things, a fifth-place finish in the point race is not out of the picture.
But for Mark Martin, and everyone else, the race at Dover will be a fierce fight to beat Bobby Labonte. And for the three contenders in the race for the championship, well, trying to close in on Labonte at Dover will be a monster task.
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