June 23, 1999                                                      by Jane Smith

        TEST AND TUNE AT DAYTONA INTERNATIONAL


Elliot Sadler, Buckshot Jones and Matt Kenseth were at Daytona this
week on Tuesday and Wednesday to test and tune their cars under the
night lights of the Daytona track.  Wednesay, they opened the test session to the public from 2 P.M. to 10 P.M. free of charge.

With maybe 100 people in the first grandstand after turn 4, Daytona
was not so hard to see.  But you still needed to be at the top of the
grandstand to see most of the track.  And even when you did see the
track, the cars were no more than little ants running around a track.
This made me think, "Is this really racing?"

Racing, for a lot of people, is seeing the cars and the drivers.  At a
local track, you can do that.  But at a 2 l/2 mile track, you really
see nothing.  You might as well be on I-95 watching the semis race
each other. 

It was quite obvious that the 3 cars were there to test their qualifying
engines as they never ran more than 2 laps at a time.  The closer it got to the magic qualifying hour - 8 P.M., the more you saw Elliot Sadler and Buckshot Jones. Matt Kenseth left with his car around 5.  Both Elliot and Buckshot would take one lap high and one lap low and check and see which was the faster lap for  them.  Not what I expected a test session to be but what it was.

Thank goodness for local track racing where you can see the whole track and sometimes even see the drivers' faces as they go by on their way to the finish line.  I will take that any day.

                                                                 -Jane Smith