BY TEAM FORD RACING CORRESPONDENT

Talladega, Ala. — After the dust settled on qualifying for Sunday’s EA Sports 500 half of the top-10 spots were sporting Blue Ovals. Giving the teams the added boost needed at the restrictor-plate tracks, where the Ford Tauruses have been lacking the past several years, is the new 2004 body and the new Ford engine.

Showing that his pole here in the spring was no fluke—Ricky Rudd. And while Rudd was not able to claim the top-spot he will start on the front row on Sunday.

“Bernie Marcus and all the guys at Ford on the aero package have worked really hard within the box to try to get these cars as slippery as they possibly can,” noted Rudd, who will start second in the EA Sports 500. “Obviously, aero is a big, big part of it. That Yates horsepower under the hood doesn't hurt matters too much either. That's a pretty big deal. It takes the whole package, obviously, here. Like I said, we're real pleased.

“We felt like our problems in the past, we've been able to run fast, but the cars haven't driven good in traffic or haven't driven good in race trim,” Rudd continued. “That's what Fatback McSwain and all the guys have been working real hard on the handling package. Some of the things they did to make it drive better—to make it not push, which is what it's always done in the past, it would get an aero-push—they worked on it and thought they gave up a little bit of speed.

“As it turns out, we didn't give up that much speed and we've got a whole lot better drivability."

Third place qualifier Dale Jarrett was pleased with how his UPS Ford performed on the clocks.

“We have a great engine package and it's gonna be a matter, as it always is, of being in the right place at the right time here and that's different places for everybody,” said the Robert Yates Racing driver. “Some guys might want to be in front right at the end while others may feel they need to be third, fourth or fifth, so getting our car to drive good tomorrow in practice will be important, but starting up front is nice. It's a good boost for the guys, too. We've worked extremely hard on these cars and our engine department has done just an incredible job, not only for here but all year long."

The other Ford drivers who made it into the top-10, all Chase for the Championship contenders, were Elliott Sadler, Matt Kenseth and Kurt Busch.

Maybe the happiest man in the game after qualifying was Sadler’s brother, Hermie. Hermie shot his car to an 11th places starting sport, almost unheard of for a privateer in the sport’s current climate.

"I'm ecstatic,” beamed the other Sadler. “I have to give a big thank you to Robert and Doug Yates, Eddie D'Hondt and everybody at Robert Yates Racing for allowing us to lease this car from them. It's been a pleasure to unload and be competitive all day. My guys are having fun and everybody is smiling. That will get us a decent, solid starting spot and I'm looking forward to doing what I can to help the other Yates cars out on Sunday. I'll be trying to finish all 500 miles and get us a respectable finish also."

The new rear spring rule did take some speed out of the equation here at Talladega, coming in right at the estimates NASCAR calculated. The pole speed when the tour was here in April, established by Rudd in the Motorcraft Ford, was 191.180 mph, verses the pole speed set today by Joe Nemechek at 190.749.

Perhaps the bigger benefit might be a subtle slowing of the once dominate Dale Earnhardt Inc. cars. Chassis engineers, who spied Earnhardt Junior’s ride on the track, at speed, report that the car didn’t squat quite as low as in the past.

“That new spring rule, I guess, is just another one of the quality control checks that they have to make sure that someone doesn't have a little bit of advantage over the other,” Rudd said wryly. “But it definitely slowed the cars up. I think we were on the pole the last race, we ran around a flat (50.084) and today the pole was a .20 [50.20], so it took two or three tenths out of the speed. You can't really tell it from a driver's standpoint. I don't notice any difference from the last race. I don't know about Dale [Jarrett], but the cars, to me, seemed about the same.

“It should have made the field more even, I think, but I haven't looked at the end results of qualifying to see if accomplished what NASCAR was looking to do."

"I think Ricky is exactly right,” Jarrett responded to Rudd’s commentary. “It'll be interesting to see how it plays out for the race, but I think we have equaled up the speeds. Any advantage anybody was getting, it has been crazy. Trying to keep up with the type of springs that we're running now.

Looking at the cost issue, and how a set of spring had escalated from about $200 to more than $3,000, Jarrett concluded, “The costs of these things have gotten totally out of hand and it's just crazy what was going on.”

SOME SECRET
It’s difficult to sneak a team out of the box when they draw attention to themselves. That’s the position that John Andretti and Dave Charpentier find themselves in this week when they set the pace during a test session in a ppc Racing-prepared Ford at the Lowe’s Motor Speedway.

The new combination of driver and crew chief set out to establish a baseline to see where they measured up, but at the end of the day Andretti got noticed after topping the speed charts.

"We thought we'd come here and kind of fly under the radar, but obviously that hasn't happened," Andretti said after posting a 181.751 mph on Lowe’s 1.5-mile configuration.

While www.teamfordracing.com doesn’t have the full details of the ppc plan, sources close to the situation indicate that ppc is rolling out a new Cup effort with Andretti and Charpentier pairing up on a Ford platform.

The preliminary plan is a partial schedule for the remainder of 2004, then a full effort in 2005. Details, including sponsorship, of the program are coming Tuesday.

INSPECTION CHANGE
NASCAR pulled a little switch this week for Talladega inspections when they opened the garage a day earlier than usual. The effort, being heralded as a success by NASCAR, took a lot of the frantic movement out of the speedway inspection process.

The idea was to get the cars on the ground, inspected and ready to go early Friday morning; and with the efforts of both NASCAR and the competitors the plan worked fairly well.

The added bonus of an extra half-hour of practice time for the teams was the reward for the head start in the exacting and very involved speedway inspection process. NASCAR’s reward was a “friendlier schedule to deal with.”

NASCAR opened the garage Thursday, with the promise that each team could make one pass through the inspection gauntlet that speedway cars must endure. The extra time made for a more casual inspection, and left most of the crew chiefs with extra pre-practice time to work on their cars.

NASCAR sources said they didn’t find anything out of the ordinary in inspections here, but some teams had to grind edges off their cars to fit templates. There was also a curious set of rear spring buckets that were found on one of the DEI entries, forcing NASCAR inspectors to check the other DEI cars that had already gotten their cleared for competition stickers.