Rain delay no problem for Gordon

RICHMOND, VA. — Steve Letarte grinned as he gazed up at the drizzling skies above Richmond International Raceway Saturday evening, and all but broke into a rain dance.

“I could go for a day race at this place,” said Letarte, crew chief for Jeff Gordon. “We came here and tested in the daytime [in early April] and ran well.”

Letarte got his wish. The Crown Royal 400 was postponed until this afternoon.

Gordon has won the last two Nextel Cup races and narrowly missed winning the two before that.

But he hasn’t won at Richmond since 2000.

This will be the first race on the 3/4 -mile oval for NASCAR’s new Car of Tomorrow design, and Gordon has adapted more steadily than anyone else to the COT.

He finished third in its debut at Bristol, Tenn., on March 25, second at Martinsville, Va., on April 1, and first at Phoenix on April 21.

The race actually started on time Saturday night, but under green-yellow conditions behind the pace car, because the track was still damp.

After 12 laps the rain intensified and the race was red-flagged. NASCAR called the race after an hour because radar showed steady, all-night rain entering the Richmond area.

Gordon, who started on the pole in a Chevrolet, was listed as the leader of the first 12 laps. But NASCAR decided to start the race over entirely today, so Gordon’s laps led were erased.

The cars were impounded overnight with no work allowed except tire-pressure checks.

Greg Biffle said he would enter today’s race without knowing how his Ford might handle, considering the different track conditions between night and day racing.

“What’s probably the worst is that we didn’t get one lap of green,” Biffle said. “If we’d gotten 10 laps, or five, or if we would have gone green and run four laps, I’d be a lot happier, just to know what you have ... “

The most amused driver over the rainout was Juan Pablo Montoya, technically a rookie in NASCAR, who was long accustomed to racing in the rain during his Formula One career.

“This is the first time for me, actually, that it rains and we don’t race,” Montoya said. But considering some of his mishaps in the rain in F1, Montoya didn’t think this postponement was such a bad idea.

“Probably the best story is when half the field in Formula One wrecked in the same corner in Brazil,” he said. “When was that, like 2003? It was raining hard, [and] there was like a river coming across the track.

“If you were second or third in line, you could be fine, but if you changed your line and hit it [the flooded area] when nobody else hit it, you were going off.

“So I went off, and before I got out of the car, three cars joined me. That was pretty good.”

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Ed Hinton covers motor racing for Tribune Co. newspapers.

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Rip Michels of San Fernando, the winningest driver in Irwindale Speedway history, earned his 46th victory in the AC Delco SuperLate Model feature race on the Speedway’s half-a-mile oval. Michels took the lead on the first lap from Linny White of Fontana and finished with a 1.680 second margin over rookie Scott Dodd of Mira Loma.