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NASCAR Winston Cup Series UAW-GM Quality 500 Preview: #4, Sterling Marlin

1 October 1997

 #4 Sterling Marlin, Kodak Gold Film Chevrolet             
 NASCAR Winston Cup Series
 UAW-GM Quality 500 Advance
 Charlotte Motor Speedway
 
          STERLING MARLIN NOTES & QUOTES: UAW-GM QUALITY 500
          "Winning at Charlotte could give us back-to-backs"

 
CONCORD, NC - Five races remain this season for Sterling Marlin and the Kodak 
Gold Film Chevrolet team, but five historically good tracks for the team.
Still trying to pull themselves from a season plagued with luck that would
make a Li'l Abner character wince, Marlin and the team are intent on bringing
home at least one victory before the year ends.

The remaining five speedways are, historically, strong ones for the Abingdon,
Va.,-based Morgan-McClure Motorsports team. Charlotte this week, then
Talladega the next - a speedway where no team has been as strong as the Kodak
Gold Film Chevrolet outfit. Rockingham, Phoenix and Atlanta finish the year
up, all speedways where the team has been strong historically.

The team has already announced Bobby Hamilton will take the wheel of the Kodak
Gold Film Chevrolet for the 1998 season, while Marlin will move to another
NASCAR team. The team has dedicated itself to pulling itself from the mires of
"bad luck" before the year is out.

That makes Sunday's UAW-GM Quality 500 probably the biggest race of the rest
of the season. No driver has had more success in winning the big race than
Sterling Marlin, one of only three two-time Daytona 500 winners in the field
and one of two to have done so in the 1990's. No other team has had more
success in winning the big race than Morgan-McClure Motorsports, which has won
three of the last eight Daytona 500s and is the only team in the past 10 years
to have won the Daytona 500 with more than one driver.

Marlin's first career victory came in the 1994 Daytona 500, stunning many in
the racing world but not Marlin and not his Kodak Gold Film Chevrolet
teammates. A year later he backed it up with a second Daytona 500 (joining
legendary Richard Petty and Cale Yarborough as the only driver to have won the
event back-to-back), and big wins became expected from the now 40-year-old
Columbia, Tenn., native.

The thoughts of Kodak Gold Film Chevrolet driver Sterling Marlin heading
into Charlotte:

"This late in the season, every race is a big race whether you are running for
the championship or 100th in points. They are big races for a lot of different
reasons for different people. People are going to look at them differently.
Jeff Gordon and Mark Martin and Dale Jarrett, they're going to be thinking
championship. You go a little bit further down in the standings and they are
going to be thinking points, trying to finish as high as they can. The further
you move down the line, the more guys are thinking about wins. I'd say that's
where we're sitting right now.

"Winning the championship doesn't look too good right now but I guess that's
pretty obvious. So we're thinking about winning races. That's really important
to us right now. We're going our separate ways at the end of the year but we'd
still like to finish this deal up on a high note. There's a lot of pride in
this outfit and they can't stand the thought of finishing the year out without
a win. Shoot, they can't stand the thought of finishing a week out without
winning the race. They've won every year for a lot of years, and we want that
string to keep on going.

"Charlotte's been a pretty good track for us over the years. We finished in
the top 10 both races last year (fourth in the 1996 UAW-GM 500 and sixth in
the Coca-Cola 600) and we were leading the 600 last year during the second
half of the race. We've had some really good cars at Charlotte. We had every
bit of bad luck you can have in the 600 this year. I guess the grand finale of
that deal was hitting a big puddle right before they red-flagged it for rain
and smacking the wall. But we still had a pretty good car and without the bad
luck maybe had a chance to win the thing.

"We really want to win the thing. First of all, it's Charlotte. Winning at
Charlotte is a pretty big deal for any race team. Second, it'd get the monkey
off our back at a really good time. Winning Charlotte right before going into
Talladega, as good as this team has been over the years on the restrictor 
plate tracks, would really give us some momentum. I don't mean to get really 
greedy - with the luck we've had this year we'll take any small favors - but 
we'd have a pretty good shot at winning back-to-back races if we could do it 
at Charlotte.

"That doesn't mean we're looking past anyplace towards Talladega. With the
terrible luck we've had this year, we don't have the luxury of looking past
any race. We think we'll be pretty good at Talladega but we think we'll be
pretty good at Charlotte too. And we think we'll be pretty good at Rockingham,
Phoenix and Atlanta. We're concentrating as hard as we can on Charlotte right
now. There will be plenty of time for Talladega thinking next week.

"The boys on this Kodak Gold Film Chevrolet team have been working awfully
hard all year, and we'd sure like to rewards ourselves with a win or two
before this season is out. That way, they can go on and do their thing with
Bobby Hamilton next year and I can go on and do my thing, and both of us can
know we finished up as good as you can finish."

By Williams Company of America