Ricky Craven’s split-second victory at Darlington Raceway was one all drivers have dreamed about.
Some kids fantasize about hitting a game-winning home run with two outs in the bottom of the ninth or sinking a three-pointer for the win at the buzzer.
Ricky Craven’s big moment came Sunday at Darlington Raceway, winning by inches after covering the last 200 yards of the Carolina Dodge Dealers 400 in a metal-crunching, side-by-side duel with Kurt Busch.
The margin of victory was two thousandths of a second – the smallest since NASCAR introduced electronic timing in 1993.
“You sit on your couch in front of the TV when you’re a kid and you think what it would be like to win a race like that,” Craven said. “It was a perfect finish.”
The dramatic victory on one of NASCAR’s most difficult racetracks was also the culmination of a four-year comeback by Craven.
In the aftermath of the emotional win, the 32-year-old driver from Maine couldn’t help thinking back to the 1998 season, the low point of his NASCAR career when he sat out 12 races with post-concussion syndrome.
The illness was the result of hard crashes in Talladega in 1996 and in Texas the following year. Early in 1998, Craven found himself suffering from vertigo and was advised by doctors to get out of the race car – maybe for good.
At that point, Craven could not have imagined coming back to win in Martinsville in October 2001, then topping that with the win in Darlington.
Craven, the 1995 Rookie of the Year and a driver thought to have great potential, even considered retirement. Once he decided to continue racing stock cars, there were still doubts. He wondered if anybody would be willing to take a chance on him.
“The perception in the racing community was that I was damaged goods,” Craven said. “No matter what you do, there are people who won’t believe you’re healthy. I’m sure there are people who still don’t believe I’m 100 percent.”
Car owner Cal Wells III is a believer, though. He hired Craven at the start of the 2001 season for his then-year-old PPI Motorsports team.
“He was the first person in a long time to judge me fairly,” Craven said. “Cal didn’t listen to what other people were saying. In fact, he never even asked me about my health.”
Wells, who came to Winston Cup from CART in 2001, said he had no doubts about Craven’s ability and gives much of the credit for the team’s growth to his driver.
“Rick is the one that hauls us along with him,” Wells said. “He had the credibility as a great race car driver in NASCAR’s highest formula. We just needed to back it up and we came close so many times.
“Last year, we were 10th on the laps led list, but we just couldn’t close the deal. There have been a lot of places we’ve been strong where we could have won. It’s wonderful to win in Darlington. That does certainly add some credibility.”
Craven is one of five 2003 race winners and goes into Sunday’s Food City 500 at Bristol Motor Speedway, tied for fifth in the season standings with Busch. Both of them trail leader Matt Kenseth by 143 points.
It’s been a long road back, but Craven doesn’t feel sorry for himself.
“There are some great racers that have been through some tough times,” he said. “I think it made me tougher and it made me better prepared. … Look where I am today. The last two or three years have been great.”
Whatever he does in the future, though, Craven will remember the finish at Darlington.
“I’m really excited to see the race,” he said immediately after his win. “I’m going to see it as soon as I can because the last three or four laps are kind of a blur.”
No matter how it ended or the margin of victory, though, Craven is just happy to be right where he is.
“We won and that’s just a cool, cool feeling,” he said. “I’ve got a great life. I’m lucky to have everything I have.
“I’ll be 65 years old. I’ll be sitting on the porch with my wife up on Moosehead Lake in Maine and I’ll tell this story 100,000 times about how we won. It will probably be a thousandth of a second at that point. But, two-thousandths of a second will make for a heck of a story.”
AP-ES-03-19-03 1431EST
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