MBNA 500

September 15, 1996
Dover, DE

This is where Derrike was during the race:

• 17th position - lap 29 of 500
• 27th - lap 44
• 32nd - lap 60
• 30th - lap 78
• On lap 200, Derrike and Ernie Irvan hit while Irvan was trying to put Derrike a lap down.
• 28th - lap 208
• 24th - lap 257
• On lap 277, both Dale Earnhardt and Derrike cut tires, apparently from debris.
• 30th - lap 301
• 27th - lap 407

On lap 466, Derrike cut a tire, hit the wall, and the car caught on fire in the right front. Derrike finished in 31st position.

Derrike commented on the race: "We had a good race car, but right off the bat we had a bad set of tires. The car was off from the start and we played catch-up all day. We cut two sets of tires down and of course the last one I got up into the wall with really hard. It hurt the race car. We destroyed that car and it can't be fixed. That was one of our only two new cars that we have been building in-house. We're down to one car and we'll be taking that to Martinsville this weekend.

"We actually felt like we had a pretty fast race car in the last practice. And we started falling back at the beginning of the race because the car was too tight, it wouldn't turn. And we were hanging on and then we lost a lap which hurt us. And the caution came out and we got a set of tires on and we almost got our lap back. The car was pretty close again.

"We ran out front for a major portion of time there in front of Ernie (Irvan). And then unfortunately Ernie caught us. We were real good on short runs but on long runs our car started pushing, and that's when he hit me and spun out. Ernie was a little impatient and he got into us and wrecked himself.

"Larry McReynolds and I got into it after the race. He accosted me. It's just one of them deals where you just hate those kind of things to happen. It wasn't anything I had to do with, Ernie just overdrove the car trying to pass me and was a little impatient. Basically it's over with and hopefully we'll go on and we won't have to deal with those kind of problems. We'll continue to keep racing hard and hopefully we'll get ourselves in a position to win a race here."