Daytona 500

February 16, 1997
Daytona Beach, FL

In qualifying on Saturday, Derrike was the 17th fastest and the fastest Pontiac of the day. Derrike said, "It was exactly what we thought we could run. This Pontiac has been extremely consistent. It's consistently been running 48-flats. We were hoping we could maybe tweak it into the 47-second range and it ran a .008. The car bottomed just a little on the bottom of the track and that hurt us just a little bit. We didn't have it haped up too much and didn't have the motor running real hot, so we're pretty positive about what we ran. It was a good run for us. We made no mistakes. It was consistent. We followed our game plan and that's what we got."

The team decided to stand on their time and skipped second round qualifying. Derrike started 9th in the Gatorade Twin 125 Event 1 qualifying race on Thursday, and finished 15th which meant a Daytona 500 starting position of 29.

Gatorade Twin 125 Event 1

Derrike started the Daytona 500 in 29th position and quickly moved to the top ten. This is where Derrike was during the race:

• 22th position - lap 5 of 200
• 16th - lap 12
• 9th - lap 26
• 7th - lap 40

On lap 48 Jimmy Spencer, who was in the front of a pack of cars, got into the wall. Unfortunately, Derrike was in the middle of the pack and got collected causing him to spin and hit another car. This required the car to go behind the wall for repairs. Unbelievably CBS did not give any report on the SKITTLES® Pontiac and instead concentrated on other cars involved in the incident.

The team was able to get the car back on the track to get some points, and Derrike finished the race in 36th position. Even though the finish was disappointing, fans should be optimistic about the upcoming season with the way the Pontiac was running.

Daytona 500

Cyndi Price was at Daytona. Check out her live report.