Finish Line--and Titles--Are in Sight

In an era when most winning race car drivers start out before they’re 10, racing go-karts or quarter-midgets, Greg Biffle was a late comer.

Biffle, 29, did not race seriously until he was 24, driving in late-model stock car races around his home in Vancouver, Wash., across the Columbia river from Portland, Ore.

Despite his short career, Biffle, who switched to racing trucks last year, is in a position to win NASCAR’s Craftsman Truck series in Saturday’s NAPA Auto Parts 200 at California Speedway, a companion feature to Sunday’s Marlboro 500.

Driving the Grainger Ford, he holds a 21-point lead over former champion Jack Sprague, a Chevrolet driver, with Dennis Setzer, in a Dodge, another four points back.

Three years ago, Biffle, who built race cars in Portland, pooled his resources and hauled his stocker to Tucson, to drive in a NASCAR Southwest Tour event he calls “the Winston Cup of late model cars” because it is televised nationally and attracts short-track drivers from all over the country.

Although he had never seen the track, and had raced on only three tracks in the Northwest, Biffle won one of the races. The next year he went back and put on a performance that caught the eye of Benny Parsons, former Winston Cup champion who was on hand as a TV commentator.

“I had quite a day,” Biffle recalls. “I set a track record, had a flat tire in the race and went a lap down, then raced back through the field, got back on the lead lap and ended up winning.”

When Parsons heard that Jack Roush was having problems signing Trans Am champion Tom Kendall to drive his Ford truck, Parsons told him to keep “the kid from Portland in mind.” He did, and now Biffle is leading the truck series in one of Roush’s Ford pickups.

“If Parsons hadn’t been there and seen me, or hadn’t mentioned me to Roush, I’d probably still be back in Portland, building race cars,” Biffle said. “The last guy Benny Parsons recommended like that was Ernie Irvan, so I feel like I’m in good company.”

As 1998 rookie of the year, Biffle has had an eventful season driving for Roush, who also fields a fleet of Winston Cup cars. Biffle has nine wins--no one else has more than three--and has overcome a 120-point penalty for using an “unapproved intake manifold” in the race at Las Vegas Speedway, which he won.

Roush, who lost an appeal on the manifold penalty, did not mince words when commenting on the incident, which also cost crew chief Randy Goss $46,860 in fines.

“I’ve been racing with NASCAR for 12 years now and I’ve never been more disgusted or disappointed or frustrated in my life, in the NASCAR sense,” Roush said.

“The part that NASCAR took the action on in Las Vegas had been on the truck, and its twin had been on the truck, in eight separate races. It was presented earlier in the year and approved by the NASCAR inspector [but] at Las Vegas, when that inspector sensed that he was under the microscope for having approved that part, he said he hadn’t seen it before. That was a lie.”

Biffle’s 130-point lead over Sprague was reduced to 10 with three races remaining at the time. When Biffle crashed in practice and finished only 14th in a backup truck at Louisville three weeks ago, Sprague took the lead by 24 points. Then Biffle’s runner-up finish last week at Texas, where Sprague was 11th, put the Roush driver back in front going into Saturday’s final race.

Biffle qualified fifth last year and ran with the top five most of the 200 miles before slipping to seventh.

“I like the big track, but I wasn’t familiar with drafting and it was tough to drive in traffic,” he said. “Things got hairy toward the end, with six laps to go, I got shuffled back. It got pretty crazy. I’ll be better prepared this time.”