SEASON IN REVIEW
Spanaway, Washington driver Derrike Cope picked up his first LASTCAR Cup Series Championship in 1996, scoring three last-place finishes in twenty-nine starts during a thirty-one-race season. Cope won the bottom-five tiebreaker over Chad Little by a comfortable margin of 9-5.
Cope was competing in his fourteenth season on the Cup Series tour. Following his breakout 1990 season in which he scored two wins and two last-place finishes, Cope remained with the #10 Purolator Chevrolet owned by Bob Whitcomb through the 1992 season, but scored just one more top-five finish and five Top Tens in that span. After driving a year and a half for Cale Yarborough, followed by a two-race stint for T.W. Taylor in 1994, Cope joined Bobby Allison’s team to drive the #12 Straight Arrow Ford. Though Cope finished last for the ninth time in his career in his debut for the Allison team at Watkins Glen, New York on August 14, 1994, driver and team gelled the following season. In 1995, Cope finished 15th in points with two Top Fives and eight Top Tens, including a runner-up finish to Ricky Rudd at Avondale, Arizona on October 29, 1995.
Cope and Allison re-upped in 1996, but the results weren’t the same. In twenty-nine starts, Cope finished in the Top Ten just three times, but failed to qualify for two races and racked up eleven DNFs, including three last-place finishes. Cope’s first two last-place finishes came in consecutive races during the summer: the first came after Cope won the outside-pole at Brooklyn, Michigan on June 23, where his #12 Badcock Ford burnt a piston after 53 laps of the Miller 400, followed by a blown engine 63 laps into the rain-shortened Pepsi 400 at Daytona Beach, Florida on July 6. The third finish came in the final NASCAR Cup Series race at North Wilkesboro, North Carolina on September 29, where he finished running, thirty-one laps down, in the Tyson Holly Farms 400. It was the second-straight year that every car in the field finished the race under power.
Cope left Allison’s team after 1996 and raced for another eight different teams through 2002, including his own. Though he scored the only pole position of his career in the UAW-GM Quality 500 at Concord, North Carolina on October 4, 1998, that season driving Chuck Rider’s #30 Gumout Pontiac was Cope’s first without a top-ten finish since 1988. The top-ten dry spell continued through the 2002 season, and he scored another two last-place finishes heading into the 2003 season.
OTHER LASTCAR HEADLINES
On July 21, Owensboro, Kentucky driver Jeff Green scored the first last-place finish of his Cup Series career in 1996 when his #14 Racing for Kids Chevrolet was involved in a crash after two laps of the Miller 400 in Long Pond, Pennsylvania. Green was making just the second start for Dale Earnhardt, Incorporated, a new team formed by the seven-time Cup Series Champion. By the midway point of the 2012 season, due in no small part to a “start-and-park” role for Tri Star Motorsports’ Nationwide Series team, Green would claim the record for the most last-place finishes across all three of NASCAR’s top divisions.
On October 6, another Owensboro native, Jeremy Mayfield, scored his first Cup Series last-place finish in the UAW-GM Quality 500 in Concord, North Carolina when his #37 K-Mart / Little Caesars Ford qualified 3rd but crashed in Turn Four after just seventeen laps. It was Mayfield’s fifth season on the Cup Series tour, two years before he joined Penske Racing as Rusty Wallace’s teammate and scored his first Cup victory at Long Pond, Pennsylvania.
CHAMPIONSHIP STANDINGS
1st) Derrike Cope [9 B5s], Chad Little [4 B5s] (3)
2nd) John Andretti, Jeremy Mayfield, Dick Trickle (2)
3rd) Geoffrey Bodine, Ward Burton, Ricky Craven, Wally Dallenbach, Jr., Robby Gordon, Jeff Green, Steve Grissom, Bobby Hillin, Jr., Bobby Labonte, Mark Martin, Robert Pressley, Elton Sawyer, Morgan Shepherd, Lake Speed, Jack Sprague, Mike Wallace, Rusty Wallace, Darrell Waltrip, Michael Waltrip (1)
