|
Wet Weather Again Lands
Tony Stewart on Pocono Pole
By DINO OBERTO
Starting Lineup
(Long Pond, Pa. 7-31-09) For the second time this year weather hampered qualifying at Pocono Raceway and for the second time Tony Stewart was awarded the pole based on current car owner points. Jimmie Johnson will start second in Sunday’s Sunoco Red Cross Pennsylvania 500. 
Stewart will be attempting to make a sweep of Pocono as he stormed to his first win as a car owner in June’s Pocono 500.
“It’s pretty cool when you can go to venues twice during the year and you can win both of them. We did that at Dover early in my Cup career and that was a pretty cool weekend. It’s hard to win one race and it’s that much harder if you have two chances and if you win both of them it makes it very, very special,” said Stewart who also won here in June 2003.
“Having the first one under our belt here and knowing we had a car that drove well all day, that’s already a step in the right direction leading into this weekend. We got a lot of confidence even before we hit the race track.”
Jeff Gordon, Kurt Busch and Carl Edwards round out the top five. Denny Hamlin, Ryan Newman, Kasey Kahne, Mark Martin and Juan Montoya compete the top ten starters.
Johnson is the defending race winner and fresh off his victory last week at Indianapolis.
“As we get closer to the chase it’s nice to have a win and carry that momentum and confidence that comes with that,” said two-time Pocono winner Johnson. “This is a much different track than what we see in the Chase, so it’s more of a mental thing if we could leave with a great run and great pit stops and adjust on the car and make good decisions, we’ll leave here with confidence.
“It’s hard to say we’ll take much from the technology side from this track to anywhere else, but it’s good for the head.”
For the first time this season there were no none qualifiers as all 43 entries on hand will make Sunday’s starting grid.
ARCA also set its line-up per car owner points with Justin Lofton heading the field to the green for the Pennsylvania 200 set for 1:00 p.m. Satarday. Parker Kligerman will start second.
Local drivers Kory Rabenold of Slatington will start 12th, Steve Fox of Hazleton 17th and Chase Mattioli of Long Pond 39th in the ARCA race.
There was some track activity that took place as the Cup and ARCA teams got practice in prior to the washout.
In Cup practice Hendrick teammates dominated the top four spots in time led by Mark Martin who turned the fastest lap of the day at 169.354. Johnson, 167.604, Dale Earnhardt, Jr., 167.470 and Gordon, 166.470 followed close behind with Kyle Busch fifth quick at 166.257.
“This has been a good race track for me. A really good race track performance wise,” said Martin who has a record 19 top five and 31 top ten finishes in 45 starts but is still searching for his first Pocono win.
“It’s one of those that have been a bit of a surprise that we haven’t won because we’ve run so well so many times. Out of all those races that we’ve been here, we’ve only had a very few dominating cars. We just had a lot of good cars.”
Since qualifying was rained out raceway officials announced that anyone returning to the track for Saturday’s activities will receive $10 off by presenting their Friday ticket stub when purchasing a Saturday grandstand ticket.
Starting Lineup
|
