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Riggs wins first career pole at Martinsville
April 9

Scott Riggs took heed of his father's advice prior to his qualifiying run Friday at Martinsville.

And as the saying goes: father knows best.

Scott Riggs is congratulated by team members after he won the pole for Sunday's NASCAR Advance Auto Parts 500 at Martinsville Speedway in Martinsville, Va., Friday, April 8, 2005. Riggs ran a lap of 96.671 mph. (AP Photo/Steve Helber) Advance Auto Parts 500 Starting Lineup

"All my dad kept preaching to me before qualifying was just be smooth, be smooth, don't slip the car," Riggs said. "Don't be too aggressive, be smooth with it and you'll be good. You know, we ended up sitting on the pole with probably the ugliest lap I've ever had out there."

Riggs toured the shortest, slowest track in Nextel Cup racing at 96.671 mph, sending Martinsville master Ryan Newman to the outside of the front row. Newman, the track record-holder, qualified at 96.657.

At each end on the first lap, Riggs said, he went too hard into the corners, had to collect the car and sailed off into the straightaways.

"I said, 'There's one lap gone,"' he said.

Instead, that was the lap that won him the pole in his 41st start in the Nextel Cup Series, making him only the 12th driver to earn the top starting spot in NASCAR's top three circuits. He has won five poles in the Craftsman Truck Series and two in the Busch Series.

Newman, who has 29 poles in 122 starts and started in the top 10 in all six previous visits to Martinsville, had the fastest car in practice, but cloud cover and a 30-minute delay for drizzle slowed the track down.

"You can't get the pole every time," he said. "We got beat by three-thousandths of a second, but I've won 'em that close before, too."

Riggs' Chevrolet is the only non-Dodge in the first two rows. The second row has Jeremy Mayfield (96.583) and defending race champion Rusty Wallace (96.558), who leads active drivers with seven victories here.

It will be Wallace's 33rd top-10 start in 43 races at the track.

The third row has the Chevys of Kevin Harvick and Bobby Labonte, with Labonte's teammate Tony Stewart in the fourth row inside the Ford of Greg Biffle. Kurt Busch's Ford and Joe Nemechek's Chevy are in the fifth row.

Other notables on the starting grid are Jimmie Johnson, who won here last fall and will start 37th, and his Hendrick Motorsports teammate Jeff Gordon, a five-time winner at Martinsville, who will go off 16th.

"In the fall race last year, we didn't run really well in qualifying but it was so much better in the race," Johnson said. "But we usually come from the back here, so we'll just have to do that again."

Virginia native Ricky Rudd, who arrived here 37th in points and needing to make the field on his own merit under NASCAR's new provisional system, turned a lap at 95.864 mph and will start 13th on Sunday.

"I felt the pressure today," Rudd, a three-time Martinsville winner, said. "I tried not to let it bother me, but it was still there. It was probably a little bit faster race car than I was able to show. I didn't want to make some stupid mistake and spin out, which is easy to do here."

Much also has been made this week of the series visiting a short track for the second consecutive weekend for the first time since 1999.

That made last week's dustup between Dale Jarrett and Shane Hmiel a hot topic, especially since Martinsville already is well established as a track where the tight, tense racing tends to grate on drivers' nerves.

Jarrett, who walked halfway down the front stretch at Bristol to confront Hmiel after Hmiel knocked him out of a Busch race, said he intended to question Hmiel's strategy, not threaten him or start a fight.

"I just didn't understand his impatience at the time, and I think that's something all of us have to learn over the years," Jarrett said. "My comments to him were that it would cost him, and obviously it has. It wasn't cost in a way that I was going to do anything back to him."

Hmiel was fined $10,000 and docked 25 driver points after he was caught flipping his middle finger at Jarrett by an in-car camera. The gesture was shown on live television as Jarrett spoke with Hmiel.

"I intend to speak with Dale and apologize to him for the comment I made after the race in the heat of the moment," Hmiel said, adding that it was "an isolated incident and we are starting with a clean slate."

Hmiel said he still intends to pursue an appeal of the penalty.

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