Riggs snatches pole
Scott Riggs watched 30 cars run their laps at Martinsville (Va.) Speedway on Friday, got a talking to from his father and then won the first pole of his career in NASCAR’s premier series.
Riggs toured the shortest, slowest track in Nextel Cup racing at 96.671 mph, relegating Martinsville master Ryan Newman to the outside of the front row. Newman, the track record-holder, qualified at 96.657.
“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.”
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.
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.
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.
Craftsman Trucks
Defending series champion Bobby Hamilton won the pole for the Kroger 250 Craftsman Truck Series race at Martinsville Speedway, turning a lap at 95.098 mph in his Dodge.
Hamilton’s lap just edged one posted by Todd Bodine, who was clocked at 95.089 mph in his Toyota. The difference was nine-thousandths of a second for their trip around the tight and tricky .526-mile oval.
The second row has the Chevrolet of Jack Sprague and the Ford of Ricky Craven, while Nextel Cup regular Bobby Labonte will start fifth in a Chevrolet with Brandon Whitt to his outside in another Toyota.
Defending race champion Rick Crawford will start 14th.
Champ Car
Bruno Junqueira is leading the Champ Car World Series by a single point. Of course, it’s the only point that’s been awarded so far.
The Brazilian driver, the series runner-up each of the past three seasons, is determined to win his first championship, and being out front of the other 18 drivers after the first qualifying session of the 2005 season did put a smile on his face.
Junqueira, who sat on the pole here last year, beat out 2003 champion Paul Tracy and 2004 title winner and Newman/Haas Racing teammate Sebastien Bourdais for the provisional pole at the season-opening Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach (Calif.).
With one more round of qualifying today, Junqueira’s fast lap of 1 minute, 8.342 seconds (103.667 mph) wasn’t far off the track record of 1:07.494 (104.969 mph) set in 2000 by two-time series champion Gil de Ferran.
Driver may have been unconscious
Racer Michelle “Shelly” Howard may have lost consciousness and been unable to cut the fuel firing the engine of her dragster before it flipped over and shot backward, killing her and her son.
During a Saturday night test run, Howard’s rear-engine dragster suffered a “blowover,” where all four wheels left the surface, Tulsa (Okla.) Raceway Park said in a statement.
“As the dragster became vertical, it rotated 180 degrees on its axis and then touched down on all four wheels and against the wall with the car now facing the starting line,” the raceway said. “The impact of the dragster to the pavement could have been enough to cause Shelly Howard to lose consciousness.”
Tulsa police estimated the car was traveling 250 mph when it struck a chase car parked behind the starting line with her 36-year-old son, Brian, in the back seat.
The force of the impact hurled the vehicles 150 feet through a fence and into a drainage area. Both Howards were thrown from their vehicles and pronounced dead at the scene.