Scott Riggs watched 30 cars run their laps at Martinsville (Va.) Speedway yesterday, 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.
Scott Riggs is congratulated by team members after he won the pole for Sunday's NASCAR Advance Auto Parts 500 at Martinsville Speedway on Friday.
(Steve Helber - AP)
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"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."
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.
"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's 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.
• TRUCKS: Defending series champion Bobby Hamilton won the pole for the Kroger 250 Craftsman Truck Series race at Martinsville, turning a lap at 95.098 mph in his Dodge.
Hamilton also possibly extended the truck racing career of former Nextel Cup star turned broadcaster Darrell Waltrip, who failed to make the field for what he said would be his last competitive NASCAR race.
Waltrip was 24th in qualifying, but was ninth among the 15 drivers not guaranteed a spot in the 36-truck field. With 29 spots already spoken for, that left Waltrip and Brendan Gaughan, who was 22nd, out of the race.
"You never know," Waltrip said when asked if there will be another next time. "I didn't get to race, so it can't be your last race if you didn't race. That's the way I look at it."
Waltrip blamed himself for making an adjustment to his Toyota that caused the truck to get loose in the turns, turning it sideways.
