| | Associated Press
LONG POND, Pa. -- Throw a hard curve at Tony Stewart, and he gets excited.
"I like it," he said of competing at Pocono International Raceway, hardly the reaction of many drivers to an afternoon on the unique, triangular-shaped track. "It's got three corners, and they're all different."
And all problematic.
So difficult is the flat, 2.5-mile layout that only one driver -- Jeremy Mayfield, in 1998 -- got his first career victory on the mountaintop where NASCAR has raced for 26 years.
The track, where Stewart will try Sunday to win for the third week in a row, is listed as a superspeedway. But it's more like a road course with three straightaways and three sharp turns, all with different degrees of banking.
"The challenge is getting it to handle through all three corners all day," Stewart said. "If you get the car good in one corner, then sometimes it's bad in one of the others."
That's why few ever master the track, and even the best have struggled here. Richard Petty and David Pearson had 305 victories between them, yet combined for only three in more than 50 races at Pocono.
Hall of Famer Buddy Baker, the TNN color commentator Sunday for the Pocono 500, was among those who had it figured out. He had eight top-five finishes in 13 years, yet never won.
In 1984, Baker fell victim to a low cloud cover, the kind that can suddenly shroud the mountain and bring heavy rain to just one part of the huge track. He was winning by three-quarters of a mile over Harry Gant when he heard his spotter scream, "Rain!"
"By the time he said it, it was a whiteout, and I was on top of the wall," Baker said.
Eventually, the car righted itself, and Baker drove it on its three remaining wheels back to the finish line. Still, he beat Gant, who had advance warning of the cloudburst and had slowed.
"They red-flagged the race, and if it kept raining, I won," Baker said. "It didn't, and I didn't."
Baker's crash came in the treacherous tunnel turn, a virtual 90-degree left where side-by-side racing is trouble and three abreast is an accident.
"It's a tight fit through there, and you don't know how fast you're going until something bad happens," said Stewart, whose finishes of fourth and sixth at Pocono last year helped define the best rookie season in NASCAR history.
Stewart is seventh in the Winston Cup standings, after setting rookie records last season with three victories and a fourth-place finish in points. With two crashes and a mechanical failure over the first 14 of 34 races, he is 295 points behind Joe Gibbs Racing teammate Bobby Labonte.
"I'm happy winning two in a row. I don't know anybody that wouldn't be," said Stewart, who backed up a victory at Dover Del., with one last Sunday at Brooklyn, Mich. "Do I think this the automatic cure? No."
Even if he were to win Sunday, Stewart might not gain much on Labonte, a top-five finisher most weeks and the winner last summer of both Pocono races.
Labonte says that means nothing now. In fact, he hopes to prove
that last year was no fluke.
"In both races we were contenders all day, then found ourselves
in place to capitalize on a given opportunity," he said. "A race
is made up of a lot of factors, and one of them is luck.
"Our team believes in the saying that luck is when preparation
meets opportunity."
The race appears to be a five-car battle among Stewart, Labonte,
Mayfield, three-time Pocono winner Jeff Gordon, and Dale Jarrett,
who has beaten the track twice.
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