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Tuesday, March 27
Track position was important
By Sterling Marlin
Special to ESPN.com
Going into Sunday's race at Bristol Motor Speedway, I was pretty excited to race at one of the toughest tracks on the NASCAR Winston Cup circuit. Not only do I consider Bristol my home track, being a Tennessee native, but I also have a lot of good memories of this track, going all the way back to the days when my daddy used to run here in those hot August night races, to my three consecutive top-10 finishes at Bristol.
|  | | Sterling Marlin's Dodge was among the fastest cars all weekend at Bristol. |
Even though I have a lot of experience at Bristol, I knew going in that it was gonna be a tough race. I mean, this track is like a punch bowl and you know going into it that there's some guys who're going to go home with some sheet metal banged up -- or missing. I thought that if we could qualify good and run out front --away from the trouble -- we'd be in good shape for our first win.
Things worked out pretty good in our favor, but we caught a couple tough breaks during the race and ended up 12th overall in the race. This was only the second time this season that we finished out of the top 10 in six starts. This puts us third in the points now, although we're closer to the leader (48 points behind leader Dale Jarrett) than we were last week.
After our first practice Friday, it was obvious that this Coors Light Dodge was ready, running sixth fastest in the field, only a tenth of a second off the leader.
For qualifying, we were the last team to go out on the track. I'll tell you what, not only is this car one of the prettiest on the race track, but it was one of the fastest that day, too. I ran the exact same lap times for both my qualifying laps -- 15.303 seconds, which was good enough for the outside pole for Sunday's race.
After the Busch cars laid down some rubber on the track Saturday afternoon, we went out for a 90-minute Happy Hour session, where we were again one of the fastest cars on the race track. This Chip Ganassi Racing team was pumped and ready for Sunday's race.
I got up on race morning, and needed to put on my winter jacket, it was so cold up here in the Tennessee Mountains. But, the sun came out by the time I climbed into my race car, and it turned out to be a great day for racing.
We were running in second place for the first part of the race, and took over the race lead on lap 82. I'm proud to say that this Coors Light Dodge team has had the race lead in each of the six races so far this season.
My crew gave me some great pit stops during the day, one of them coming during a caution on lap 337, where we came in fourth and left pit lane in second, allowing me to take back the lead seven laps later.
We decided to pit during a caution on lap 371 and we took four tires. We beat the No. 43 and 24 out of the pits, and were running fifth at this point, behind the Nos. 29, 21, 20 and 22 -- none of these guys stopped.
Remember I said before that track position was important at Bristol? Well, it was in those last 50 laps where we got bumped around by a couple of cars and shot back to 12th spot, which is where we finished.
I was glad to see that the Wood Brothers and Elliott Sadler won the race. Me? I'm going to go back to the house now and get ready for Texas next week.
Drivers, crew chiefs and car owners involved in Dodge's return to the NASCAR Winston Cup Series in 2001 will provide weekly features to ESPN.com throughout the season.  Send this story to a friend | Most sent stories
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