Gordon

At .526 miles, Martinsville is the oldest, shortest track in stock car racing's premier series, and the kind of place where one wrong move by anyone can quickly turn a good day into a bad one.

"No matter what, you're probably going to have damage to your car at the end of the race," said Gordon, a three-time Winston Cup champion. "But if you stay patient, you can gain positions and keep your fabricators from doing a lot of extra work."

Gordon leads Ricky Rudd by 237 points with seven races remaining. But he got another lesson in the dangers of short-track racing last month at Richmond, when an early accident ended Gordon's night early. Rudd went on to win and gained 120 points on the leader to make it a race again.

Richmond, though, is a track that races like a mini-superspeedway. Martinsville is the quintessential bullring -- tight, testy and tough.

"It seems like you're always in heavy traffic," Gordon said.

Both drivers have had plenty of success here. Gordon finished in the top 10 in 13 of 17 career starts, and Rudd earned his last victory as a team owner here in 1998. He leads all drivers with four career poles.

Rudd finished 21st last weekend at Lowe's Motor Speedway, allowing Gordon to expand his points lead despite a 16th-place finish. But Rudd is quick to note that while he missed out on a chance to draw closer to Gordon, the leader also didn't make much of his own chance to pull away.

"It really could have been a whole lot worse for us," Rudd said. "I've said all along that the 10- or 15-point swings aren't nearly as important as it is for both teams to avoid problems. We can't catch Jeff unless we have fewer problems than they do. His racing is out of our control."

At Martinsville, the unknown is always lurking, perhaps in the form of a driver who is prone to mistakes and can take out a number of cars, or in a tire that blows and ends a driver's day prematurely.

"We crashed so often in this race last year that I felt like I was in some sort of stunt show," Dale Earnhardt Jr. said. "In the spring race, we tried a new approach. I guess it was like a boxer that's on defense, avoiding trouble and avoiding contact to stay around until the end."

Earnhardt Jr., 36th in the stunt show, finished 11th in the spring.